depression

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Maybe DON’T wake me up when September ends

I wish that I had brought the lapcom back with me to the house yesterday evening after work.  Alas, I did not, and so I am writing this post on the “smart”phone like some Zillennial.  It’s annoying.

Although, I want to be clear, putting the word “smart” in “scare quotes” as I did just now is merely rhetorical.  It’s snarkiness.  It is a true fact that modern cellular phones are indeed quite smart compared to all prior generations of phones.

They’re smart compared to most prior generations of home computers.  They’re smart compared to many prior iterations of the operating computers on board real space ships, for crying out loud.

And if rumors are correct, they’re smarter than our current strategic defense computers.  Though that could be false intelligence, just a negative rumor about the military, because such rumors are enticing and so spread easily.  I don’t know.

I’m just annoyed to be so susceptible to using the phone to write, simply because its presence is convenient, even though I very much prefer to write on the lapcom, or on any other real (as opposed to virtual) keyboard.

Of course, I use the phone for many other things that I previously would have done with something else.  Calculator functions are one of those things, and I have no complaints about being able to use the smartphone for them.

It’s quite convenient, though I can do relatively simple mental arithmetic pretty well without any calculator at all.  Still, it doesn’t take much for it just to make more sense to use a calculator, because the way it processes arithmetic is more direct and logical than repurposing a general biological intelligence to be able to do arithmetic via relatively elaborate algorithms.

You can use an LLM to multiply two three-digit numbers together, and it may even do better than most people would do at the task‒I don’t honestly know‒but it would be a waste of that machine’s capabilities, when you could just tap on your calculator app, or even just use an old-fashioned physical calculator.

You don’t use a VTOL fighter jet to go to the corner store for a candy bar, after all.  I mean, it would be pretty cool to see someone do it once, just for a stunt, but it’s not a sensible way to go for a snack.  Heck, it’s not really sensible to drive to the corner store, unless you have some physical infirmity that makes it necessary.  In general, walking is better.  You’ll not only get there nearly as fast as (and sometimes faster than) by driving, you’ll also be making yourself ever so slightly stronger and healthier because of the exercise.

A bicycle would probably also be a sensible way to go.  But it has the disadvantage that you need to park your bike and chain it up (unless you live somewhere far less petty-theft-prone than where I live), and in general bikes require more maintenance than feet do, or at least they require additional maintenance.

Anyway, I’ve had my troubles with bicycles, so I have a hard time talking them up, though I recognize that they have many advantages over motor vehicles and over plain ambulation.  My difficulty with bicycles is one of the many things about myself that frustrates me.  Still, there are many places that one can walk where bicycles or other wheeled vehicles are not going to work.  There are reasons why the Incas, for instance. didn’t really use any wheeled vehicles.

Well, enough of that weird little set of mutual tangents.  It’s the last day of September today, which means tomorrow will be the first day of October.  That’s just the way that works.  I’ve noted before, recently, that October is my favorite month, but the reasons for that favoritism have eroded over time.

Birthdays and holidays become just reminders of the fact that things are worse for me than they’ve ever been in the past; I have no one with whom to share any of them.  And the notion of changing leaves and bright autumn colors is just a cruel joke in south Florida, as is the notion of weather cool enough to require a windbreaker.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I’m sick of all this bullshit, anyway.  I would say it’s a waste of my time, but my time is wasted no matter what I do, so that’s not a good point.  But it’s also a waste of mental energy and effort, for something that does almost nothing for anyone, if it does that much.

I need just to shut all this shit down, and I don’t just mean the blog.  I’ve been gradually phasing out most of the relatively productive and creative things I do, though that hasn’t been deliberate or conscious.  It’s just happened, like I’m petering out.

Of course, given that “peter” is a word derived from the Greek for rock*, saying I’m petering out could be construed as meaning that I’m rocking out (dude).  But, of course, I am doing no such thing.

No, I’m just winding down, I think.  It can’t happen too soon, can it?

*Thus Jesus’s famous play on words when he said to Peter, “Upon this rock I shall build my church” or whatever the specific wording was.

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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“Now far ahead the road has gone…”

First and most importantly for today, I want to say, “Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.”  So, I will say it:  Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.

Yes, though the movies were inexcusably unclear about the fact, Bilbo and Frodo were both born on September 22nd (Shire reckoning).  Mind you, they were born 78 years apart (Bilbo first, in case that was not obvious).  So the big party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring was a joint celebration of Bilbo’s 111th birthday and Frodo’s 33rd birthday (the year in which one officially comes of age in Hobbit culture).

Also, the people inside the tent in the big dinner at the party were chosen to total 144, matching their hosts’ combined age, a number also called (by hobbits and by us) a gross.  Many of the guests were quite miffed when they learned of that system, but as usual, Bilbo DGAF.

