depression

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Did you know that the official name for February 15th is “Chafing Day”? Now you know.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my laptop computer, but I’m already at the office.  I really didn’t feel well when I finally gave up and got up this morning, and I was sorely tempted not to come to work.  So, I forced myself to come in very early—at personal expense—since I didn’t want to leave things hanging for other people at the office.  I hereby send out a “you’re welcome” to those people whose day I will be making slightly easier by my choice.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, though I didn’t mention it in my post, since it’s a day with little personal relevance to me.  Now, it’s the day after Valentine’s Day, which as far as I know has no “official” name.

In the UK and, I believe, in the rest of “the Commonwealth”, the day after Christmas is known as Boxing Day.  I have been unable to locate a reliable explanation of that term, but I personally imagine it referring to collecting all the boxes and other discarded packages that are a consequence of Christmas gift-giving.

I therefore now hereby propose that we all call the day after Valentine’s Day “Chafing Day”, because it’s mildly humorous, at least to me, and for some people it may even be accurate.  I doubt it will catch on, but maybe I can post a “tweet” or a Facebook message saying “Happy Chafing Day” to everyone, and see if the idea spreads.  Maybe I’ll title this blog post “Happy Chafing Day!” or similar, just to try to encourage the term.

If I’ve elected to do so, you readers will already know.

I felt pretty low at work, yesterday—even for me, I mean.  I told my coworker, the one with whom I’m closest, that I didn’t think I could keep doing this much longer, that I felt like I was going to hit the skids soon.  He misunderstood me at first, saying that he would miss me if I left for another job, but that I needed to do what I needed to do.  I clarified that I didn’t mean that I was thinking I would need to leave the job, but that I would need to leave—period.  By which I meant “to leave reality”, “to leave the world”, however you prefer to euphemize it.

He expressed his concern and said that he didn’t like to hear me talking that way, but of course, he had plans for the evening with his wife, and I didn’t feel like burdening him too much, so I put on a comparatively cheerful face afterwards.  Weirdly, I felt mildly relieved and more relaxed after that.

People seem not to take such expressions of emotional rock bottom as seriously as they might, but having at least gotten some word of my distress out to someone—other than regular readers of this blog—is something of a minor relief.  That way, if I go through the final exit door relatively soon, it will not be a complete surprise to everyone at the office.

I can’t keep feeling responsible for not causing inconvenience to other people at the expense of my ongoing misery, especially since so few people seem to return the favor.  My relationship with reality is an abusive one, and since reality is unlikely to change, I probably should just get out.

Another coworker, with the best of intentions, gave out some candy to everyone in the office, which was certainly a nice gesture.  However, being the weak-willed fool that I am, I ate mine, and then, after finally leaving the office quite a bit later than our supposed closing time—see my comment above about other people not being worried about inconveniencing their coworkers—I got some junk food on the way back to the house, and I ate it last night.

It was not very satisfying, and it probably contributed strongly to my ill-feeling this morning.  I need to take that as relevant feedback from reality and just avoid all such things from now on.  Snacks used to give me one of my only reliable sources of pleasure, or at least distraction, from the discomfort of life, but even they seem to be losing their power, though their costs are not likewise diminishing.  Today, I mean to put up a sign above my desk reminding others not to offer nor for me to accept such well-meaning “treats” in the future.

This situation is another example of the simple but hard-to-swallow fact that good intentions are not anything like a guarantee of good outcomes.

Often, once a person is secure in their good intentions—and I am provisionally convinced that most people who do such things really do mean well—they cease to assess the likely consequences of their actions.  If they mean well, they presumably think that they cannot do harm.  This, unfortunately but  clearly, is not the case, as anyone who has ever paid any attention to the nature of reality in any serious way will know—which is not very many people, I fear.

So, anyway, I’m physically tired and mentally tired, and I don’t feel well at all in either sense, either; I feel ill, both physically and mentally.  Alas, I have no reason to suspect there is any cure, though for certain aspects of things there may at least be some treatments, even if they are only palliative.

I told another coworker—one who is difficult but without meaning to be, because of his own life-long issues—that I more than half-wished I would get cancer, and that if I did I would not wish to be treated other than with palliative medicine to control pain.  Why would I want to prolong my life?  I’ve been undead for years already, and it’s not pleasant, and I see no reason to think that anything good will come along to change that.

