depression

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However, but a folly blogged with wit, or else a wit by folly vanquished

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and today I am writing this post on my smartphone.  That’s partly due to the fact that I was feeling very enervated by the end of the day yesterday and didn’t feel like carrying even that little bit of extra weight that is my lapcom.  Also, on the previous three days, during which I wrote the posts on said lapcom, I saw some of the lowest readerships and “likes” that I have had in quite some time.

Now, correlation does not necessarily imply causation (though Judea Pearl has done nice work on how one can more truly discern causality from statistics).  But it really doesn’t much matter if I get that causality exactly right.  Odds are that it was just a statistical fluke or some such thing.  But it sure feels like negative feedback.

Of course, this is all rather pointless no matter what.  Mind you, that’s a fairly useless assessment, since everything is pointless as far as anyone can tell.  I make that statement without real fear of contradiction.  Though, if anyone has any actual argument against it, I’m open to listening.  But bring something original and well thought-out, something that’s been subject to scrutiny and potential disconfirmation, something with arguments strong enough to convince an intelligent but disinterested extraterrestrial*, or don’t expect me to give you much attention.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’m writing this on my smartphone.  If any of you notice any discernible difference in the character and quality of my posts using the two different tools, please let me know.  I recognize, of course, that such an evaluation is highly subjective, but I’m not trying to get rigorous feedback; I’m just trying to get a sense of things, because I really don’t tend to have any idea how I come across to people.  I mean, even if they do tell me, I can’t feel sure that they’re telling the truth, but at least it is some data that I can use to update my priors, however weakly.

And yet, again, none of it really matters, and I have a good chance of screwing everything up even if I get it right at baseline.  I know I shouldn’t feel too bad about that.  There are almost always more ways to get something “wrong” than there are to get it “right”, and it can be difficult to tell them apart ahead of time.  Thus the old saying that the gates of Heaven and the gates of Hell are adjacent, identical, and unmarked**.

I guess you can probably tell that I am particularly directionless in writing this blog post today, even for me.  Unlike earlier this week and some of last week, when I had some thoughts that wanted to get out so much that I made audio recordings***, today I find no burning thoughts to share or even to spray out into the world and see if they land anywhere.  I am simply writing out of habit, and I am not terribly enthusiastic about it‒other than the low-level recognition that this is nearly my only way of connecting daily with anyone in the outer world.

Or, maybe I should say that I am trying to connect with the inner world.  It’s not so much that I am hemmed in someplace.  I am more like a creature caught in the space between universes, like the Other, the Ill Will, in The Chasm and the Collision (though my intentions are much better than its intentions).  I have other antagonists in other currently-in-progress stories that are similar but on a smaller scale, but I won’t get into that too much, because it might accidentally give some spoilers‒just in case I ever finish and publish those stories.

Okay, well, this has been a truly pointless blog post, but I think I’ve written enough for today.  I hope you all are doing well by any reasonable measure of wellness.  I will probably write another post tomorrow.

TTFN

*Or changeling, or Nexus 13, or mutant, or whatever might best describe me metaphorically.

**Though this seems like an assholish kind of way for any supposedly benevolent deity to set things up.

***I am curious about the sound quality between the two recent recordings.  The first was made using a USB condenser mic, and the one I shared yesterday was spoken into the recording function of my smartphone and then sent over via Google Drive, downloaded, edited on Audacity, and then exported as an MP3 file (the latter step was also done to the 1st recording, but I recorded it onto Audacity directly in the first place).  If anyone has listened to both, could you please let me know?

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I forgot to give this a title at first

This is another lapcom post.  That’s three in a row!

It’s Wednesday now, though why today is named after the “Allfather” is far from clear to me.  Maybe because it’s the “middle” of the week, and Odin (AKA Wodin  AKA Wotan, etc.) supports the weight of time or some such.  I don’t know.  That sort of sounds good, at least.

Anyway, of course, I’m going to work.  It’s payroll day, and the boss should be back from a brief vacation.  It’s remarkable to me how often some people take vacations and so forth.  I’m not against vacations, don’t get me wrong.  But it’s quite annoying when someone takes a vacation while everyone else is working after having asked us to work on days when other people are taking a day off (e.g., Memorial Day).

It doesn’t really matter, I guess.  I have nothing to do on days off, let alone during any prolonged vacation, anyway.  I certainly have no one with whom to spend my time off, whatever it may be, except in rare snippets.

I don’t know.  I suppose some people out there might think I ought to do something about that, but the fact is, I don’t feel good about myself, whatever that might mean, and it is hard to try to inflict myself upon other people; this blog alone already feels presumptuous and probably annoying.

It is a persistent aspect of my experience of myself and the world that I feel strong self-disgust and self-contempt.  This is quite contrary to the concept of “self-compassion” often touted in discussions of getting an autism diagnosis as an adult and learning about it and some of why your experience in life has been the way it has been.

Getting diagnosed and learning more hasn’t given me any more generous attitude toward myself, at least not so far.  Maybe if there were more resources and support available, I might be doing better with it*.

I have also read suggestions about finding discussion or support groups or online meetups or even in person meetups.  This seems a slightly contradictory suggestion for people who are, as part of the very description of the disorder, socially troubled.  I even get tense whenever new people come to work in the office, until I get used to them.  I certainly don’t see myself trying to interact with groups of strangers, even if they are neurodivergent.