So, anyway, yeah, it’s Frodo’s and Bilbo’s birthday.

It’s also the day of the Autumnal Equinox, when the sine curve of daylight versus nighttime crosses the x-axis toward negative territory.  In other words, from now until spring, the nights will be longer than the daylight‒in the northern hemisphere, anyway.  In the southern hemisphere it is the opposite.

And, of course, it is the first day of Autumn, which is my favorite season and always has been (well, it has been for as long as I can remember, though certainly not longer than I’ve been alive).  It’s the time of most of my favorite holidays and so on (including Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday) and it was the time when school started again (which was a good thing to me).

Unfortunately, in south Florida, most of the physical charms of Autumn are almost completely effaced.  And the charms of south Florida have long since been almost completely blunted for me.  Unfortunately, I really don’t have anywhere else to go, at least not anyplace I could go in good conscience.

It would be nice to spend at least one more Autumn-Winter-Spring up north, to experience the change of the seasons again, before I die.  I’m not that optimistic about my chances, though.  I don’t see how it’s going to happen.

I often think about just…leaving here, on foot, and walking towards Michigan, just seeing if I can make it all the way back to the house in which I grew up, or if I would die trying.  Either outcome would be acceptable to me.  And I often feel that September 22nd would be an excellent day to start such a trek, since that’s when Frodo left Bag End to begin his own long journey.

Right now, though, I don’t know that I am in good enough shape for such a trip.  Though, of course, the trip would do at least a bit of working me into shape as I went along (or it might completely wreck me).

I think I have said here before that just going off for a very long walk would not be a terrible way to end myself, not least because nobody can intervene to try to stop you or hospitalize you, because you’re not doing anything that’s definitely life-threatening or associated with self harm or self-destruction.  It’s just walking.

That’s much more ambiguous than, say, nooses or blades or gallons of flammable liquids or big bags of rat poison or even bottles of analgesics of various kinds, all of which (and more) I have ready and set to go.  But those all make a mess, at least potentially.

Of course, I’ve also mused‒here as well as elsewhere, I think‒that maybe an ideal thing would be just to swim out into the Atlantic and keep going until it kills me one way or the other.  That way there really is no cleanup required.  Bury my body in Davy Jones’s Locker, you might say.

But swimming out into the ocean is more or less irreducibly frightening, at least to me.  I don’t think I could get past the activation energy required to start that process.  I’m definitely a good enough swimmer, but I’m not a comfortable swimmer, especially not in deep water.

Mind you, I’m also not exactly comfortable with poisoning myself with one or more things, nor with immolating myself, nor with hanging.  Those things are daunting, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise.

Cutting is less intimidating, interestingly enough.  It hurts, of course, but I’m pretty well used to that much of it (a face which can be frustrating in and of itself), and I have various topical lidocaine preparations that would make that process at least slightly easier.

But blood is messy, and I wouldn’t like to have someone need to clean up such a mess on my account.  This is also a problem with jumping from a high hotel balcony, which is another available option.  Maybe if I were ever to get to the point where I just hate everyone so much that I don’t mind inconveniencing anyone, even strangers, I might be willing to do one of those messy things.

Walking is still probably the best thing, though.  One might even see it as a test of a kind, a sorting process:  will one gain new self-respect and maybe even some contemplative insight on a very long walk, or will one die in the process?  Either outcome is not too bad.

Alas, I need to get in somewhat better shape before starting such a quest, and that’s frustrating.  My chronic pain doesn’t help, either, though there are interventions that can help that, at least a little, and it might even improve over the length of a long enough walk.

It would be nice to see the seasons change at a slightly accelerated rate while walking north.  But it may be too late for that this year.

Anyway, if I do such a thing, I’m unlikely to announce it here at the time.  I would likely just leave, and only maybe send intermittent reports as I go along, but with some built in delay such that, by the time people could see how far I had gone, I would have been well past that point.

Ironically, if I were suddenly to do that, I think almost nobody would even realize it.  No one tends to notice when I’m not around, as it were, except perhaps to feel a slight lightening in the air in rooms I used to inhabit.

Whatever.  Happy first day of autumn (in the northern hemisphere).  Happy equinox.  And a most joyous Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.

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Trying to atone down the noise

First of all, G’mar chatima tova to anyone out there observing Yom Kippur (it’s not really a celebratory holiday, since it is the day of atonement; one observes it).

Mind you, someone really observing Yom Kippur isn’t going to be reading this today, nor will they be working in any way other than rabbinical duties (if they have them) and so on.  There’s no carrying of any burdens, certainly no driving, no starting any flames (or anything analogous thereto), and so on.  There should certainly not be any going to work or writing blog posts (or writing anything else).