It’s physically possible, in principle, of course.  I’m not so foolishly and superstitiously fatalistic to think that it’s utterly outside the realm of chance for my life to turn around and get better and remain better.  But as far as I can tell, the odds are very low.

I’ve waited things out for a long time, nevertheless, not wishing to be rash in drawing conclusions.  But if one is going to venture the capital of one’s continued time and discomfort and despair on some possible future upturn, one wants odds that justify the investment.  I don’t see any routes that carry such odds.  I have looked, and looked very hard, for them.  That doesn’t guarantee there aren’t some that I’ve missed, of course, but I’m not a stupid or unimaginative person—not in that sense, anyway—and I can only work with what I have and what I am, paltry though such resources may be.

So, anyway, I hope you all had as happy a Valentine’s Day as you could, and that you have a good Chafing Day today.  Spread the word about that title, if you like it.  Make memes and videos about it if you feel so inclined.  It wouldn’t exactly be legacy for the ages, for me, but it would be amusing, nevertheless.

TTFN

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The enemy of my Self is Myself

I mean to try to keep this post relatively short today, and only partly because I’m writing this on my smartphone and don’t want to make my thumbs feel worse.  It’s mainly that I just don’t have much to say or talk about, and certainly nothing uplifting.

I tried to do a few relatively upbeat posts‒for me, anyway‒on Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I don’t think they’re as popular as my depressed and nihilistic posts.  It’s rather ironic; one might imagine that upbeat posts would be the ones people would prefer to read, but I guess that may not be true.  I shouldn’t be surprised that it surprises me, probably; people often make very little sense to me.

Anyway, I’m just tired.  I left work slightly early yesterday with a bad headache and just feeling horribly stressed out and tense and angry.  I don’t know if it was that things were particularly frustrating at the office, or if it was the usual fact that I cannot escape from the person I loathe most in the world:  me.

I often say that I hate the world and I hate my life‒at least, it feels as though I often say it, because I say it in my head a lot.  Maybe I don’t say it aloud or in writing as often as it feels as though I say it.  I haven’t kept track, and I don’t mean to do so.  That would be truly boring.

But of course, the reason (one of them, anyway) I don’t just change my life‒or try to change the world‒is that I cannot escape the common denominator that is the single biggest contributor to the fact that I hate the world and hate my life:  I hate myself.

I wish it were otherwise.  It would be nice to love myself, I guess.  I wouldn’t have to be narcissistic or anything.  It doesn’t require a delusional or overinflated self-worth to love oneself, any more than it need be irrational or delusional to love one’s spouse or one’s children even when one can see and knows their imperfections.  No one is perfect, after all‒I’m not even sure what the term could mean when applied to a person.

One can love another person even when angry at that person.  One can punish one’s children when they misbehave, and one can choose not to indulge all their wishes precisely because one loves them and hopes to guide them toward being the best people they can be.

So love doesn’t have to be stupid or delusional.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean one can simply choose to love someone.  I’ve tried to train myself to love myself, with positive self-reinforcement, with cognitive therapy, with auto-suggestion, with written lists of my positive attributes, and even with self-hypnosis.  Obviously, I have not succeeded.

Even when I’m stressed out and irritated by everything that happens at the office‒by the noise, by the overbearing “music”, by the stupid little rituals, by the personality conflicts, by the frequent interruptions when I’m doing one task and people just come in without preamble and start asking me about something else entirely*, as if I were a machine just waiting for them to give me work‒even when all these things are happening, the thing that bothers me most is that I am with me.

That’s what I feel, and it’s what I’ve been fighting and it’s the fact in spite of which I’ve been trying to be positive, at least in my writing, but that’s not really working.

When I was writing fiction, that seemed to help at least a bit‒and sometimes a lot‒but there’s only so much fiction one can write that almost no one reads before one feels as delusional as if one believed one had magic powers.  But it is true that writing fiction is good therapy, as Stephen King has pointed out on more than one occasion, and if I could do it full time without other commitments, I might again find the energy to do it.  Unfortunately, if I want to stay alive‒which is a rather big “if” a lot of the time‒I have to work, like everyone else, and my mental energy is used up and more than used up.

Anyway, that’s that.  Yesterday I was very stressed out and had a headache and yelled openly at my closest friend in the office and came within a hair’s breadth of breaking my tablet and my back Stratocaster.  I banged my head on the wall a few times to release some of those destructive urges, and that didn’t help my headache.

