death

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This is not an attention-grabbing headline

I’m writing this post on my smartphone, even though I brought my lapcom with me yesterday evening.  I did not use my lapcom for yesterday’s post, such as it was.  I didn’t even write that post in the morning yesterday, or at least, I didn’t write the “first draft” of it then.

By the end of the workday on Wednesday, I didn’t feel like I was going to want to write a blog post on Thursday.  So I went to the site directly and just wrote the “Hello and good morning,” and the “TTFN” and set it to publish later.

I already knew what title I was going to want to use for it.  I wanted to use Polonius’s dithering, meandering jabber about brevity being the soul of wit, as a sort of left-handed self compliment about my own brevity in that post, and because, in the original form, it would have made the headline longer than the post, which would be ironically funny, in principle.

Then, yesterday morning, I got the urge to put my little “insert here” bracketed bit in the post, the better to convey how disgruntled and disaffected and self-disgusted I (still) felt, as well as how tired.  It did sort of spoil the joke about the headline being longer than the post, of course.  At least the older joke about Polonius still holds water.  Then again, that joke was made by Shakespeare, so we shouldn’t be too surprised if it has serious legs (though this raises the question of how serious legs could possibly hold water).

One thing worth at least assessing this week might be whether there is an aesthetic difference between this post (for instance) and the posts I wrote earlier this week, on the lapcom.  Writing on the lapcom is quite different for me in many ways.

On the lapcom, I generally have to work to stop myself before a post, or whatever, gets too long.  Whereas on the smartphone, that isn’t as frequent a problem.  Not that I can’t yammer on and on even with the smartphone, of course.  Some might say all I ever do is yammer on and on.  But anyway, I can’t write as “effortlessly” on the smartphone as I can on a regular keyboard*.

Sorry, I’m retreading a lot of old ground here, which I guess is better than retreading a lot of old tires. I know how to tread on the ground; indeed, I cannot recall a time when I didn’t know how to do that kind of treading.  Whereas retreading a tire sounds like something that requires special skills and equipment, both of which I lack.

I don’t know, I’ve heard of “retread” tires, but I don’t know if such things still abound, or if they ever did.  It sounds vaguely like a bad idea, like such tires might be more prone to blowouts.  But latex is a finite resource, and there aren’t very good synthetic alternatives, so maybe there’s at least some cost/benefit tradeoff (or treadoff?) there.

Ugh.  With that last joke, I probably convinced at least some of my readers that, yes, the world would be better off if I were dead.  Actually, I say that as if it were conditional, but it’s not.  It would be more in line with reality to say “the world will be better off when I am dead”.

There’s a quote by which to be remembered, eh?

I cannot say whether I will be better off when dead.  It’s probably a nonsensical question.  When I am dead, I will not be anything at all, not better, not worse, not uglier.  What happens to virtual particles after they have annihilated?  Nothing, and less than nothing, for they truly no longer exist, and in some senses they never existed.  Indeed, as physics goes, they probably never do exist; they are a shorthand description of what happens in quantum fields when perturbances in the fields have effects that do not rise to the level of actual, true particle production.

Or so I am led to understand.

From another point of view, it is possible for something to improve, at least in a sense, by ending.  I’ve mentioned this before, but if the curve of a function‒perhaps a graph of the “quality of life” or one’s “wellbeing”, to say nothing of happiness‒is persistently negative, then returning to zero is a net gain.  It can be a huge net gain, in fact.  This is related to the origin of my own version of an old saying, which I use with tongue definitively in cheek:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Now, of course, the integral, the area “under” that wellbeing curve would not be improved by the curve reverting to zero and stopping.  But at least that integral would not keep getting more and more negative over time.

Some might say, “well, the integral can become less negative over time, and might even become positive”.  This is, in principle, true.  And when one is younger enough, it’s relatively easier to tip the curve, and its integral, into positive territory.  But as the curve goes on, having been negative for a longer and longer time, it’s going to become ever harder to bring things to a net, overall positive integral, even if one could reliably make one’s curve positive (which one often simply cannot do).

Of course, the moment to moment experience (which is all the mind really gets) of an ascending curve could be pretty darn good, and might well be worth experiencing, even if it’s not enough to bring the integral into positive territory.  We are straying into the “peak-end” rule here, which was elicited regarding (among other things) colonoscopies but applies to much else in human experience.

Speaking of peak endings, I’ll mention in passing the curious fact that, no less than twice in the last week, the evening train service has been disrupted by someone either getting hit by or becoming ill next to the train.

Earlier this week, right by the station where I catch the train to go back to the house, there was a man who looked like he was probably homeless and had collapsed next to the train tracks not far from the station.  I saw him brought away, finally, on a stretcher.  He didn’t look physically injured‒certainly not in the ways I would expect someone who had actually been hit by a train to look‒but he did look cachectic, which is why I thought he might be homeless.

Then, last night’s commute was interrupted by what they call a “trespasser strike”, one that did not involve the train I rode but which always slows everything down.  I’m vaguely amused by the euphemism “trespasser strike”.  A “trespasser” here is a non-passenger who doesn’t work for the train company (or whatever) who is in the area adjacent to the tracks.  The “strike” part is probably self-explanatory.

I suppose it’s literally true, at least from a legal point of view, to call the person a trespasser.  But it’s amusing that the train people have to say something derogatory about a person hit by a train‒even if the person deliberately put themselves in harm’s way‒to sort of, I don’t know, assuage the company’s conscience.

But we are all trespassers, in at least some senses.  We are also, in other senses, all owners.  We are all innocent, and we are all, in some other senses, guilty.  “Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.”  Above all, we are all very much just passing through, staying only a very short time.  We are all virtual particles.  Or you might say, we are all Iterations of Zero.

Have a good weekend.  I should not be writing a post tomorrow (in more than one sense).

*I wish I could honestly say that my use of a piano-style keyboard were as effortless, but I am terribly rusty with that, though I started learning it when I was 9, a rough 2 years earlier than when I got my first typewriter.