But then again, I am not observant, not really, and I am not a believer (in anything really), so I don’t feel any deep shame about the whole thing.  It’s more a bit of sadness.  I am alone.  I wish I had a community or a family or somebody with whom to observe such holidays and traditions and even proscriptions.  I honestly don’t think I would mind which ones, at least up to a point, though I don’t think I would commit to any flagrantly destructive nonsense.

Though, as I say that, it occurs to me that I do plenty of things that are flagrantly destructive toward myself.  I just do so on small scales and in small amounts at a time; I don’t really want to get Baker Acted (again).

I do tend to fast on Yom Kippur, and I am fasting today‒no food or water except that required to take medication and such.  I actually did a pre-fast most of the day yesterday, though I allowed myself to drink water and I ate some food in the evening.  I like fasting, both conceptually and experientially.  It definitely sharpens my mind in particular ways, and it evens out my emotions a little bit (not always in a good state though).

I honestly wish I had the strength of character to fast more often or just longer.  To be honest, I would like the strength to fast indefinitely.  After a certain point, if you go without eating long enough, you never have to eat again.  That sounds like a real load off.

Anyway, I am fasting.  And I do try to use this event, this sort of chapter marker day, to possibly stop doing certain things I do deliberately to harm myself (without doing the sorts of things that make one subject to possible involuntary hospitalization, i.e., Baker Acting, though I do those sorts of things from time to time as well, and have done so recently).

The idea behind such things, from my own admittedly atypical perspective, is that I might as well do things that shorten my life, since frankly I am not feeling much of anything good about living, and have not felt so in a long time.  So, if I can chop at least some of it off at the end, that would be a net benefit:  decreased negative is a relative positive.

I am also more than open to the irony of possibly one day finding a true desire to live or something for which to live, only to find myself dying of some disease I invoked through my deliberate, earlier self-destructive habits.  It would be funny in a way, a practical joke that I knowingly and willingly played on myself.  Bazinga, as Sheldon Cooper might say.

But I will see if I can break at least one such habit today.  It’s not always easy; when I put aside certain self-destructive things, I often find that I begin to feel more depressed.  The prospect of living longer makes me feel depressed, because there are only very few things in my life that make it worth bothering with, and my most honest assessment is that it is unlikely to improve, ever.  Like a mortal who keeps a Great Ring, I will not grow or obtain new life, I will merely continue, until at last every breath is a weariness.

“At last”, he says.  It’s already happening and has been happening for a long time.  And there is no Valinor to which I can go to recover (as if they would have me, anyway).

So, yeah, anyway, that’s what’s going on with me today.  I doubt that I’ll keep fasting after sundown, but if I do, I will let you know.  It would be nice not to be fat when I die, at last.  Still, I don’t actually expect things to work out in the ways that I want them to work out.  That’s not the nature of reality.

Anyway, I don’t really do too much anticipation about the future, nor do I ruminate all that much about the past, despite what readers might think.  Though I try to prepare for various contingencies just as a practical matter, I don’t tend to have long-term expectations or anticipations.  The world is too chaotic for such things, and the universe makes no promises other than that it will follow its laws everywhere and always, whatever those might ultimately be.

So, yeah.  I won’t say “Happy Yom Kippur” because that doesn’t make much more sense than Happy Memorial Day does.  Have a good one, though, whether you observe it or not.  A “good” day is never an inappropriate thing to have, more or less by definition.

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“Sometimes I think I’d like to watch it burn.”

Umm…I don’t have any idea what to write this morning, this work-week beginning, this dawn of yet another iteration of zero.  But I guess that hasn’t ever stopped me before, though it feels more prominent now than I remember it feeling in the past.

But such feelings are unreliable guides to the past and present actual state of reality.  This is not to say that they are absolutely untrue and misleading; if that were the case, not only would everyone have picked up on it long ago, but it would have been weeded out of the gene pool.  A perfectly unreliable memory is no better than no memory at all.

On the other hand, it’s not evolutionarily sensible to have a perfect memory, either, largely because the information required to store perfectly all the things that have happened to you, and to which your senses had access, would very rapidly exceed your “hard drive” space.  No, your nervous system must sift out the useful information and discard the useless, or the not salient or pertinent, as much as possible, because the brain, though tremendously useful, is extremely energy intensive.

Human brains burn about 20 percent of the daily calories burned by a person.  Yes, that’s true even of people you consider morons.  The most ignorant person around still has a version of the best operating system available in the known universe (at least for the moment).  How much smarter is the least intelligent but functioning human compared to the smartest nematode…or even the smartest house cat?

Oh, who cares?  I don’t know why I go on about this nonsense.  It’s not as though people are actually interested.  I’m hemorrhaging readers steadily, it seems.  I’m not exactly sure why.

Maybe it’s because my insomnia and early awakening are getting steadily worse, and so I’m posting my posts earlier and earlier.  Maybe if I delayed them, like I do with the audio posts, more people would notice them.  What do you think?  Should I try that?  Would it bother you if my posts went up at, say 8 am versus whenever I finish them?  Would it matter?  Do you think there is a better time for them?