I had a little bit of connection on Instagram with some sort-of communities.  At least, there were other people there with some degree of similar experiences, though interaction was minimal and artificial.  Anyway, Meta arbitrarily kicked me off their platforms without telling me why, so fuck them to death.

I used to be better at this socialization sort of thing.  I probably would be better at a lot of it if not for chronic pain, but it’s rather futile to dwell on that very much.  In this, I try to follow the recommendations of the Stoics.  But sometimes I dwell on it, nevertheless.  Sue me, Marcus Aurelius.

Anyway, I don’t think I have anything productive to discuss today—not that yesterday’s weird, meandering post, which ended up focusing on prime factorizations somehow, was productive—and I don’t know that anything is likely to spill out of me at this point that’s going to be of any use to anyone, even for entertainment.  Sorry.

I did a brief audio recording yesterday about something that was nagging me relating to Sean Carroll’s answer to a listener question on his Mindscape podcast.  He does an “Ask Me Anything” podcast every month; it’s usually more than 3 hours long and is a real treasure trove of thoughts and insights about many things, since he’s a smart guy and a professional physicist and philosopher.  I was somewhat disappointed and therefore annoyed by his mentioning of Sam Harris and free will, because he somewhat misrepresented the arguments Sam has made.  I also thought he didn’t quite give adequate serious thought to the existential threat posed by AGI, though he certainly recognizes many potential drawbacks.

Anyway, I just recorded aloud my thoughts in response.  They may or may not be coherent to anyone else, let alone be very interesting.  Nevertheless, I’ll include the recording below.  I think it’s about ten minutes long.

In the past, I’ve been known to turn these audio recordings into “videos” to be posted on YouTube, but I don’t know how many people, if any, ever watch any of them.  But if any of you, listening to these audio files, think I should make them into “videos” too, please let me know.

I did get at least one person replying to a comment I made on another site that they miss my YouTube channel.  That surprised me.  It still exists, of course, but I haven’t added to it in a long time.

Maybe I will.  But it’s so hard to summon the will to do very much.  Maybe my will can become stronger, I don’t know.  Much of my effort and energy in that area is spent just getting through the day while dealing with pain and being alone and anxiety/stress and depression, frankly.

Oh, well, enough moaning.  My apologies.  I’ll try to make tomorrow’s post better, assuming I do one.  I hope you all have an excellent day by your own standards.

*I am diagnosed as Level 2, which is supposed to mean “requiring moderate support”, rather than level 1, which says someone only needs minimal support or some such.  So I’m not even expected to be able to make it very well on my own.

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“Please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest…”

I’m writing this blog post on my mini lapcom today.  It’s the first time I’ve written one on the lapcom in over a month—since May 1st, in fact.  I’m not entirely sure why I decided to bring the lapcom with me when I left the office on Saturday, but bring it with me I did.  I think partly I just wanted to spare my thumbs, which are not as bad as they were, but are still quite sore a lot of the time when and after I write.

Also—and this is stupid—I wonder if people who see me writing my posts on my smartphone imagine that I’m just playing some game or scrolling through one of the social media all the while.  It certainly shouldn’t matter to me whether anyone thinks that, but I’m a somewhat mature-looking man (so to speak) and I don’t want to set a bad example.  I also don’t want to leave my lapcom feeling too lonely and neglected for too long.

I know, that’s very silly.  I have no reason to suspect that my lapcom experiences anything at all—it’s not that kind of computer and it’s not running any of that kind of programming (largely because no one knows how to write such a program).  But still, I often feel a weird, imaginary empathy for things that I know pretty well don’t have any qualia, as the philosophers of mind call it.

I even used to feel bad if I accidentally mistreated one of my stuffed animals when I was little, such as by sitting on it or something.  I guess that’s not really that unusual for a young child, is it?  Still, I have retained something of that all my life.

Don’t even get me started on actual other people’s feelings.  Those are cacophonic!  That’s part of why being around a lot of people is just a bit overwhelming.

Of course, real, physical noise also is irritating, especially something like background music when you’re trying to work.  That’s one thing that’s annoying at the office.  There is constant overhead music playing, just to keep people from overhearing each other on the phone and becoming distracted.  But to me it’s like listening to the sounds of the world beyond the gateway in Event Horizon, or the noises in that recovered record they deciphered.  Ugh.  I’ve sometimes thought of just playing construction noises for them so they can see what it feels like to me.

Oh, I also brought the lapcom in case I felt the urge to write some fiction.  But that’s a pipe dream, I suspect.  Also, I don’t see how I could manage the time to write fiction and still do my daily blog.  There are only so many spoons (as they say) that I can bring to bear on anything at any time, and the supply is largely used up just grinding through days in pain and whatnot, to say nothing of the sensory and social stresses that also accumulate.

Even so, I honestly feel quite sad being alone a lot of the time, though I do my best to distract myself.  I would like to have good friends, someone to hang out with and so on, but unfortunately, the sorts of people at work, while perfectly nice and tolerable people, are not really the kinds of people I think I could hang out with much.  I don’t think anyone in the office, including the boss, reads more than a book a year or so.  I think I would have a hard time being a close friend of someone who doesn’t really read, at least at this point in my life.