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“Like”, “comment”, and “share” (if you feel like it)

I’m very tired this morning.  By which I mean I’m more tired even than usual.  My head is a bit foggy—more so than usual, again—and I feel like I just belong lying down inert, perhaps in an open-topped coffin.  I’ve occasionally thought that they looked like good places to sleep.  It seems a shame to waste them on people who are already dead.

It’s Wednesday today, and I don’t think I’m going to have anything nearly as thoughtful to say as what I wrote yesterday, which was at least rather “deep” if not particularly useful or helpful or interesting to any of my readers.  I did get an interested comment on my take on one of the reasons mindfulness is useful, and that’s always nice.  I’d love to encourage greater feedback from more of my readers, here on the site in the comments, but I don’t know what to do to encourage them [I decided just to do a little cajoling in the headline, in case that works].

Probably there is just some percentage of people who tend to comment, no matter the situation.  It’s a bit like the long-known “fact” (which may or may not be a true fact) that every advertisement, from flyers/mailings to commercials, actually elicit a response in only about two percent of people who interact with it.  I suspect it’s probably similar with things related to blogging and social media and the like.

One sees it most readily on places like YouTube.  The number of views of a video is almost always something like an order of magnitude greater than the number of likes (and often it’s larger than the number of subscribers), and that’s still larger, though by a ratio that’s not as clear to me, than the number of people who comment (let alone share).

My own YouTube videos (and those of my published songs) are poor examples, or perhaps one might say “poor samples”, not representative of the phenomenon as a whole.  I have a number of “views” on my music videos that is generally a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of “likes”, but I know why that is.

Almost all of those views are from me, because I put my songs in my YouTube music playlist, and so I have listened to them often, back when I used to ride my scooter to work and back.  I had a lovely Bluetooth enabled helmet.  I like to listen to songs and sing along in a car, or similar, when I’m on my way places*.  So I’ve listened to my own songs probably orders of magnitude more times than everyone else put together has listened to any of my songs.

It’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?  I’m also the one who has bought more copies of my books—because I gave copies to the people in the office—than everyone else put together, I’m fairly sure.

As for this blog, well, I get a higher number of likes relative to number of readers than I do with anything else, and I even recently have been getting a comment or so most days, which is very nice.  There’s at least some interaction.  It would be nice if I could reach a larger audience, but I’m not terribly good at self-promotion.  I am pretty good at self-denigration, though.  In fact, I’m one of the best there is at it!

Ha ha.

Well, like the song says, it’s all just a drop of water in an endless sea.  Or, it’s all just spit in the ocean** as more people probably say.  My spit may be more purulent than average, but it’s all still just spit.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to discuss today.  I’m very tired and worn out and I’m in ongoing pain that only responds somewhat to all the mitigating things I try to do, at least so far.  I’ve been through a quarter of a century of trying, and I have not been passive nor uncreative nor ignorant in my attempts.  As those reading might notice, I’ve thought about this matter a lot.  You probably would also if you were in chronic pain for nearly half of your life (so far).  It has a way of garnering your attention.  It’s built that way.

It’s interesting to note that shortly after I’m sixty, if I’m still alive***, I will have been in essentially constant pain for half my life.  After that it will become a majority (unless I’m cured at some point along the way, of course).

I occasionally (not often, though, because it’s too disheartening) wonder what my life would be like, what I would be like, if not for my chronic pain.

Things would almost certainly be vastly different.  I cannot be certain that they would be better—there are probably at least a few things that would be worse.  But it seems likely that my life would be much better overall, if only because I wouldn’t have a huge chunk of my will and energy stolen by being in pain all the time.  That constant pain really does make everything else harder.

But no matter the state of the rest of my life, at least one thing would be true (by “definition” in this case), and that is that I would not be in pain every fucking day of my stupid useless life.

Surely that must be worth something.  It would not be worth not having my children exist, but almost everything else would be worth trading.  I sometimes think of it as parallel to a line from Me and Bobby McGee:  “I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”  It’s nice poetry, albeit a bit weird to think about temporally.  But in my case, I think of it as basically saying I would gladly give up some significant fraction of what would otherwise have been my future if I could be out of pain.

But, of course, my future is less valuable to me now at least partly because I am in pain.  If I were not in pain, ironically, the future would be much more valuable, since it would be at least somewhat less uncomfortable.  If I could be free of depression, and the tendency thereto, that would make things better still.  That might even constitute a future worth having.

Yeah, yeah, I know, wishes, horses, manure, beggars riding, dogs and cats living together, watermelon, cantaloupe, rutabaga, yada, yada, yada.  I’m wasting my time and yours.  And I’m writing too much, because I’m using the lapcom, and I’m not saying or doing (or being) anything at all worth saying or doing or being.  This is all just stupid.

I hope you all at least have a good day.  I would not mind if this were my last one.

*I can’t do it anymore because I don’t ride or drive anywhere anymore, so I am not “alone” when commuting anymore.  I’m also not alone at the house.  It’s really quite disappointing.  I like to sing.

**This is a bit amusing:  I made a typo when I first wrote that phrase, and it was rendered as “spit is the ocean”, which seems almost like some vaguely deep thought about how oceans are lived in, swum in, excreted in, and bled in by numerous living creatures.

***Right now that seems a horrifying prospect.

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“But see, amid the mimic rout, a crawling shape intrude.”

First of all‒first today, anyway‒I would like to apologize to anyone who feels disappointed that I did not write a blog post yesterday.

I’m sorry.

Okay, there, I apologized.

I don’t know if anyone actually missed there being a blog post to read from me yesterday.  Probably, I ought really to be apologizing on the days when I do write a blog post.  I know that I probably make a lot of readers feel like crap when they read my blog, no matter how good their intentions.