I don’t really expect it to make a difference.  No one notices when I’m not around, so to speak.  I’ve been banned from Meta platforms for some time now, and the only people who have touched base were the few people who did so anyway.  There are quite a few people whom I would consider friends, and who could get in contact with me, but they don’t.

I’m not saying that they ought to check on me.  It’s not their responsibility.  But I suspect at least a part of the whole thing is that, once I am not even peripherally in their lives, people don’t really notice.  If anything, I suspect that they probably feel a slight lightness, a sense of greater vivacity, some decreased sense of dreariness about life, the universe, and everything.

Certainly I have not heard anyone complain about the fact that I’m not around.  No one says they miss me, that their lives are emptier without me nearby.  No, most people either don’t notice (at least superficially) or just experience relief.

Even the four dollar coins* I keep for helping me make certain decisions are not on my side (not that they would be, since they are coins, not people).  Late last week‒I think it was Saturday, but it might have been Friday‒when I was feeling particularly low, I asked if I should just kill myself.  I spun the four coins and, on the first try, I got four heads.

Heads is the side I use to mean “yes”.

So, yeah, even the ladies (2 Susan B. Anthonies and 2 Sacagaweas) don’t seem to think having me around is worth much.  Of course, they are just coins.  I know there is no actual thought or judgment there, let alone attachment or agency.  It’s just sort of perversely funny to me.

Whatever.  I’m tired of this, and everything is getting less and less consequential.  I think, unless someone voices clear and convincing objections in the comments today, I will set up tomorrow’s post to come out at 8 eastern time, at least roughly.

Or maybe I just won’t post anything.  It’s not as though doing this is helping my mental health (obviously), and I doubt that I’m contributing anything to the world of ideas.  Even if I had some deep and interesting insight, it would go essentially nowhere and reach almost no one.

Oh, again, who cares?  Thanks for reading today.  I hope you have a good week, a good remainder of the month, a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives‒just in case you never hear from me again.

*By which I mean four one-dollar coins, not $4 coins.

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Meet the new year, same as the old year

L’shana tovah!  It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so for those of you who celebrate it, I hope you have a good one.

It’s Saturday, also, of course, and I am going in to the office.  I can hardly claim to feel slighted to be working on Rosh Hashanah, since if I were actually observant, I would never be working on any Saturday, since that is Shabbat.  I would be hypocritical to try to claim the day off by some form of religious right.

It is also rather sad and frustrating that I just have no one with whom to celebrate this and other important days.  Tomorrow is another very important day, and of course next weekend begins Yom Kippur, which is the so-called highest of the holy days.

Anyway, all that’s neither here nor there.  It has nothing to do with me other than memories.  I can’t even share well-wishes with people on Facebook as I used to do, thanks to my weird expulsion from Meta’s sites.

But it’s not as though anyone has a right to Facebook.  Not even the people who created it have a right to it.  It can all be taken from them at any moment by the whims of fate, and sooner or later, it all will be taken from them, just as everything else will be taken from everyone else as well.

Again, happy new year.

Each day is the beginning of a new year depending on one’s point of view.  And every second is the beginning of a new day, and so on.  Likewise, each day is the end of a year, and each second is the end of a day.

And each moment is the end of some noteworthy number of lives.  Every day is the last day some parent out there will lift and carry their child.  Every day is the last day some parent will ever see their child, and every day is the last day some child will see their parent.

Every moment is, for someone out there, the last moment they will spend with the person they love the most.

This is not even counting the suffering, the fear, and the deaths of non-human animals and other forms of life.

So, yeah.  Happy, happy.  Joy, joy.

Sorry, I know I’m being perhaps even more of a downer than usual.  It’s what I’m best at, I suspect.  I should charge for my services; after all, like the Joker said, if you’re good at something you should never do it for free.

I don’t know if there’s actually a market for what I’m selling, though.  I’m down to about a dozen or fewer regular readers here, and it’s not as though anyone’s sharing my posts or calling them to the attention of friends as being entertaining or insightful.  That’s not surprising.

I am quite creative in many ways, but those ways all tend toward the dark and horrible.  Way back when I was writing the first science fiction/fantasy* novel I ever completed, some of the best parts in it were the “horror” elements, which just crept in as I wrote the type of story I liked to write.

I seem mainly to be a source of darkness in the world‒though I’ve been part of bringing some wonderful things into the world as well.  I’ve even done my share of good deeds, and possibly more than my share.  That’s pretty much over now, though.

Of course, darkness doesn’t require me to bring it into existence.  It makes no difference to the universe if one declares oneself, say, an Agent of Chaos or of Entropy.  That’s about as sensible as someone claiming to be an agent of gravity or of the electromagnetic force.