And that’s also something that I would definitely find a deal-breaker in any kind of “significant other” kind of relationship.  Obviously such a thing would be nice, but again, I don’t think I could be very close to someone who didn’t read a reasonably significant amount.

All this is moot, of course.  Most of these possibilities and wishes are irrelevant, because no one really wants to be friends with me, let alone any kind of romantic thingy.  I don’t blame them.  Why would they want to do or be such a thing?

Even when I’m at the office, I’m basically alone.  I mean, I have a few “work friends”, of course, some of whom are quite good work friends.  But we do not ever do anything together outside of work.  I probably wouldn’t be able to have fun doing such a thing, even if anyone wanted to do it; we tend to have office holiday dinner parties of sorts at restaurants around Christmas/New Years time, and those get me so stressed out that I have to start drinking as soon as I arrive.  It’s not good.

Anyway, that’s over 700 words already, and I’ve just been moaning the whole time.  I apologize.  But I do spend a good deal of my time hating the world, hating my life, and especially hating myself.  Of course, the “hating the world” part is really projection—I hate the world because I hate my life and myself.

It’s a low-flying, subacute kind of hate, though, nothing florid.  I don’t spend as much time deliberately damaging myself as I used to, unless you count all the OTC meds I take for pain.  But, of course, those aren’t intended as self harm; quite the opposite.  But I have no doubt they are doing their thing on my kidneys and stomach and liver and so on.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  The universe was not made for me, and it was certainly not made by me.  It never promised but one thing, so to speak.

All right, that’s enough of me bringing you guys down—and on a Monday morning of all things, when you probably want something to boost your spirits.  So here, if you have spirits that need boosting, wait till they’re haunting you and feeling miserable and come out with, “Don’t feel too bad.  If you need a boost, well…here, use this, it’s my stepladder.”  Then, put on a wistful expression and add, “I never knew my real ladder.  And my mother left us before I was even born.”

Ba-dump-bump.

That ought to make them glad to be dead.

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Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry, as, to behold desert a blogger born

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I don’t know what to write today.  I’m really, really mentally fatigued.  I feel as if I’ve been working for forty days straight instead of just four.

I guess that’s at least slightly biblical, if you care about such things.  You know, raining forty days (and forty nights) or wandering in the desert for forty days while occasionally getting tempted by the devil and whatnot.

It’s all rather silly, of course, but it is memorable.  Anyway, I write stories about supernatural entities attacking college towns or trapping the spirit of a dead addict in a train station or about whole universes potentially colliding or teenagers becoming demi-vampires.  I can hardly complain if other people’s stories aren’t realistic.  Though, at least I don’t claim, let alone believe, that mine really happened.

Anyway, I haven’t written any new fiction in quite a while, and that is severely demoralizing.  I also haven’t played my guitar or even listened to any music this week.

I have listened to/am listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, because the first one of every month is his “Ask Me Anything” podcast, which lasts over 3 hours and is almost always very interesting.  If you like physics with a bit of philosophy thrown in, you might enjoy it.

Of course, what I should be doing‒or, rather, what I want to want fervently to be doing‒is reading Professor Carroll’s General Relativity textbook, Spacetime and Geometry, as well as other similar sources.  Or I want to wish to go on Brilliant dot org and work through their mathematics and physics and CS courses as completely as I can.  Or I want to yearn to get to work on the Babbel app, learning some German or some Russian or some French‒it doesn’t seem to have any Asian languages (last time I checked), so I can’t use it to bone up on my Japanese, nor to try to learn Cantonese or Mandarin or what have you.

But my mind is so tired.  I don’t even do any singing, let alone playing, like I said.

I know why I’m so tired, or at least, I know a big part of it:  chronic pain.  For just about a quarter of a century‒nearly half of my life‒I have been in pain every day, all day, except for those brief moments when I have had enough medications on board to do their own damage to my mind and my body (depending on which of the many medications it is that I’ve taken).

I’m also always grumpy nowadays, which is really disappointing.  This probably goes back to when my chronic pain really became chronic and exacerbated my depression and everything, but it’s become more persistent over time, and now it seems to be my default state.

The people who know me now just think of me as a grumpy and ornery person by nature; it’s even a bit of a joke, since I know that I am grumpy* and at least retain the capacity to be self-deprecating and not to hold it against people.

But that’s not the way I used to be!  That’s not who I was before my chronic pain started.  I did have trouble with depression (and I was, apparently, always autistic), and that probably sometimes made me irritable, but not like now.  I think‒I recall‒that I was usually a fairly upbeat and enthusiastic person, reasonably friendly and kind whenever I could be.

Anyone reading who knew me in the past, feel free to disabuse me of that notion if it’s wrong.  In some weird way, it might be comforting to learn that I’ve always been just an asshole, I simply didn’t know it back then.

Oh, and teeth; I used to have great teeth.  I took good care of them, flossed all the time and everything.  I had dentists tell me that I was a very boring patient.  But various of the meds I’ve taken (and the mental states into which I’ve fallen, to say nothing of the state prisons into which I’ve fallen) since my chronic pain started have more than decimated my oral hygiene, despite regular, frequent brushing and flossing.

I am a shambles.  I’m a twisted wreck of what I used to be, with only just enough in common with that self to remind me of it.  Or so it seems to me.