Then again, no one is forcing them to read it, are they?  If I could somehow make it so that people felt some powerful compulsion to read my blog, I would probably make a lot more people read it.  Heck, I don’t know that I would waste the effort on my blog; I’d be more inclined to make people feel compelled to read my fiction, if I could do that.  At least then I might eventually make some money from it, and more importantly, my stories would be read by more people.  Some of those people might even end up finding my stories to be some of their favorite stories.

That would be much more important than having more people read my blog, as far as I can see.  No one is going to read blog posts to their kids or talk about them with other people.  No one will wistfully pull a volume of my blog posts down from a shelf on a cool and rainy afternoon in autumn to pass a quiet day reading with a cup of tea or coffee or cocoa, maybe with a quilt or an afghan over his or her or their lap (perhaps with a pet dog or cat keeping the reader company).

It would be just barely possible that someone somewhere might do that with one of my stories if enough people knew of them.

Anyway, that’s that.

I didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick from work.  “Sick” feels like it’s not quite the right word, though.  “Sick” feels as though it should refer to someone suffering from something infectious‒a bacterial or viral or fungal disease.  Of course, I know that’s not the only way for a body to become compromised, but it’s the first notion that comes to my mind when I hear the word “sick”; much like Forrest Gump, I’m inclined to ask, “Do you have cough due to cold?”

This is not to imply that I was well.  I certainly was not well yesterday, not even for me.  The pain about which I wrote on Monday did not improve through the course of that day, and I left the office right after lunch time.  I tried to rest at the house; however, the pain (like the proverbial horrors) persisted.  It also did its really annoying thing where it shifts its focus from one side of my body to the other, probably as I compensate for that one side when it’s flaring, which this leads to increased irritation of the other side and then I compensate for that, and so on.

That cycle’s got a vicious streak a mile wide!  It’s a killer!  Look at the bones!

Anyway, at this moment, it’s my left side pain that dominates, from my shoulder and wrist and thumb and fingers (not really my elbow, oddly enough) down to my ribs, my back, my pelvis, my hip, my knee, and my ankle, down to the arch and ball of my foot, and to some degree my toes.

The right side still hurts, but it’s slightly drowned out by the left side.  That will probably shift, though.  It may do so sometime today.

I’ve been trying to medicate myself adequately with what’s legally available, but it all has limits, and lots of the available things have significant toxicity.  NSAIDS like Ibuprofen and Naproxen (and aspirin) can do some good, but they are hard on the kidneys and on the stomach.  I’ve been having a fair amount of nausea these last several days, probably at least partly because of these meds.  Acetaminophen is not anti-inflammatory and it is easier on the gut and kidneys, but it’s dangerous to the liver* in significant doses, and it doesn’t do much in less than significant doses.

So, yeah, that’s all that.  CBD seems to help a little bit, and I do use it, but it (plus its related compounds) makes me feel rather loopy.  This isn’t always a horrible thing, but it can make it hard to get things done.  And, unfortunately, since I am here alone in a civilization without much of a safety net, I cannot simply not get things done and try to rest and recover somewhere.  If I were independently wealthy, I suppose I might be able to do that‒or if there really were a great many people who bought and read my books, I might be able to have a less stressful lifestyle.

Alas, I am not independently wealthy, nor am I a bestselling author, nor‒as Théoden says to Aragorn‒am I as lucky in my friends as some are.  That’s not to say that I have not had good friends; I feel I have had some of the best friends it is possible for a person to have.  But I don’t really have then anymore; at least I don’t have them around.

I cannot blame this on anyone but myself, if blame is to be had.  After all, I am the common denominator of the whole situation.  Occam’s Razor suggests that I am probably the single biggest contributing factor in the fact that I have no friends, and no family, around me now.

I am not a good pony; I am not a good investment; I am not a good risk.

It doesn’t matter, though.  I’m just tired and worn down and in a great deal of pain, and it’s more annoying with every passing day.

People will tend to say they don’t want other people to take their own lives when their pain (physical, psychological, or both) is too persistently great.  But they don’t offer any actual help dealing with it, just trite clichés and moral homilies and pseudo-comforting nothings (“You would be missed”, “there are people who will miss you”, “there are people who would be sad if you were gone”, etc.**) that are not far removed from “thoughts and prayers”.

Whatever.  I guess we’ll all see whether or not I write a blog post tomorrow.  Or, well, I guess those who bother looking will see.  I will either see or I won’t, depending on the circumstances, but even if I don’t see, others may still see, if they look.

See you then.

*Its metabolism uses up glutathione (if memory serves) which is a scavenger of free radicals in liver cells.  When it gets used up, the radicals generated by the various stages of hepatic detoxification chew up the liver’s own cells.

**Really?  How would they even know?  If I stop blogging and posting tomorrow, as far as anyone but one or two people could know, it might be because I just quit blogging or got hit by a car or got abducted by extraterrestrials.  It would have no significant impact upon anyone.

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An angry and probably unpleasant rant

It’s Friday.  yay.

Today’s date (February 6, 2026 CE or AD) has a mildly amusing coincidence/repetition of digits, 2-6-26 in the shortened American version of the date layout.  In the European system, the date would be almost palindromic (6-2-26) but that’s leaving out the zeroes in front of the day and month digits and ignoring the number of the millennium.  So it’s not quite as cool as it could be.

Some might say that such numbers and the arrangements and the noticing thereof can never be “cool”, but such people are troglodytic idiots.  They live in a world full of and shaped by complex ideas, by innovation and technology they could not have invented themselves, and which they don’t bother to try to understand because other people take care of and do all that stuff.

I’ve said before, many times (with sadness and regret and yes, quite a lot of anger) that if it were up to most people, we would all still be living in caves (the few who remain alive, at least).  That’s metaphorical, mind you; very few humans actually ever lived in caves as far as we can tell.  It’s just that the remains of those who died in caves (and their artifacts) are much more likely to endure to be discovered than the tools and remains of those who lived on the savannahs and such.