Real things, fundamental things, don’t require human (or other) agents to carry them out.  They simply are, they happen, there is no avoiding them.  They happen with or without anyone even knowing they happen.  This is one of the things that should make everyone suspicious of every religion, really:  why would real omnipotent force require agents?

So yeah, like I said, every moment is laden with loss and suffering and death, and ironically, this will only ever end if and when everyone and everything is dead.

Happy New Year.

*Yes, it counted as science fiction and fantasy.  That was one of the points of it:  it told of an ultra-high tech, space faring civilization that also used “magic”.

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Painfully to pore upon a blog to seek the light of truth

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you might be able to tell by my traditional, Thursday-associated “Hello and good morning” style opening.  But, of course, if you’re new to this blog‒I wonder if there are any new people reading this blog today‒then you might not know.

But I’ve been writing a Thursday-based blog for at least 10 years, I think, in case anyone wants to go back and check it out.  It then expanded into an “every workday” blog after my last fiction publication, which I think was my collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Though my last novel ended up being Unanimity Book 1 and Unanimity Book 2.

I have written a novella since then (Extra Body) that’s published here, and I’ve made beginnings on Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which are also available here as far as they’ve gone.

But for the most part, I’ve just been doing this blog.  I initially imagined it to be a kind of promotional entity, intended to help people hear about my books.  As far as I can tell, it utterly failed at that purpose, but whataya gonna do?

Then I decided to try to turn the blog into a sort of mental health thing (for me, not for my readers‒it cannot be good for my readers’ mental health), a kind of talk therapy, to try to help with my ongoing dysthymia and depression.

Well, it’s difficult to assess an intervention’s effectiveness without being able to know how things would be without that intervention, but if this is me with a successful method of intervention, I shudder to imagine what I would be like without it.  Possibly, I would be dead, but that’s really not such a bad thought, to be fair.

I’ve had a few very bad days of pain lately, which is not unusual, but it is frustrating.  For a few days before this, my pain abated a bit, to just a sort of low, background thing, and when that happens, I start to feel stupidly optimistic for a time.  Of course, so far, that optimism has been profoundly misplaced, but what do you want from something as stupid as optimism?

The pain really doesn’t help things, though.  It’s been going on for nearly a quarter of a century so far, and that’s too long for my taste (in case you wondered).  In a few years, I will have reached the halfway point, i.e., I will have been in chronic pain for half my life.  From there, the fraction just gets bigger.  Indeed, if I were to live forever, the limit of the fraction of my life in which I’ve been in chronic pain would be 1.

That’s a pretty horrible thought.

So, yeah, that hasn’t helped with my mental health either.  It’s difficult to know what my mental health would have been like without chronic pain; it’s possible it could have been worse.  But there are decent reasons to doubt that to be the likely case.

Insomnia doesn’t help, either.  I will say one thing about Paxil, for all that it wasn’t great for my depression:  it made me enjoy sleeping, even though it didn’t make a big impact on how long I slept.  I have never really enjoyed sleep, either before or since.  I am not one who eagerly anticipates getting into bed and drifting off.

I know there are people who do seem to enjoy it, quite apart from its necessary function.  Not I.  My need to sleep, as with so many other things, is one purely of necessity; I need to rest, if I can.  And I certainly long for the feeling of actually having adequately rested, though I don’t know if I will ever experience that again.

Anyway, I’m tired‒from lack of sleep, from pain, from depression, presumably from ASD, from being alone with only my own miserable and annoying self all the time, from the fact that the world is so stupid and so pointless*, from general social awkwardness, from innumerable things.  And I have no apparent capacity to do anything creative now, which used to be one of my saving graces.  I haven’t even played guitar (or sang) for weeks now, if I recall correctly.  The black Strat just leans against my desk in the office, gathering dust.

Oh, well.  Like I said (or asked), whataya gonna do?  Although, there is always something I can do, but people don’t like it when I talk about that.  It makes them uncomfortable.  It doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable enough to act, but they don’t like it, and it doesn’t seem to do me any good except to make me feel slightly more hopeless, as well as somewhat guilty for bothering other people with my issues.

Anyway, it’s not like I can blame anyone for not wanting to have anything to do with a creature like me.

Enough.  This is idiotic, like so much else in the universe.  I hope you’re all doing well.

TTFN

*But especially the “stupid” part.  Pointlessness is tolerable, and it can even be rather freeing, but everyone and everything is just so idiotic.  I do not exclude myself from that judgement.

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“…the emptiest of feelings…”

Ugh, boy, wow, do I feel wiped out this morning, which seems mildly peculiar after a night’s sleep, however inadequate.  I didn’t have the energy to do my usual morning pull-ups today, even, and that’s rare.  Well, I say “usual”, but I actually alternate:  on even days I do pull-ups in the morning, on odd days I do dips, and on Sundays and on those Saturdays on which I don’t work, I do neither.