Yet I didn’t sleep well at all last night, even for me, despite going back to the house somewhat early.  I don’t feel rested; I almost never feel rested.  The very air through which I move feels like viscous, heavy smoke, burning my eyes, poisoning me as I breathe, impeding me as I try to walk, pressing down on me as I try to stand up.  I need to stop.  I need to rest.  I need to sleep.

*This is a bit akin to people who will come up and start talking to one when one is reading, as if someone who is reading must be unoccupied and just waiting to be of service to other people.

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Late-arriving, futile “justice” and reminders of a life that has been all but annihilated

I read the news yesterday, oh boy.  And yes, it was about a lucky man‒luckier than I am, anyway, at least in some ways.

There was a doctor in the heartland of America somewhere, I don’t recall where, who had been convicted of, apparently, inappropriately prescribing very large amounts of pain meds, the report quoting the number 500,000* (It seems unlikely that there were 500,000 prescriptions**, so it probably was that number of pills).

Anyway, his conviction was overturned on appeal, because apparently, in 2022, the SCOTUS handed down a ruling that the prosecution had to prove in such cases that there was “intentional or knowing” inappropriate prescription for it to rise to the level of a crime, and the jury hadn’t been appropriately instructed regarding that fact.

I looked up the case, and I’ve even downloaded the PDF of the case.  Although I haven’t read through it yet, the summaries make it clear that, yes indeed, this is a new and specific requirement.

Silly me, I had always thought that mens rea was a crucial requirement for nearly any criminal case, certainly one that rises to the level of a felony charge.  I brought that up with my (public) defense attorney, trying to point out that I shouldn’t be convicted of a crime since I literally had never intended to do anything but treat patients who had chronic pain‒which I did because I had chronic pain, and it had already severely harmed my life.  I knew how hard it was for even a physician, who at the time had good health insurance, to be able to get adequate treatment and even to get his prescriptions filled by often-judgmental pharmacists who looked at him as if he were a criminal just because he wanted to try to mitigate his pain with the most effective medicine that was available.

But no, apparently, according to my attorney, the prosecutor didn’t have to prove any such thing specifically; it could just be inferred.  And apparently I’m not exactly the sort of person to elicit sympathy from a jury in south Florida, because my voice tends to be monotone and my face tends to be expressionless and I don’t look like someone who is frankly worthy of sympathy.

All the charges against me were created by the PBSO, who sent in undercover people with (evidently) faked MRIs and fake complaints, who complained of chronic, severe pain and said they were in pain when I examined them***, and whose own secret recordings and records showed that there were often only one or two other patients in the whole office when they were there‒hardly what one would call a “pill mill” I should think.

Anyway, I was offered a plea bargain and I took it, because unless you’ve got a lot of money or you literally have nothing to lose, you will take a plea bargain in the right circumstances, even though you know you’re innocent.  I’ve written a blog post about how the plea bargain system is an extortionate game slanted against especially the underprivileged.

The statutes involved in my charges were designed by that <sarcasm> bastion of intelligentsia and morality, the Florida State Legislature </sarcasm>, to give judges no leeway, and to grind away maximally at anyone charged with “trafficking”.   If a jury decided that they should convict on at least one charge, since the state had created so many charges against me (each prescription being a charge, and twenty something having been conned out of me by various lying police officers over time) and the number seems impressive, I still could have faced a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

In retrospect, I think I would have been little worse off if I had, given the mockery and shambles my life has become.  But at the time, I hoped to see my kids again, perhaps sometime before they were adults.  Three years was better than fifteen (or potentially the rest of my life), and I had no one else to help me with a legal fight, and certainly no reservoir of money, so I took the deal.

The way things are now, though, I might not have been charged, or might have been offered some misdemeanor plea deal.  Or I might have gone to trial and won with relative ease, since the fact that I never knowingly or intentionally mis-prescribed medicine was a fact I knew for certain, at a Cartesian, cogito ergo sum sort of level, since it was a fact about my own mental state.

I may be naïve, and I often do not understand humans.  I am often easily misled and manipulated and used and misused and probably abused, because I am socially and emotionally very clueless and believe in giving other people the benefit of the doubt (to hold them innocent until proven guilty, in other words).  But I have never been greedy or unscrupulously opportunistic, and I took the practice of medicine and my duty and goal to relieve suffering very seriously.  I was never into making a lot of money, though it was good to be able to buy books I wanted and to take care of my kids.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and drove a ten-year-old Toyota Sienna.