Anyway, the troglodytes have a quite common attribute, one that might explain a good deal about them:  even though they may have the capacity to read, even though they may have been taught to read, they don’t choose to do it.  It’s both sad and quietly horrifying.

Even those who claim to read just one book (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, etc.) don’t even really read those books.  You can tell, because they clearly don’t live their lives respecting all the precepts of those books.

This fact can sometimes be bad, but more often than that, it’s just as well.  Those books are horrific (and often just horrible, aesthetically).  They also tend to be rather stupid by modern standards, but it’s hard to hold them too much to task for that.  They were, after all, written from depths of profound ignorance about the universe.  One cannot know a truth before it has been discovered.

Of course, if those books really had been written, or at least inspired, by an omniscient being or beings, they could reasonably be expected to be very smart books by any standards.  Alas, they are not.  Trust me, I’ve read many of them, as well as many other books that don’t claim to be the products of omniscience, but which would be far more convincing* if they did than those ancient compilations of legend and myth and mental illness that are the so-called holy books.

Ironically, the Tao te Ching is much wiser than the aforementioned holy books, and it was never said to be written by anything other than a man.  It’s not perfect, of course, but it doesn’t really claim to be so.  Perhaps some of its adherents think it’s somehow “perfect”, but that doesn’t really matter.  After all, there are probably those who “think” Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are perfect.

Weirdly enough, some of these people would probably also say the Bible is perfect [Disappointed shrug and heavy sigh].  People are stupid.  And there are none so stupid as those who refuse to think.

Sorry, I don’t even know how I got to dealing with this set of subjects today.  It certainly was not planned.  Then again, nothing here was planned, other than that I would write a blog post as usual, which is not surprising.

It’s not as though I have anything better to do with my life‒that is, nothing better other than to shut it off, I suppose.  But so far, I am too much of a coward to do that.

I know, I know, there are those who (with truly very good intentions) will call continuing to be alive a “brave” choice, but though I appreciate such people’s kindness, that “choice” is very much the default.  In a similar vein, it’s not brave to hunt, or to fish, or to farm, if hunting or fishing or farming  is what you must do to survive.  It’s just pragmatic.

I am not brave for still being alive.  This is not to say that it would be brave for me to kill myself, either.  But it also would not necessarily be cowardly.

Bravery in the usual sense is overrated, anyway.  We can (and should) all be glad, of course, that there are people like firefighters, as well as honorable soldiers and honorable police officers.  But if one stops to think about it, one can see that we should all very much wish to live in a world in which bravery was not required, a world where heroes are not merely not needed but are not useful.

It’s likewise with so-called leaders.  If a society were functioning well, it would not need (or want) heroes or leaders, at least not in the traditional sense.  In a well-functioning civilization, people would see their elected officials as their employees, as the public servants that they are.  They are not, and should not be thought of as, leaders.  That’s just a troglodytic way of thinking.

Alas, we are far from such a well-functioning civilization yet.  Who knows if we ever shall achieve it?

I do know, however, that I will probably be working tomorrow, which means I will write a blog post, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  Until then, I hope you each and all have a very good day by any reasonable criteria.

*Especially modern science books.

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My way of life is blogg’d into the sere, the yellow leaf

Hello and good morning.

TTFN

Ha.  Ha.  Sorry about that.  Just, honestly, I don’t really feel much like writing right now.  There are no other twos here today (at least, I’m not going to be talking about them, except to the extent that saying that I’m not talking about them constitutes talking about them).

Actually, wait.  I will make a relatively fun note that includes the number two, since it just occurred to me that today is the fifth:  If you add (or if anyone else adds) the first two prime numbers together, they give you the third one.  2 + 3 = 5.

This is the only place in all the infinite realm of the prime numbers in which you will be able to add two consecutive primes to get the next prime, because all prime numbers except two are odd, and if you add (or anyone else adds) two odd numbers together, you (or they or he or she) will get an even number.  And the only even prime is two.

Actually, it’s worth noting that one can add two primes that are not consecutive to get a third prime.  If one takes any of the first member of a set of twin primes* and adds two (that solitary even prime) to it, one will get the second of the pair of twin primes.  This may be able to be done in an infinite number of cases; it’s thought that there are an infinite number of twin primes, i.e., that there is no largest twin primes set.

However, this has not been proven yet (as far as I know) though work has been done on it and progress has been made.  I won’t get much more into it than this, except to say that apparently a lot of the work has been done by large, decentralized groups of mathematicians (professionals and amateurs) through a site called “polymath”, if my memory is correct.

Now that is an excellent name for a collaborative mathematics website.

Oy, there I go again, talking about trivia about prime numbers and so on.  Maybe it would make sense for me to get into these things if I were truly involved, but I’m a spectator of mathematics (apart from my truly useless invention of the gleeb**, a number which, when multiplied by 0 gives you 1).  So my interest is entirely esoteric and reflected.  I apologize to those of you who find it tiring.  To those of you who like it, I’ll say “You’re welcome”.

You’re welcome.

See, I told you I would say it.  And then I said it.  I guess that’s one point in my favor.

I’m not sure there are any others.  At least, none of them appear to me to be in my favor.  I am all but completely worn out.  I’m running on fumes, or whatever other metaphor one might want to apply that is applicable (since applying inapplicable ones is stupid) and my incessant pain continues to wear me down, adding to my depression, and eroding what little joy I have left.

I really have wanted so often just to hang it up.  I came relatively close yesterday afternoon and considered leaving a “post” that just said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”  The would be the title and the content.

I didn’t do it, of course, which you can tell by looking, if you are so inclined***.  But I came closer than I’ve come before, at least subjectively speaking.  Last week—I think it was—I posted a similar sentence on most of my social media, just the line “I don’t know if I can do all this much longer.”  I’ll embed a screen shot here:

 

So, fair warning is being given, here and elsewhere.  The fire alarm is giving off little warning beeps.  The readout dial is high in the yellow range, perhaps already inching into the red.  Creaking sounds and little wisps of steel and concrete dust are issuing from the support beams of the bridge.  Small tremors and puffs of escaping steam are increasing in frequency near the hitherto dormant volcano.  There’s a red sky in the morning, today****.