<sarcasm> Isn’t that exciting to learn?  I know that I can barely contain myself; I can’t imagine how it must be for all of you! </sarcasm>

Anyway, I don’t know why I am so enervated this morning.  I mean, I slept an entirely inadequate amount, but that’s not atypical or unusual for me.

Yesterday was even a decent day as far as it went.  We only worked a half day at the office, but sales were nevertheless pretty good.  Then afterward, I had a discord call with my youngest and we watched two excellent episodes of Doctor Who.  This is their first time watching, and it’s nice to be able to introduce someone to the show, especially one of my two favorite people ever.  The show is being quite well-received.  This is not a surprise.

Of course, I went back to the house later than I would have if I had not watched the Doctor, but not as late as usual.  Then I went to bed pretty sensibly.  That doesn’t translate into a good night’s sleep‒not by a long way‒but I did what was within my power.

It’s not as though I can do anything that’s not within my power.

So, yeah, I don’t know why I feel so beat this morning.  I don’t feel like I am coming down with some infectious illness (unfortunately), and I don’t have the symptoms that would go along with some rather severe medical process that could cause acutely worsening fatigue, like a GI bleed or something.  There’s no faintness/lightheadedness, no rapid heart beat, nothing of that sort.  I also have no new pains that I have so far noticed, and as far as I can tell I am not jaundiced, so my liver is probably okay.

Well, whatever.  The point is I feel a lot like crap.  But, unfortunately, I don’t feel sick enough not to go to work (or to write this blog post).  And I am not allowed to take breaks of any kind unless I am legitimately incapacitated.

“Not allowed” you ask?  Not allowed by whom?

By me’m, is the answer, albeit a deliberately ungrammatical one.  I cannot seem to let myself stop trying to do shit unless I am actually ill enough that I cannot really do anything.

I have been like this for as long as I can remember.  Even back in my early grade school days, I remember fantasizing about getting seriously hurt so that I would be able just to lie about and rest for a bit.  Honestly.

When I had open heart surgery‒it was August 7th or 8th, 1988, 2 weeks before I was to go back to university‒it was quite unpleasant of course, and quite painful.  Indeed, I remember that my first thought upon beginning to regain consciousness was more or less “damn it, I survived”.

It’s not great when you’re 18 (or probably any other age) to get your chest sawed open and your blood artificially circulated and oxygenated for a while, then to wake up restrained and intubated and cortically blind (I didn’t put that last thing together completely until quite some time later).

But it was, nevertheless, freeing.  I didn’t feel the need always to be doing something, to be accomplishing something, because I couldn’t.  That was kind of amazing, and it felt so at the time.

I wasn’t even afraid when I was going to get my heart surgery (or the catheterization before that).  It’s not that I was brave; it was nothing like that.  I was just too intrigued by the whole process, which was admittedly pretty cool and amazing, and I was almost unconsciously looking forward to having everything taken out of my hands for a while, whether I liked it or not.

Of course, in a sense, everything is always mostly out of our hands.  Our own agency, such as it is, is something we don’t choose, and we don’t choose our nature and our “specs”* and our talents and capacities.  Even our will is something that starts as it is without our input, as does the universe itself.  The best you can do is try to surf on the chaos.

But I’ve always felt the need to do something whenever I’m conscious and able to act.  Even if the “something” is a fun thing, or just a distracting thing, there’s always a pressure to do it, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember.  And it’s just a relief to have it taken off line temporarily, to have it rendered moot for a while.

When I had my heart surgery, I knew that it might kill me.  I certainly knew it intellectually, just as I also knew that the odds were very small‒roughly one in a thousand according to the statistics my cardiologist had shared with me.  Even back then, I had a good enough intuitive grasp of probability and statistics to know that, though immensely higher than the chance of winning the lottery, these were odds about which it was not worth worrying.

But I also just wasn’t horrified by the prospect of dying.  Even then I didn’t really believe in any kind of afterlife.  And I experienced (or, rather, I did not experience) more or less as complete a simulacrum of death as it was possible to undergo, one far more closely approximating it than mere dreamless sleep:  deep general anesthesia including hypothermia and cardioplegia, and the non-pulsatile cerebral blood flow that heart-lung bypass entailed.

If I had died on the operating table, there would have been no experiential transition for me.  That’s rather fascinating.

Anyway, sorry to bother you with my fantasies about, and my missed opportunities for, a painless death (or just for the chance to rest because there was nothing I could do).  Maybe I’ll feel better by tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll feel deader by tomorrow.  I could even be wetter by tomorrow, this being Florida.

I hope all of you are feeling and doing better than I.  I mean, come on, it’s not a very high bar to clear.

*By which I mean “specifications”, as of a machine or process, not “spectacles”.