I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.  I do not want to last much longer‒not like this.  Every day is a trial by endurance, like the stupid “touch the truck” thing, but as far as I can see, there’s no prize…not even a stupid truck.

It’s more like Space Invaders:  see how long you can keep shooting down all the things that are trying to destroy you, but as you succeed, the onslaught becomes more and more difficult, and it never lets up except for brief seconds when it’s about to send a new, harder wave at you.

And then, once you finally, inevitably fail, it’s just…game over.  It might as well not have happened.  Maybe you can put your initials up if you lasted unusually long (thereby scoring more points than others), but no one really cares, and your mark will be displaced very soon anyway.

It reminds me of the final words of my story Solitaire, which you can get as a stand-alone story or in Kindle format or hard cover in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Now that’s a story that’s not silly, but it is very dark and horrifying.  It’s also short, so if you’re interested, it won’t take much of your time.

Okay, well, that’s it for now.  Unless you’re lucky, I’ll write a post tomorrow and also on Saturday.

TTFN

*I sometimes say that I am an amalgam of the Seven Dwarves:  I’m occasionally happy, I am sometimes sneezy, I’m quite bashful in many situations, I’m frequently sleepy but rarely enough to stay asleep for long, I’m definitely often dopey, I’m usually grumpy…but I’m always Doc.

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“Shell smashed, juices flowing, wings twitch, legs are going…”

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m going to work again, despite‒as the Beatles song puts it‒feeling low down.  My trouble is, I more or less feel low down almost every day.  What am I supposed to do about it by staying at the house?  That’s likely just to make me feel worse, because then I’ll just be alone with one of my least favorite people‒me‒and feeling non-productive and useless.

At least I wouldn’t feel “hysterical and useless”.  I don’t know if I’ve ever been what would be called “hysterical” in my life‒I tend to bottle things up and slash and burn my own figurative innards (and sometimes my literal skin) rather than outwardly flipping out‒but if I have, it’s been quite a long time.

I guess I was probably close to hysterical the time I called the old version of “the hotline” and got picked up by a few undertrained Palm Beach County deputies who did nerve damage to my left wrist with a poorly applied handcuff before dropping me at a clearly underfunded emergency mental health facility.  But I think my hysteria was at least somewhat justified at the time.

That was when I was out on bail, had already lost everything, was effectively homeless, and had very few hopes for much good happening ever again in my life.

I wasn’t wrong, either.  Even the psychiatrist whom I saw for the follow up to that 24-hour hold admitted that he thought there was no way someone wouldn’t be depressed if they were going through what I was experiencing.  He knew I was a doctor, as was he, of course, so he had a certain amount more personal sympathy than he might have had for someone else, but I think it was the shape of the situation, not the specifics, that he thought worthy of despondency if not outright despair.

Anyway, that was a horrible stretch of time, and when I was offered a plea bargain I took it, not because I was actually guilty, but because I saw no way of fighting the whole stupid thing with no money and no real allies in the process.  I hoped at least to have it done in a relatively short amount of time (three years minus gain time) so I would be able to see my kids again before I had missed too much of their lives*.

This highlights how utterly, damnably inadequate our criminal “justice” system is.  The fact that a person who can afford a private attorney can consistently expect fewer convictions, lighter sentences for lesser “crimes”, and even often doesn’t serve time despite having been convicted (see The Donald) than people who don’t have the capacity to hire private lawyers is an absolute and inexcusable travesty.

The word “justice” should not be allowed within a hundred lightyears of that system.  I would say it’s a joke, but jokes are more worthy of respect.  It is, instead, a low-flying, long-term catastrophe, and no one who would like to live in a just society should support it as it is.  No one should be allowed to have private representation in criminal trials unless everyone gets it.  Otherwise those with more money are effectively not subject to the same laws as everyone else, and that includes everything from petty shit up to murder (see OJ), which at the very least in practice violates the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Don’t even get started on sex crimes.  I think we all know how rarely and haphazardly they are punished, let alone prevented.

It would be amusing if someone set up a service whereby they would provide assistance to women (and, yes, men) who were the victims of unpunished sexual assault by helping to get rid of the bodies of their assailants (if they killed them themselves) or just helping to delete the perpetrators from start to finish.  Of course, this could easily run afoul of the crucially important notion of due process, without which laws might as well not really exist, but our government(s) are failing miserably in that crucial area anyway.

Enough fantasizing.  I barely have the energy to get up and live my own so-called life, let alone to set up illicit vigilante services.  I am very tired and I am in continuous pain, and I have very little notion of anything good happening in my future.  A few things in my life now are wonderful, of course‒my youngest, my sister, my brother, and yes, my son, since at least I know that he is doing well, and of course, you readers are pretty darn great‒but I know that I am not wonderful.

I am not much more charming or beneficial than a growth of black mold or a teratoma (or even a less benign tumor).  Maybe tumors and mold growths have rights of some sort in an idealized world, if any living thing does.  But they cannot expect to be welcomed or loved or supported.  They are generally only worthy of removal and destruction if anything at all.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, but then again, I don’t know what the point of much of anything is, least of all the point of me.

Whatever.  Never mind.