But, I appear not to be able to stop yet.  I’m not yet able to escape.  I’m still pushing the stupid boulder up the stupid hill, like the stupid idiot that I am.  I’m even writing this blog post on my lapcom for the first time in two weeks (well, this is the first time at all that I’m writing this blog post, but hopefully you know what I mean), just because I felt mildly nostalgic.

One of these days, though, I’ll be able to end my blog post with just “TT” instead of “TTFN”, and it won’t be over just for now but finally and for good—not just the blog but everything.  And I don’t know if that will be sad or a relief for anyone out there, but I hardly think it will be a tragedy, nor will it be more than little noted, and it will certainly not be long remembered.

But for now, I must needs sign off with the annoyingly non-climactic

TTFN

*Primes that are two apart from each other, such as 29 and 31, or 137 and 139.

**Seriously, I worked out a lot of the algebra that involves it and everything (for instance, it turns out that a gleeb squared is still a gleeb, and 1 over a gleeb equals 0).  I’m sure I discussed it in a previous blog post.  If I can find which one without much trouble, I’ll leave the link here.

***In principle, you can tell by looking even if you are not so inclined, but you simply will not tell because you won’t look.  Should that count, then, as a “can” situation if it’s not physical impossibility but mental disinterest that leads one never to do a thing?  If it simply will not ever happen, can one not just then say that it cannot happen?  Are “cannot” and “shall not” synonymous here, as when Ian McKellen misspoke his most famous line when facing the balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring?

****This may be true somewhere—it probably is, come to think of it—but it’s not true for me, because it’s still fully dark as I write this; the sun is not even lightening the eastern horizon yet.  I’m just being melodramatic.

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Who’s hogging all the ground?

It’s Monday, and I think it’s Groundhog* Day in the US, but I may be misremembering that.  It’s never been a holiday to which I’ve paid much attention.  The notion of the groundhog seeing its shadow and that leading to six more weeks of winter is one of those rare superstitions that I don’t think anyone I’ve met actually takes seriously.

I was awake almost the entire night last night.  It’s very frustrating.  On Friday nights (when I don’t work on Saturday) I tend to sedate myself rather thoroughly, though I use only legal, OTC methods.  To a slightly lesser degree, I also do so on Saturday nights, though I have to make sure I get up to do my laundry on Sunday morning.

But then, on Sunday nights‒and to some degree every other weeknight‒I have a terrible time getting to sleep and then staying asleep.  And then my brain becomes ever more frazzled and worn down, even after a relatively restful weekend, at the very beginning of the week, and it rarely improves as the days pass through the weeks.

Of course, my rest isn’t helped by the fact that I’m continuing through a flare-up of my chronic pain.  That’s probably not helped by the unusually cold weather in south Florida; it went down to 33 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday night and about 35 last night.  That’s as chilly as it’s been since I’ve lived down here.  I know, though, that cold weather is not the main culprit behind my pain flare-ups, because they happen at least as often during the middle of the summer, when it is neither cold nor dry.

Also, my chronic pain problem only began after I was living in Florida.  Before coming here, New York City was the warmest place I had lived, but I never developed any chronic pain problems up there.  Of course, I’m older than I used to be, which is what happens when you haven’t died yet.  But that didn’t happen all at once, whereas my chronic pain sort of did‒and not terribly long after I had moved to Florida.  So, the problem is basically internal, a neuromusculoskeletal kind of thingy.  I suppose perhaps changes of pressure might affect it, but temperature doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.

Anyway, sorry, I know that must be tremendously boring.  Believe me, I get quite bored of being in pain, which has been ongoing for more than twenty years, with no days off, not even major holidays.  It gets very, very old.  It certainly contributed to the downfall of the life I had tried to build and to the wreckage in which I now live.  And it’s damnably hard to build anything back up, literally or figuratively, when one is in pain.

So, yeah, a lot of things that stir my ambition‒and ambition has always been a noteworthy part of my character‒get left behind at least partly because I just can’t keep doing things when I’m in pain.  I don’t know if that’s because biology has programmed us not to want to do things that are associated with pain (and most everything in my life is so associated now) or just because dealing with the pain wears out one’s willpower, in a sort of “learned helplessness” situation.  Probably, both aspects are involved, and there are likely to be others as well.

Okay, I know, this is still boring, isn’t it?  Sorry.  I would love to say insightful things or pose interesting questions or make serious comments about various things happening in the world.  But, alas, I am rather overdone.  The more I try to explore what’s happening in my life and mind, the more I have trouble finding much that’s positive.

I am surely an emotional drain on those near me; at the very least, I know that I am unpleasant to be around.  At least I’m not so unkind as to be willing to continue to inflict myself upon others when I know that I am almost always a net negative.

I’m really very worn out, in more than one sense.  And I don’t see much to which to look forward in the world.  Humanity in general is becoming even more disappointing than I expected it to be, which is saying something.  That’s not to say they don’t have their good aspects and individuals, just as I think most of the rest of the “natural world” is no more beautiful or inspiring or beneficent than humans are.

I’m very discouraged.  I suppose the only good thing about my chronic depression is that it would probably need to improve (perhaps due to antidepressants) for me to be able to find the energy to kill myself.  This may seem ironic, even contradictory, but it is a recognized phenomenon.

All right, that’s enough.  It’s time I stopped inflicting myself on all of you, at least for the today.  I hope you all have good days (or a good day overall).  You’ve earned it by reading through my dreck.

*I always thought of it as “Groundhog‘s Day”, but apparently it is not a possessive.

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Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows blog heaven on the face

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (of course) and it’s also the 29th of January in 2026 (common era).  At least today’s date (the 29th) is a prime number, but other than that, nothing interesting about today’s date jumps out at me.