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It’s serious Labor just to get through each Day

Good day to you all.  It’s Monday, the 7th of September, and for those in the USA, it is Labor Day.  That’s sort of the government holiday antipode of Memorial Day.  The latter marks the unofficial beginning of summer, and the former marks the unofficial end of summer.  In south Florida, I can fairly and reasonably say about the supposed end of summer, “Would that it were.”

That’s because the weather in autumn‒late autumn, anyway‒is much more pleasant than it is in summer here.  This is a large part of the reason for the “snow bird” phenomenon:  people who live up north during the warmer half (roughly) of the year and then come down to Florida during the cooler half of the year.

I say “cooler” in the meteorological, thermodynamic sense, not the social sense.  Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, there are not many cool people per capita in Florida.  It just doesn’t tend to fit the regional identity in any sense; “The Florida Man” is not celebrated for his coolness.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is:  I am probably only barely below the mean level of coolness in Florida, at least based on the usual criteria of greater society.  Even well-known people from Florida are rarely noted for being cool.

Not that it really matters, of course.  Coolness is an epiphenomenon that accreted like pipe scale on the surface of primate dominance and reproductive hierarchical behavior patterns; that’s all fairly obvious looking at humans from the outside as it were.  But it all becomes self-referential after a while, building on and/or reacting in support of or opposition to prior standards of “coolness”, until it’s long since become a sort of autoerotic death spiral, a precursor to AI slop.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes appreciate cool things and people; I just recognize “coolness” as entirely parochial.  What octopuses think is cool and what spiders think is cool and what albatrosses think is cool are going to be very different from each other and from what humans think is cool*.

Speaking of coolness, I went to the movie theater (by myself) this weekend to see the new Spider-Man movie.  The movie was certainly reasonably cool as far as it went; I thought it was well made and well acted and fun and so on.  It was at a theater that has a full bar, which is also pretty cool, so while I waited I had a Jack and Coke (to help with some social anxiety).  It was tasty, but it made me need to use the restroom four times before the movie started.  That was annoying.  But I rarely drink alcohol, anyway, so it’s an effect I need not dread.

The popcorn was pretty good, I guess, and so on, and the seats were comfy, but by the end of the movie I just felt more alone than I had before, despite coming out and joining the throng (then going into Target for some cat food and then to Walgreens for some sparkling water before ordering an Uber back to the house).

It was an expensive day, though.  The concessions were even more expensive than the ticket (and that’s not counting the Jack and Coke).  And the Uber to and from the theater was not cheap, either.  So, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that very often.  I may not do it ever again, maybe not even for Doomsday.

Though, when it comes to money, it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement.  I don’t expect to retire.  As of right now, I just expect to keep moving until I fall apart and then just basically die.  I mean, in the end that’s what everyone does, but my situation is likely to have less bric-a-brac cluttering up the works than many.

Honestly, I wish I could skip to the end a lot of the time.  Which I guess I can, of course, but it requires gumption and willpower to do it, and I am generally low on spoons, as the metaphor goes nowadays; I’m not sure how that figure of speech became prominent, nor why, but it feels somehow apropos.

Many things that I am doing to try to improve my willpower and my mental reserves and so on are at least partly to try to build the will to overcome my instinctive but annoying resistance to self-destruction.  I’m getting there, I think.  I’m making progress.  Maybe I’ll get there soon.

Honestly, I don’t really even mind that much if I don’t get to see Avengers: Doomsday.  I’m just sick of all of this shit.

I hope you all are doing better than I am.

*Of course, the thought processes as such are likely only to be very roughly analogous to what humans think about coolness, especially for non-social species.  There may also be overlap; I imagine many humans might think certain examples of flying skill shown by an albatross are very cool, and so might another albatross.

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Infinite distractions have limited effectiveness

It’s Wednesday now, and I’m writing this post on my lapcom.  There’s no particular reason I’m doing so, though as always, a cause or causes surely exist(s).  I just felt the impulse to take the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday afternoon, and I saw no reason not to indulge that impulse.  That’s about it.

It’s the 2nd day of September, which should come as no surprise, since yesterday was the 1st day of September.  Numbers don’t necessarily have to be put in any given order—and indeed, one cannot properly order the Real numbers, because there is an uncountable infinity of them between any two points on the number line, however arbitrarily close you might want to choose them—but the ordinal numbers have an inherent order.  Thus the name.  Duh.

I often marvel at the cool facts about uncountable versus countable infinities.  Think about it.  The “natural” numbers represent a “countable” infinity because you can make progress counting them and, if you had infinite time, you could in principle count them all, though it can be a bit mind-bending to try to imagine what that could really mean.  But it is true, mathematically speaking.