*That turned out to be a pipe dream.  I also stayed in Florida instead of remaining with my parents up north after getting out of prison for basically the same reason.  I was severely and devastatingly disappointed when my kids themselves asked me not to pursue my legal right to visitation once I was out, because it would be too disruptive of their lives.  I could not in good conscience selfishly force myself upon their time‒not after I had screwed everything up so much and hurt them thereby‒so I acquiesced.  I can easily sympathize when people don’t want me around.  Anyway, now at least I am interacting regularly with my youngest, and that’s a wonderful thing‒it’s better than I surely deserve‒but my oldest still doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.  Most of you reading this blog post have read my stuff before and have some acquaintance with my mind; can you blame my son for not wanting me around?

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Are you a Memorial Daypot Dome Gate scandaloholic?

First off, Happy Memorial Day, for those who live in the US (or anyplace else Memorial Day is observed, if there are such places).  I have to admit, it seems slightly weird to wish someone a “happy” Memorial Day, since it’s a day in which we honor and remember fallen soldiers.  At least, that’s the idea behind the holiday.

But of course, when I was quite young, Memorial Day was a happy sort of holiday.  We got a day off school, it was all but summer already, and we always had a big family get-together with grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and all sorts of side dishes like potato salad and chips and such like.  There often tended to be desserts, as well, including (if I recall correctly) popsicles.  I’ve never been a huge popsicle fan, but sometimes, during warm weather, and at such special, family events, they could be quite refreshing.

Still, if I look at a popsicle now, even if it’s a Creamsicle®, I get more of a positive nostalgic feeling than any even slight urge to eat the popsicle.  Would that this were the case with more straightforward ice cream and other such treats.

I know from experience that it is possible to break one’s proclivities for certain junk foods just by overexposure.  I did that‒unintentionally‒with Nutter Butters® and with Pringles®.  I no longer crave either of those things because, for a time, I overindulged in them quite severely, and it wasn’t good for me‒I ended up getting negative associations with eating those things because of the general physical ill-health they engendered.

I guess that means that one way to break a bad food habit may be to give into it in spades‒say, eating only Cheetos® for every meal, three meals a day, nothing else.  I’m not recommending that, by the way; it would not be good for you.  Though, if you were truly starving and had nothing else, it could keep you alive for a time.

Interestingly, I don’t think this aversion therapy works for more fundamentally pathological addictions.  For instance, I wouldn’t recommend trying to quit heroin by doing nothing but heroin for a while‒as I understand it, that’s actually what some people do, and it tends just to lead to tolerance.  Of course, if you die of an overdose, that would eliminate your addiction, but it certainly would not cure it (by any reasonable definition of “cure”).

And of course, severe alcoholics often just drink alcohol almost solely, sometimes as their main source of calories, but even getting sick to their stomachs doesn’t make them quit nor does experiencing the more horrifying effects of alcohol addiction (including alcohol withdrawal, which can kill you).  If these sorts of things don’t trigger an aversion to something, it’s hard to see what would.

This raises (quite tengentially) a pet peeve of mine:  it makes no sense to describe real or figurative addictions by calling oneself, for instance, a “chocoholic” or a “workaholic”.  This would seem to imply that one is addicted to “chocohol” or to “workahol”, whatever such things might be.

If one were following the paradigm that gave us the word “alcoholic” one would be a “chocolatic” or a “workic”.  It’s flagrantly stupid to do the other thing.  If you’ve got a problem with chocolate or with working too much (or whatever), don’t try to use a cutesy, cannibalized term made by cutting and moving something that was never a suffix and then using it as if it were one.  Just call the problem what it is.

This is similar to the fact that people inexplicably want to add “-gate” to the end of every scandal du jour, in reference to the very famous Watergate scandal.  But the Watergate scandal was about a break in at the Watergate Hotel.  That’s where the “gate” part comes from!

If we were to assume current media scandal standards, we would have thought that historic event was a scandal involving water somehow.  It’s as if, because of the old Teapot Dome scandal, people named every scandal a “-pot Dome” scandal.  Then the actual Watergate scandal would have been called the “Watergatepot Dome Scandal”.

It’s submoronic* to call a scandal about pizza, for instance, “pizzagate”.  Is there a Pizzagate Hotel somewhere that had a breakin?  (Though, I must admit, if there isn’t a restaurant that calls itself “Pizzagate” then I’ll be disappointed in the creativity and chutzpah of restaurateurs.)

If my blog achieves only one thing in the world (or two things, in a sense), and if that is to decrease the use of “-holic” and “-gate” in such situations, then I would be pleased enough with having written it.

I don’t have high hopes for that possibility, though.  Then again, I don’t have high hopes for much of anything.  I’m a pretty miserable sort of person, though I think that before the onset of my chronic pain I was less so (though I did already suffer from dysthymia/depression).  Like Kenny Rogers’s gambler, the best I can hope for is to die in my sleep.  Of course, the fact that I sleep horribly makes even that small hope less likely than it might be otherwise.

Whatever.  I’ll simply have to accept the fact of not being asleep when it happens if that’s the way it has to be.  Who knows, maybe it will be better to see it coming, so to speak.

Try to have a good holiday.

*By which I mean “worse than moronic” not “not quite moronic”.

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“Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in.”