Not much interesting is jumping out at me about anything, come to think of it.  Not that there aren’t plenty of “interesting”* things happening in the US and the world at large; there are.  But they are largely just stress-inducing, and all too redolent of Yeats’s The Second Coming, i.e., “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  What rough beast indeed slouches its way toward Bethlehem to be born?

Meh.  It’s always been like that, though.  Peace and kindness in any populations are too easily infiltrated and spoiled by any freeloaders and parasites that come along‒on societal scales, these are often politicians as well as too many of the most wealthy individuals, though it would be foolhardy to say that they are all parasites or that they are the only ones.

In any kind of ecosystem that’s complex and productive enough, with enough thermodynamic “free energy”, there will be many means by which “life”** finds a way to garner resources and increase.  Some of these are generally useful and productive, the equivalent of green plants and earth worms and so on, creating or improving the resources that make the whole thing livable.

But when there are resources, and when there is a complex ecosystem (of any type) then predators (like the cows and horses and sheep that feed on the plants and then the other animals that feed on them) will evolve that prey ultimately on the primary producers, as well as parasites that just drain life from many levels of the system for their own benefit without providing anything that is useful for any other creatures.  There are also symbiotes of various kinds, instantiating various forms of mutual exchange to mutual benefit.

Of course, every living cell‒each of the tens of trillions in every human body and the bodies of all other eukaryotes on Earth‒is a symbiote, really.  The mitochondria (and chloroplasts when applicable) and probably other organelles were separate life forms that long ago took up and adapted to residence within other cells and have never left, to the benefit (in the “short term” at least) of all multicellular life forms.  And, of course, those life forms themselves are each massively symbiotic systems of countless cells.

But, unfortunately, even a life form that originated from a single ancestral cell‒and this applies not merely to each individual organism but to life on Earth as a whole‒can produce parasites that drain and ruin things for the rest.  Think of cancer, here, when applying the concept to “individual” organisms.

And even otherwise sensible and useful parts of an organism can experience a kind of mission creep that ends up making them detrimental to the whole.  Think of autoimmune diseases, or analogously, some of the judgmental and self-righteous excesses of the left that have caused their electability to deteriorate, allowing the already mutated cells on the right (which has seen its own healthy functions overwhelmed by its own cancers over time) to overgrow to general detriment.

Of course, cancers and severe autoimmune diseases and the like will end up destroying themselves, but they are prone to take the organism down in the process, and then all that will be left finally is a decaying corpse.  Am I speaking literally or metaphorically?  Yes, I am.

I know humans tend to think of themselves‒when they think of such things at all, or indeed, when they think at all‒as somehow different, separate, special, other than the various levels and stages and types of life and interactions.  They are not.  It’s just very difficult for them even to think to look at themselves dispassionately, as if from above and outside.

Of course, they are different from all the other things in reality‒as is everything else.  Everyone is “special”, which is just another way of saying no one is***.

If and when humans actually develop a civilization that goes beyond Earth and out into the greater cosmos to become significant at a galactic scale or higher, and in a durable way, I will recognize them as something special****.

Until then, nothing humans have done has really been much different qualitatively than ants making hills and termites making mounds and bees making hives.  Even the various space probes and messengers and, yes, astronauts are not much different than the scouts that bees “send out” to look for new sources of pollen and nectar.

Humans really could stand to develop a greater sense of humility.  I strongly suspect that they would do much better that way in the long run.

I don’t have high hopes for them, unfortunately.  But then, I don’t tend to have high hopes about much of anything.  That may be due to some degree of insight on my part, or it may be just the way my mind tends to work, or there may be other possibilities or combinations thereof.  In any case, I often find humans in general‒with noteworthy exceptions‒utterly exhausting and disgusting and pathetic.

But humans are not the only creatures that merit such reactions.  They are merely, for the moment, the most consequential ones to me.  Saddle me with an infestation of cockroaches or a swarm of mosquitoes or a massive overgrowth of mold and/or mildew, and I will be at least temporarily distracted from my (sad and disappointed) contempt for humans, and to some degree for everything else.  It will not, however, make that feeling go away.

The universe as a whole and in its parts is so noxious as to be barely, if at all, tolerable.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  But I suspect it always will be that way, at least unless and until the whole shmear evolves into a state of uniform, maximal entropy with no free energy and so no dynamic processes beyond those required fundamentally by quantum mechanics.

Oh, well.  I guess I can check out any time I like, and‒unlike the case with the Hotel California‒I can thereby leave.

I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*In the sense as used in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  Or, as I have said many times in the past, one should try never to be interesting to one’s doctor.

**This can be literal, or it can be metaphorical‒businesses, nations, ideologies, etc., can be what we are considering when we say “life”, but many of the same patterns hold at every scale.

***Props to Dash from The Incredibles for this pithy insight.

****Or, well, if I am still alive then‒which seems unlikely‒I will so recognize them.

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Saturday.  Blog post.  Work.  Why am I doing this?

Okay, well, if we must, then let’s go.  I’ll try to write something that’s at least intelligible (which may or may not correlate with being intelligent) so that people won’t feel they’ve completely wasted their time reading my blog today-or hopefully any day that they read my blog, though I cannot guarantee that.

Obviously, as noted, I am working today, though I’m not happy about it.  I’m very tired.  I’m still well within my latest flare-up of my chronic pain, and I was so uncomfortable yesterday that I couldn’t even find any interest in eating comfort food to try to distract me.

The boss actually bought lunch for the office, but I didn’t really want what they were getting.  He offered to get me whatever I wanted, and told me to order from Uber Eats and he would pay me for it.  But nothing, not even ice cream or tacos or burgers or pizza or anything appealed to me.  So I didn’t have lunch.  I had some corn chips in the afternoon, but not very many, and I had a bit of bacon in the evening, because even when you’re not really interested in it, bacon is fairly tasty.