Before yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d bothered thinking about what my life might have been like if things had not gone the way they did.  There didn’t seem to be any point.  I was a lost cause and that was that.  But this has made me feel acutely once again the cut of all the lost time with my kids and my lost ability to practice medicine, and all the other losses I’ve experienced as part of this debacle of a life.

What’s more, there’s been salt and vinegar rubbed into the wound by the fact that it took a Supreme Court dominated by many justices who’d been appointed by The Donald to require courts to require prosecutors to prove something that was supposed to be a necessary element of almost any serious criminal charge:  actual criminal intent.

That’s all leaving aside the un-ethics and illogic of the government of the “Land of the Free” dictating what people can put into their own bodies when it doesn’t directly harm other people in the first place.  I won’t get into that because it had no bearing on my medical practice‒I was not in the business of dealing in euphoriants, I was trying to relieve actual suffering.

One cannot really apply new jurisprudence to old cases in which a sentence has already been carried out and finished, and when the consequences thereof are already irrevocable.  I cannot regain the time I have lost with my children or the time I have lost when I could have been practicing medicine, or the time I spent at FSP West or in the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, where even the people who worked there frequently asked why the hell I was there, or still there (I spent 8 months in the place, on the mental health floor, because I couldn’t make bail, but finally my former girlfriend’s mother helped secure it‒at least she got all her own back after I was sentenced, and I appreciate her very much, though I might as well just have stayed in jail, since at least the whole sentence would have ended earlier given “time served” and I was basically homeless when out on bail, having lost everything I owned and relying on the generosity and kindness of friends/former coworkers).

So I am stuck with a ruined life and a twisted mockery of myself.  The fruits of a considerable number of years of time and effort and thought and creativity on my part**** were all taken away by the mindless grinding of a huge stupid machine of “criminal justice” that has little to nothing to do with the latter part of the term.  I don’t claim not to be stupid or foolish or not to have ever made mistakes in the whole situation.  I make many mistakes.  But it is maddening to see how misapplied the law can be and to experience it for oneself, especially when one is now by oneself, partly thanks to that misapplication, and then to learn that now the law is changed (or correctly applied) such that I could have been in a better situation had that change come sooner.

I often consider the possibility of going to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in various flammable liquids, and turning myself into a “bonfire of the unsanities and inanities”, to bring attention to some of the costs of misapplied “justice” and to bring an end to my own mis-called life.  I even have two gallons of paraffin lamp oil and six liters of charcoal lighter fluid and a big enough backpack to carry them all, in case I decide to do it.

Death by fire is intimidating, though‒I am no Buddhist monk by any means.  And I also dislike causing inconvenience to other people, even those involved in an institution that had no qualms about recklessly “judging” me and ruining my life.  But it is tempting, and I feel right now even more than usual the utter pointlessness of continuing, even while stupidity in the office in which I work grinds away at me further (though, to give him credit, my boss tries hard to keep things as sane as he can).

I feel rotten enough and alien enough even at baseline, and all this doesn’t help.  I have lost almost all that mattered to me, and I live alone in a stupid one-room (plus bathroom) “in-law” suite that is smaller than many hotel rooms.  All my previous friends are far away, and most are doing much better with their lives than I am and don’t really have much in common with me anymore.  In any case, I don’t really talk or otherwise communicate with them, though it would be nice.

There are also plain few people where I am now who have anything in common with me.  Very few people have much in common with me:  a disgraced physician unable to practice, with a love of math and physics and biology and of Shakespeare and horror fiction and science fiction/fantasy (reading and writing it) and of science and rationality-oriented podcasts and books and videos, who wants to learn or relearn more about modern physics at a deep level and whose brain doesn’t seem to run the same operating system as most of the people around him‒a Linux in a world of iOS, or worse.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Knowing me, I’ll probably just grind along until I’m worn to a nub and then tumble into the trash can, unmarked and largely unlamented.

I know that I won’t be sorry‒not about that.

*This sounds like an awful lot of pills, but it’s deliberately chosen to sound that way in a manipulative, rhetorical tactic as used by reporters and prosecutors alike.  Let’s run the numbers, as I am wont to do, to see how impressive they really are.

Now, if there were one patient, taking one pill per day‒perhaps the person only takes one prescription, say an antidepressant or a cholesterol med or a long-acting antihypertensive‒it would take nearly 1400 years to use that many pills.  Plain few patients live that long (see my recent blog post), and most pills would long since have expired and become inactive before the end of that time.