What a strange night and morning it has been.  I had a terribly disjointed sleep, which itself is not surprising‒in fact it’s more or less par for the course‒but then I dozed off for a bit just after 3.  Then I almost overslept for my reserved Uber to the train station.  I reserved the ride to make sure I wouldn’t be tempted to walk any part of the way to the train, since my knees and hips and everything else are still bad, and I have taken significantly less naproxen than usual, so I am very stiff and sore.  But I didn’t set my alarm, because I’m almost always awake anyway.

I was able to scramble and even to shower and then make it for my ride without any penalties, though that wouldn’t have been too horrible an outcome if it had happened.  Indeed, I might have then bit the bullet and gotten an Uber all the way to the office.  That would cost a lot more, though.

Anyway, I hate the very notion of being late for something, even if it’s not really important and was a deadline/time semi-arbitrarily chosen by me.  There’s no one really in my life for me to disappoint, other than myself, of course, and I’m already almost always disappointed in and by me.  Still, the notion of being late is mortifying to me, and I really need to struggle to resist as much self-loathing as possible, so it’s best not to fail at one of the few things at which I usually succeed.

So, here I am.  I made it to the station and I’m writing this post.  To that degree, at least, I am successful.  I am, of course, a failure at pretty much everything else.  Certainly I have failed at nearly all the things that have been truly important to me.

C’est la vie, I suppose.  Some people succeed through no credit of their own, and can thereby develop a sense that they are special and divinely protected or some such stupidity, when in fact they are some of the least impressive humans around.  Other people‒many more, it seems‒fail and fall despite having done everything they could, in the ways they were told they ought to do things.

They keep trying to be and do good, trying to achieve success and stability, maybe even trying to have a family and a career.  But they end up seeing everything fall apart, feeling it crumble in their hands even as they try to hold it together.  Indeed, often their attempts to buttress and repair things seem merely to speed up the destruction and exacerbate the decay.  Then, finally, they die alone, surrounded by no one (or at least by no one they know, no one who loves them, if such people even exist).

C’est la mort as well, I guess.  The universe makes no special deals.  It makes no promises, either, other than its implicit “promise” always and only to proceed by its own rules, though we only incompletely know what all those rules are.  It certainly never said, “If you do everything right according to these very human-invented and evolved and imagined rules of behavior, I will ensure that you have something at least approximating the good life you have been told to seek and to expect.”

The universe doesn’t actually say anything at all, come to think of it.  Well, it “says” stuff in the sense that people are part of it, and they say various things, but they in no sense represent the intentions and thoughts of the universe (these do not appear to exist, so people could not represent them).

The universe, as far as we can tell, has no larger scale intelligence and intentions.  It merely is, if the concept of “mere” applies to something that may well be infinite in spatial and temporal extent, and at the very least is much, much larger than anything humans evolved to grasp directly, and also much, much smaller and more finely grained than humans ever evolved to grasp directly.

I guess “mere” is in the eye of the beholder.  And joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks, as Foamfollower often said.  Though I doubt there is much, if any, joy for anyone anywhere in “hearing” my words.

It’s hard for me even to say that I have joy in writing them.  I certainly feel internal pressure to write them, and going with it does relieve some of that tension, and that relief could be called joy, I suppose.  But I don’t think that’s what poets and plasterers and everyone in between really imagines when they speak of “joy”.

Still, we can only take what the universe gives us.  It’s not offering any exchanges.  And it’s not as though we can just go somewhere else to see if they have a better deal.

So, I guess we do what we can with what we have where we are and try not to let ourselves get distracted by foolish notions that the universe owes us some reward.  As far as I can see, the universe “promises” us only one thing, and‒also as far as I can see‒it never fails to deliver this, sooner or later.

Anyway, I hope your weekends are starting off more auspiciously than mine is.  Of course, my weekends always have the major drawback that I am there, and so far, it is certainly a drawback today.

Please take care of yourselves.  I hope you have some joy this weekend that isn’t just a dishwashing liquid.

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I don’t think this is a repeated title

If you want to get some idea of how “out of it” I was yesterday‒in case the mere body of yesterday’s post does not suffice‒consider this:  Yesterday’s altered Shakespeare quote (a thing I do on Thursday blog posts) was one I had used before, back in March of 2023.  WordPress let me know this by giving me their tongue in cheek “Groundhog’s Day” award, which is pretty funny, I have to admit.

It’s also quite frustrating, though, because I tend to search through my old blog titles before choosing a new one, just to avoid such a thing, and I thought I had done so yesterday.  Evidently, I did not.

It’s slightly ironic, because the title of a post from earlier this week was a quote from No Surprises, and I definitely checked that one, because I felt almost sure that I must have used it before.  It’s one of my favorite songs and expresses a sentiments that resonate strongly with me (as I say in the description of my own cover of it, No Surprises is practically my theme song).  But no, I seem not to have used it previously, at least not in that exact form.

Somehow, though, I thought I had never used the quote from yesterday, despite the fact that it was a glaringly obvious one.  I did think I had checked‒though I would not bet any serious money on the fact‒because I nearly always check.  I also remember thinking to myself something along the lines of “Wow, I can’t believe I’ve never used this quote before!”

And I should not have believed that, it turns out.  I suppose, as flubs go, this is a pretty inconsequential one; it feels worse to me than it probably seems to any of you.

I also feel more groggy and out of it today even than I did yesterday, so I worry about how incoherent this post is going to be.  It probably doesn’t matter much to anyone but me, but I have difficulty simply dismissing the worry.