It’s also true that this infinity, the so-called countable infinity (ℵ₀, or “aleph nought”), is matchable one-to-one with all other countable infinities.  You can assign a natural number to every integer, and to every even or odd number, and to every rational number (i.e. every fraction) and so on.  Therefore, they are the same “size” or “cardinality”.

In case anyone wonders why that point might matter, all one has to do is to try to list the Real numbers (designated with ℝ).  These are all numbers including the integers and the rational numbers, but also all irrational numbers, i.e., numbers that can’t be expressed as a ratio of any whole numbers or integers.  The latter set includes pi (π) and e (e) and phi (φ, the so-called Golden Ratio) and so on, but these are simply a taste of what’s available.  All of these numbers have a potentially infinite number of digits* after the decimal point, and those digits do not have any repeating pattern, for if they were consistently repeating, they would be rational numbers.

Cantor’s “diagonal proof” demonstrates that there are more Real numbers than there are integers (or any other aleph-nought level infinities of numbers).  I won’t get into it here—it’s not that difficult, and it’s very clever and rather wonderful, but it would take a bit of time, so I just put a link to it for anyone who is curious.

What’s more, once we realize that fact and think about it a little, we realize not only that the Real numbers are uncountably infinite, vastly more infinite than the integers of the natural numbers, but something even more mind-boggling:  Between any two numbers you can choose, however arbitrarily close you want to make them, there is an uncountable infinity of Real numbers.

You could pick two numbers that have eighty-thousand zeroes after the decimal place before you start getting non-zero digits—such numbers would be far closer together than any separation we could possibly physically measure using any sensible unit of measurement—and the number of Real numbers between them is much, much larger than the number of integers, and is indeed equal in size to the Real numbers.

You can kind of understand why some of the people who worked with notions such as these, like Cantor and Gödel and so on, got pretty loopy at times**, though it is not possible to say definitively whether the mental atypia were caused by too much contemplation of infinities or were the reasons why such people got into studying them, or were pure coincidence.

Of course, the above raises for me the question whether the infinity of the Complex numbers is larger than that of the Real numbers.  I don’t believe it is***; I’m not looking it up to confirm right now, but I am just going to think it through out loud, as it were.

A complex number is made of two “parts”:  the so-called Real part and the so-called Imaginary part.  But the Imaginary part is just i, the square root of negative one, multiplied by some Real number.  So, each complex number is made up of two Real numbers, but two real numbers can be expressed as one Real number in various ways.  So, the Complex numbers have a higher dimensionality than the Real numbers (2 versus 1), but they have the same cardinality, as the terms go.

There are higher versions of countable infinities used occasionally in mathematics.  I find them a bit more contrived than the preceding, but perhaps that’s just because I’ve never had the call to use them nor to play around with them.  These are your ω and ω +1 and so on.  The idea behind it is that you can arbitrarily say that, once you’ve counted all the natural numbers (for instance), whatever the hell that might mean****, you can go on and count some more, calling the next number after infinity ω (that’s a small-letter omega, the counterpart to Ω, which is kind of a cooler-looking symbol).

Anyway, that’s enough of me nattering on about matters that don’t really ever seem to interest anyone around me other than me—I guess I’m not really around me, so I didn’t really need to add to caveat—but about which people sometimes smile indulgently for a moment or two, since I sometimes get rather excited when mentioning them.

This doesn’t happen often, though.  By which I refer to occasions on which I get excited.

This is all just distraction, anyway, and that’s getting more difficult for me over time.  I don’t really feel that I’m going anywhere or getting anywhere.  I’m just killing time while waiting for something to kill me.  I hate the world (by which I mean the universe, and maybe even the Universe), I hate my life, and I hate myself.  This is not a mood (though it entails a mood at times); this is a judgment, this is my (provisional) conclusion, this is my strongly held opinion.  I need to stop running from it; I suck, and so does everything and nearly everyone else.

Present company is excluded, of course (not counting me).  Indeed, I wish all of my readers the very best possible of every possible thing for which things can be the best.

*Though it is interesting to contemplate whether one can take any arbitrarily large run of digits of, say, π and always be able to find the matching sequence in any other irrational number.  I don’t know the answer to that question, so if anyone does, please let me know.

**Poor Gödel became convinced—or at least afraid—that someone was trying to poison him, or might try to poison him, and so he would only ever eat food prepared by his wife.  There is something rather charming, almost romantic, to the notion that he distrusted other people, in principle all other people, and yet he believed in his wife completely.  I wonder if she was flattered.  It was tragic, though, because when she became ill, he stopped eating, and he eventually more or less starved to death.

***It isn’t.  I eventually looked it up just to confirm (or refute) my judgement.

****You can say this, in a way, because (for instance) you can count the integers by first counting the positive integers, to positive infinity, and only then starting to count the negative integers toward negative infinity.  This means you can continue counting after you’ve counted an infinite number, at least in a sense.