Anyway, this morning is already starting out annoyingly, and that’s not counting the fact that I am getting up to go to work on a Saturday after working Monday through Friday*.  Not that I was asleep.  I woke up more than two hours before I got up, partly because of pain, but also because of just my chronic insomnia/low grade feeling of lack of safety in the jungle at night.

To be clear, though I am living in a subtropical region, I do not actually sleep out in the jungle.  That’s just the feeling I have, that inability to rest and stay asleep, as if I might be attacked at any instant.

I won’t get into the specifics of what is so annoying.  It’s the sort of thing that would annoy pretty much anyone, though it is not life-threatening nor is it life-deranging, in and of itself.  It is, however, one more thing, another little weirdly heavy straw placed on the camel’s back, added to the already all but crippling pile.  Also, there seems to be some kind of fungus or caustic toxin in this pile of straw, because it itches and burns like nobody’s business**.  This is metaphorical, of course, but not far from reality.

Anyway, I don’t feel well.  I’m tired, I’m in pain, I’m exhausted but can’t sleep, and even the things that often tend to give me some degree of joy are not catching my attention.  I feel chaos and decay and dysfunction everywhere, in the world and in myself, and now even in the (paid!) service I use to post my blog.

I feel almost as if I’m sliding along on a zip line over a field of lava far below, and the rope on which I’m hanging is frayed and unraveling.  I can’t tell how long it will last.  Nor can I tell how far it is to my destination.

Maybe there is no destination.  Maybe the zip line just keeps going until the rope finally gives way.  Or maybe, at the far end, you just run out of rope and your zip line rig‒whatever the proper term for it is‒zips off the end, off the top of that final pole, and you go slinging into the lava anyway.

I certainly see nothing that gives me any indication of even any relatively pleasant end to the trip.  It’s just dangling over lava until I eventually fall in, the scent of sulfur and other foul odors rising up to entertain me along the way.  But I’m strapped to the zip line, and to get free prematurely would require unbuckling the harness or cutting the line or perhaps bouncing on it to increase the rate of fraying.  It can be done, but it is intimidating because of the damnable instincts baked into my hardware.

I’m so tired.  And I have no future to which to look forward.  I wish I could just find the courage to take my exit, to unbuckle from or cut the line.  I’m all alone here, anyway, so there’s no one depending on me‒other than the people at the office to a limited degree, I guess.  But one cannot stay alive merely to continue to do a job that one does merely to be able to stay alive.

It’s not as though anyone is anxiously awaiting my next book or my next song, and even the people who read my blog every time I write it are surely not eagerly awaiting it.  No one will be significantly bereft when I’m gone.  They can’t be, because no one is significantly in my presence.  For the most part, with respect to other people, I’m just a concept, a theoretical entity.  I’m not really a person someone could look at and spend time with and potentially touch (let alone help).  I’m an idea‒and not a cool one like the idea of Batman, as discussed in Batman Begins.  Thus, any idea anyone has of me now, they can still have after I die.

Don’t try idly to persuade me that this is not true.  The evidence is strongly against you, so convincing me otherwise is going to be a serious task.

I hope you have a good day, though.

*Oh, and now it turns out the WordPress has changed the way their classic editor works, making it less user-friendly, with a smaller and less clear type-face, so there’s yet another irritating thing, this one involving something with which I deal every single working day.  Perhaps this is a sign that I should just call this blog, and everything else, quits.  I don’t know if I can stand this anymore.  Living in this world is like rolling around naked in a field of nettles and brambles.

**That’s a peculiar expression, isn’t it, “like nobody’s business”?

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Dysphoria, dat phoria, de udder phoria, to Hell with it, none of it matters

Well, we’ve reached the just-shy-of-two-thirds point in the month of January, and we’re exactly nine months out from the most important day of the year (Ha ha).  How exciting.

It’s still chilly here in south Florida; at least, it’s chilly for south Florida.  I don’t think we’re in any immediate danger of having snow in Miami‒we’re more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit* too warm for that‒but it’s cold if you’ve lived in the subtropical cesspool climate for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s way too long to be in Florida.  Florida is a nice place to visit, but given the overall quality of humans that tend to have influence here‒and we all know one extremely prominent one‒you wouldn’t want to live here.  Or, as a popular local saying goes, “Florida:  come on vacation, leave on probation.”  Even my grandparents on my mother’s side, who had lived in Florida for some years, moved back north for their final years.

I’m not sure what to “talk” about today.  Or, to be my usual unnecessarily strict self regarding such things, I am not sure about what to “talk” today.

Here’s a mildly amusing point:  when I try to construct that last sentence’s last phrase without ending it (not counting the word “today”) in a preposition, or a dangling participle, or whatever the proper term is, the stupid Google Docs word processor tries to suggest that I’m incorrect and recommends the less grammatically correct but more popular way to put things, such as what I wrote in the preceding sentence.  It’s pathetic and disgusting.  Google should be ashamed of themselves, every last one of them, to the point where they commit mass seppuku.

It’s almost as if someone said they wanted to listen to some lovely orchestral music, perhaps something by Rachmaninoff, and the respondent‒perhaps some artificial “intelligence” program‒played “Baby Shark”.

Anyway, so much of nearly everything is so very frustrating in this life.  Nothing is rewarding.  Well, nearly nothing is rewarding, and the few rewarding things are not just few but also very far between.

I see no future for me.  I cannot visualize actually having a remaining life that’s any better than that of a homeless drug addict.

Everything is maddening.  Or maybe it’s just that I am maddened by everything.  It hardly matters which is the more accurate way to put things, since the experience for me is the same:  unhappiness, loneliness, frustration, insomnia, chronic pain, constant tinnitus in both ears, professional and personal disgrace, and who knows how many other things I could list if I had the energy for it.

I don’t think I can do this much more, perhaps not any more.  I’m so frustrated and miserable and stuck.  Supposedly, someone with my level of ASD‒level 2** officially‒needs moderate support, not just “some” support.  I don’t have any.  I am on my own.