I’m also making a lot more typos than usual; I even made an error initially typing the word “typos” just now.  How recursive:  an error in writing the description of writing errors!

Well, whatever the case, I am really going to try to keep this fairly short today, because I really am exhausted.  Yesterday was an unusually bad day for me because of pain, and because I had to ease down on some of my medicine for pain because of the side-effects I’ve been experiencing.  I also almost threw up on the train while heading back to the house yesterday, probably because I took more aspirin than usual to compensate for less of my usual longer-acting NSAID.  So, I’m not feeling very good nor very energetic today.

Of course, I do have to go to work tomorrow, so I guess I’ll be writing a post then.  I suppose you can…what, take that as a…comfort?  Though, to be fair, people rarely find my writing comforting.  I guess, really, people rarely find my writing anything, because people rarely find my writing.

Anyway, I feel pretty crappy, and I’m so tired of nearly always feeling crappy, at least to some degree.  I just want to be able to sleep until I feel rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  I don’t have high hopes for the first outcome, but I guess it is physically possible.  Otherwise, though, I am just so tired of being in pain, and there are no real other consistent facts to my life (other than trivial things).

I am alone here, and yes, I am lonely.  But I also know that I am terribly unpleasant to “be around”, even at work, because I am almost always grumpy.  I didn’t used to be that way; at least, I don’t remember being grumpy as a general tendency.  I remember being pretty upbeat most of the time, except when I was in the throes of some particularly bad turn of my dysthymia.  Even then, I tried to stay pleasant for other people as best I could.

With that in mind as today’s goal, I will stop this now.  I hope you all have very good days.  It would make me feel at least a little bit better.

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“You look so tired, unhappy…”

I don’t think I’m going to write anything interesting or thought provoking today, as I sort of did deliberately earlier this week (Monday more than Tuesday).  I certainly don’t expect to write anything profound.  I’m actually just very mentally and emotionally* tired right now, which is nothing new, but which is more onerous sometimes than others.  Such is the case with all things, I guess.

Yesterday, for most of the day, I felt extremely grumpy, by which I mean that basically everything was bothering me.  Part of this is no doubt due to my recent exacerbation and complication of my chronic pain:  I did something to injure my right knee, and it’s still very stiff and sore, especially when I first try to rise after being seated for a while.

It eases a bit after I walk a little; the stiffness seems to work itself out some.  But then it just re-seizes up as I sit, and it’s quite painful once I move again.  It certainly isn’t enough to distract from my chronic pain, but it does add extra highlights to it.  I guess at least it keeps things from being too dull (though the pain still often feels extremely boring‒in the “drill bit” sense, not the “tedious” sense**).

I’m sure it’s all plenty boring for you to read, probably in more than one sense.  I apologize.  You come to my blog in good faith, expecting to find something at least tolerably worth reading, and I keep spewing my vitriol and discomfort all over your minds.  Again, I am sorry.

I’m so tired of my life, though.  Yesterday, I don’t know how many times, or in how many ways, I fantasized about…well, you know.  I’m just very drained, and I feel as though there are always new setbacks.  I suppose that’s true, in a sense.  It’s probably true for almost everyone, in some fashion or other.  That doesn’t make it better or easier to bear, though.  If anything, it just reinforces my sense of despondency about the world and the universe.

Ordinarily, I can be philosophical about such things, embracing the apparent lack of meaning partly because it means that people can create and choose the meanings of their own lives.  But chronic pain and chronic insomnia just chew away at one’s sense of optimism or even one’s sense of acceptance.  Chronic pain tends to make one hostile and even spiteful, especially when one is dealing with it all by oneself.

Also, my thumbs are sore, despite the fact that I’m trying to find ways to give them a rest.  And the stupid rash on my right hand that seems to have started (years ago) due to some kind of contact hypersensitivity to something in the “rubberized” grip of those Pilot® gel-roller pens (which I love but, alas, must avoid) continues to act up, and as a consequence the skin near the crook of my right thumb is dry and splitting open, which can sting quite a bit.

Oh, and I’d also like to register a complaint about this parrot what I bought not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

You want to complain?  Look at these shoes!  I’ve only had them three weeks, and the heels are worn right through.  If you complain, nothing happens, you might as well not bother.

Something like that, anyway.  It is terribly annoying.  O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.  Fie on’t!  O fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear‒you shout and no one seems to hear‒and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Sorry about that hodgepodge of quotes from various brilliant British artists from different times and very different genres.  Such are my go-tos, as they say.

What is it about Britain that has led to everyone from Shakespeare to Newton, to Darwin, to Maxwell, to Monty Python, to Tolkien, to Orwell, To Kipling and Wells, to Byron and both Shelleys, to the Beatles and the Stones and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Radiohead and the Police and so on and so on?  Maybe it’s the chronic emotional repression, which leads to the build-up of thoughts and feelings that have to burst out somewhere?

Except I don’t think that’s how such things as feelings actually work.  Maybe it’s just that it’s not culturally “acceptable” there to express one’s deepest feelings and concerns except through formal art.  Keep a stiff upper lip, everyone‒unless you’re making an embouchure to play an instrument.  Then you can blow away!

Speaking of which, that’s probably what many of you wish you could do to me right now.  With that in mind, and since I don’t think I’ve something more to say, I will draw to a close.  I hope you all have a very good day.

*Aren’t those really just part of the same thing, though?  I think so.  Emotions are a kind of thought, or at least a state of mind.

**Though it is all but unbearably tedious, believe me.

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You don’t prolong a vowel sound by repeating a silent “e” doggone it!

Well, here we go.  It’s Monday.  It’s the start of another “traditional” work week, and I am participating in that tradition.

I don’t really know why I am doing so‒though, on a reasoning kind of level, I could probably figure out at least some of the proximate causes‒since there is nothing of value for me to sustain by getting an income, and I feel less and less a member of society or civilization with every passing day (or so it seems).  And whatever I am (metaphorically), I don’t like me.

I also don’t know whether the WordPress people were able to fix my site or not*, so I don’t know if I’m going to load this onto it in the usual way or not.  That almost threw me into a nervous breakdown the other day (I suppose the official term would be a “meltdown”, which is apparently what they call it for people with ASD, and though that’s somewhat insulting, it’s not an inappropriate comparison for one to invoke a nuclear catastrophe).

It makes me feel the urge to try to write on Substack or some such similar site.  But I’ve been on WordPress for a decade and a half now‒that’s wild to realize‒and I don’t really want to have to change.  I’d rather just delete.

I’m also having issues with my ride this morning.  I reserved a ride to the station well in advance, which ought to make it more reliable, not less, but evidently that isn’t the case.  Despite the irregularity, I have not been offered a discount, even though if I were late, I would be penalized.  Somehow that doesn’t seem right, and it fills me with at least a slight wish for vengeance.

I know, I know, this isn’t a major deal.  But it feels major to me, relatively speaking, and it makes me want less and less to bother participating in anything at all.  I’m already jogging along the edge of a canyon with unstable sides.  Even little gusts of wind could be enough to push me over the edge, if it comes at a time when I am already unsteady and have taken a bad step.

I take a lot of bad steps.

Speaking of bad steps, I would like to make a public service announcement, aimed mainly at younger folks online.  Here it comes:

It makes no sense to try to convey the impression of an elongated spoken vowel sound in a word that ends in a silent “e” by repeating the e!

The most common use (that I have noticed) of this idiocy is to prolong the word “love” to provide emphasis.  They write things such as “I loveeeeee this restaurant” or whatever.  But “loveeeeeee” would be pronounced “luv-eeeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island were wailing for his wife as they became separated on a failing getaway raft, like in Castaway.  (Think the analogue of yelling, “Wiiiiiiilsooooooon!”)

If one wants to prolong the main vowel sound of the word “love” then it makes more sense to repeat that vowel, for instance, “I looooove the show Gilligan’s Island.”  The “e” is silent in the original word; it doesn’t make sense to multiply it.  That changes the word’s pronunciation entirely.  It bothers me every time when I see such blatant, if not terribly important, idiocy.  I haaaaaaaaate it!

See how that works better than “hateeeeee” would?  That sounds like someone greeting their beloved head covering, to which they refer by the nickname, “Hatty”.

I think I will make that subject the headline topic of this post (I did).  Maybe someone out there will see it and apply it.

Ugh.  I already feel overwhelmed, and it’s just Monday morning, and work hasn’t even started.  We also have supremely Florida weather here today, very hot but even more humid.  I’m sweating copiously just sitting still.

And now my train is going to be delayed, it turns out.  I really ought just to go back to the house and lie down and not ever get up.  That might be hard to do, of course‒not going back to the house, I mean the “never getting up” part.  For one thing, even though it’s stupidly humid and so I’m probably somewhat dehydrated, I would eventually have to get up to go to the bathroom.  I have no desire to lie in my own urine.

Of course, if I took enough of the right medicine or combinations of medicine, I wouldn’t have to worry about that.  At least, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I don’t know what to say.  I really don’t feel well.  I don’t feel any sense of belonging or connection with the life I have (and am), but I don’t see any change that’s within my power that would do anything but make things even harder and more stressful.

I can’t just throw myself on someone else’s mercy and beg for help.  No one I know has the resources to be able to help me, even if they knew how to do so.  And I don’t have any insurance of any kind, nor any other such things.

I don’t even use my bicycle because the rear tire is punctured and I don’t have any bike stores within bike-pushing distance, and I don’t know how to fix the rear tire myself.  I guess I could learn, but I know that I probably never would do it.  I don’t handle maintenance tasks very well, especially when they’re geared (no pun intended) toward me.  I don’t really have any reserves of will and energy.

Things would be easier if not for chronic pain and the consequences of taking lots of medicine for a long time to try to control it as best I can.  It would also be nice to be able to have an actual, restful night’s sleep.

I want to say that I cannot remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, because that sounds rhetorically impressive, but I do remember:  it was a night/morning in the mid-nineties (I do not recall the exact day and year, because at the time it didn’t seem so noteworthy, though it was wonderful).  As far as I can tell, that was the last time I felt well-rested.

Speaking of rest, I’m going to give this post one for now.  I hope, I truly hope‒and if I thought it was any use, I would pray‒that each and every one of you is feeling much better than I am right now.

*They hadn’t completely, but I am able to do something at least more like classic writing on it than it looked to be as of last week.