That’s not to say I don’t have people who care about me, but they are far away and have their own shit with which to deal.  They certainly don’t need to waste their energy on the added piece of shit that I am.

I don’t know how often I have felt that I really ought to kill myself, that it’s probably the most sensible course of action for me‒socially, biologically, ethically, what have you‒but I have not done so yet.  Each occurrence of such contemplation must carry some certain percentage of risk****, like a more metaphorical version of Russian Roulette (though I literally tried that once).  Eventually, probability suggests that my actual killing of myself would approach a mathematical certainty.

It will never quite reach certainty, of course, even if (when?) I finally kill myself, at least not as a matter of retroactive probability.  Just because someone won the lottery last week doesn’t mean we can retroactively say that their odds of winning were 100%.  One could say such a thing from a certain point of view‒the past being unchangeable and so fixed and deterministic‒but it’s not a useful way to think about probability.

Anyway, enough of this shit for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write a post tomorrow; I mean, it’s always uncertain, but it feels less likely than usual.  If I do, I guess it’ll show up here.

*Let’s see, in centigrade (or Celsius) that’s five ninths as many degrees as in Fahrenheit, so 20 times five is 100, divided by 9 is 11 and one ninth, or 11.1111111…

**Level 2:  Perfume, lingerie, women’s clothing, and jewelry***.  Everybody out of the elevator.

***That stuff would probably actually all be on level 1.  They usually keep things of interest mainly to women on the first floor of department stores, since statistically, those are the things that bring in the most business.

****If you want to call “risk” something that would end my constant dysphoria and also free other people from having to think about me in any other than a sad little, throwaway, “Aw, what a shame” kind of way.

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“Try to hide your hand, forget how to feel”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you’re right.  I’m working today.  Heavy sigh.

It’s not as though I can opt out, since my coworker who shares some of my responsibilities is not able to come in‒he and his wife have a newborn and a toddler, and he’s doing some bartending work on the weekends, so it’s on me, even though I worked last Saturday and even though, honestly, my mental reserves are dipping lower and lower, and I need‒or, well, at least I could really use‒at least one night a week where I can knock myself unconscious and so at least get a form of mental rest.

Alas, that’s not going to happen this week.  I cannot sleep in on Sundays, because I do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I need to get it done before everyone in the other, main part of the house wakes up and starts doing their things.

So, I’m pretty unhappy this morning, but that’s nothing particularly new.  I don’t have any whimsical musings about infinity to share today.  Also, I did not write this post the night before, as is probably obvious; I’m writing it in the morning.  And, of course, I’ve written no fiction, unless you count the fact that yesterday’s post misleadingly seemed full of pep and vim and spark and pizzazz.  That was a lie.

I feel very just generally hateful toward reality as a whole, to be honest.  There are things and people here and there that I don’t hate, and even a few people I love, but they are far away and far between.  Seeing or interacting with even one of them is a sort of special occasion.

I did try meditating the other day, as I discussed, and though, yeah, I did get depressed, with intrusive thoughts about, for instance, going and lying on the railroad tracks* troubling me.  But I got through the day‒as I guess you could tell, since I’m here.  I wondered if maybe that meditation contributed to my weird but lighthearted digression on infinities and related topics yesterday.

Unfortunately, though yesterday started okay, it didn’t continue as well, and I had a fair amount of pain (and other things happened).  And then, of course, I found out that we’re working today.  Also, I slept terribly last night, but that’s true almost every night.

I wish there was a real “The Force”, including the dark side, because I think at least it would be some compensation for my depression and tension to be able to use force lightning and to be able to choke people out from a distance without needing to touch them.  Though, I like to think I’d use more creative attacks, like squeezing someone’s heart or brain with the Force.  That would be quicker, and they would have less time to know they were being killed, but honestly I’m not interested in causing suffering to people who are intolerable.  I just want them gone.

Yeah, I’m not a good person, I know, though that does depend a bit on specific answers to the questions “good for what purpose?” and “good by what criteria?”, and probably on others.

I’ve said it before, but I do often feel some regret about not “winning” when I played Russian roulette way back near the end of 2012.  Nearly everything in the years since has been of questionable value, and much of it has honestly been rotten.  And it’s not as though the years immediately preceding 2012 were great‒chronic pain/injury, divorce, disability and the like colored a lot of it, but at least I was part of my kids’ life back then.

Again, I’m not going to engage in foolish overgeneralizing if I can help it; there have been moments of joy and even a few achievements in the years between, though the latter have often been causative of reflective reproach, like someone who grew roses but found that the “thorns” were vastly more prominent than the few little misshapen and mutated flowers that were produced.

I occasionally wish I could be like Lord Foul** and just hate everything and everyone except myself, as opposed to the way things are, in which a big chunk of my hate is directed inwardly.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that Lord Foul’s “ethos” is astonishingly pathological and also astonishingly illogical and irrational.  But it has its attractions.  Madness in general often has such seeming advantages, though I suspect that, in reality, they are largely illusory.

I’m tired, and I’m hostile and even hateful, unfortunately.  Events in the world aren’t helping, and though some may counsel just staying away from “the news”, I consider that bad advice.  As Gildor said to Frodo, you can shut yourself in, but you cannot forever shut the world out.  It will impinge upon you, and by being aware of it you can best protect yourself and mitigate possible harm.  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The only ways completely to prevent the world from interfering with you are to destroy the world, to destroy yourself, or to do both.

Am I speaking metaphorically here, or am I speaking physically?  I think the idea can be considered both ways.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope all of you who read this have a good weekend.  As for everyone else, well, it would certainly be nice if the kind people in the world had good days.

What are the odds of that happening?***

*Incidentally, I would not actually do that.  I would find it far too rude to disrupt the commute of at least hundreds of people and possibly thousands.

**He’s the big bad in the various Thomas Covenant books, and he is one of my favorite villains.

***I’m speaking rhetorically.  I don’t expect that there’s any way for anyone to know the accurate probabilities involved.