Still, the average physician is responsible for the care of 2,000 to 3,000 patients (see here and here), meaning that if, on average, their patients each only took one prescribed pill a day, they would go through 500,000 pills in 6 to 9 months.  But many prescriptions call for more than one pill per day, and uninsured patients cannot tend to afford the long-acting pain meds that claim to allow for steadier doses and thus slightly less risk of rebounds and escalations and all the horrors involved in that.

Now, presently, I take three to nine aspirin a day, sometimes more, and I also take two naproxen and some supplemental Tylenol as well, all of which are more directly toxic to the body than opioids, but are nonetheless over the counter (as they should be).  If I averaged ten total pills a day, then it would take me only 137 years or so to take 500,000 total pills.  That’s longer than I’m likely to be taking pills, but I’m only one person (that, as Dave Barry said, is the law).  An average practice of patients who took only six pills a day would go through 500,000 pills in one to one and a half months.  Many ordinary, non-pain-specific patients, especially those middle-aged and older, take that many and even more prescription meds a day.

In any case, an ordinary general practitioner with a light patient load of two thousand patients, each taking only an average of two pills a day, would prescribe 500,000 pills in 3 to 5 months.  So don’t be too impressed by the carefully curated numbers that prosecutors and media choose to elicit your alarm and disgust.

**Even 500,000 prescriptions, in a modest 2000 patient practice, would require only 250 prescriptions total per patient.  That would certainly take quite a bit longer than 500,000 pills would take, but given an average of only one prescription per patient per month (counting refills) it would only take a bit over 20 years, a decently short length of practice.  Many doctors see more than 2000 total patients and many patients get more than one prescription per month.  And, of course, one cannot even apply refills on “controlled substances”, they have to be literally re-written every month, and patients have to come to the doctor’s office to get them, assuming they can even get them filled.  Monthly doctor’s visits can be hard for someone trying to work a regular job while dealing with chronic pain.  Thus, the whole “mill” part of the “pill mill” trope is created by the law itself, leading to greater costs in time and fees for the patients who are trying to survive after job-related and other injuries or conditions that have caused them chronic pain and make it difficult for them to find consistent, gainful employment or to sustain health insurance.

***Pain is a symptom, not a sign, in medical terms.  We have no reliable ways of testing it, beyond patient report.  We try to find physical correlations when we can, often to see if we can find some treatable cause, but even Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine (I think it was on page 80 or 81 of the 14th or 15th edition, whichever one I had at the time) has clearly stated that, for instance, back pain does not correlate well even with specific injuries noted on MRIs and the like.  As large a number of people without pain will have nerve root impingements and bulging discs and the like seen on spinal MRIs as do have pain.  NO ONE KNOWS all the wherefores of this situation, but there is no serious doubt that such pain is quite real.

****It did not all happen during medical school or residency‒one does not coast along from K-12 and undergraduate college and only then start to work hard in med school, especially if one grew up in a blue-collar, factory town outside Detroit.

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How many times must a man wake up before he can sleep through the night?

What a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sleep I had last night*.  I have said before, and I will repeat it in all honesty here:  my last good night’s sleep that I can recall happened in the mid-1990s.  So, I never seen to get a very good night’s sleep anymore, and this either contributes to or is a consequence of my dysthymia and apparent “neurodivergence”**.

Last night, however, was a bit of an outlier even for me.  For much of the night I would drop off to sleep and then awaken in stress, wondering what the time was and if I had overslept, only to discover that it was a mere five minutes since I had last looked at the clock.  I don’t know how often that happened, but we can work out the theoretical maximum just by taking the number of hours between when I first dropped off and when I finally gave up and got up, and multiplying that by the number of five-minute intervals (a rough but reasonably accurate average) per hour, which is twelve.

Given this, there was a theoretical maximum of between sixty and sixty-six awakenings during the night.  I’m sure I had quite a bit fewer than that, though.  for instance, I had a period of relatively long sleep during the early night, lasting about an hour to an hour and a half.  So, there were no more than 48 awakenings, and still probably significantly fewer than that.  Misery tends to amplify and magnify the subjective impression of these kinds of occurrences.  It’s probably a perverse version of the peak-end rule, described by Fredrickson and  Kahneman, which was used in colonoscopies before the general practice of doing conscious sedation, which ensures that people don’t tend to remember what happens during the actual test.

As one who has been present when colonoscopies were performed, I can tell you that patients are often semi-awake and even somewhat responsive to interactions during the test, but they do not remember it.  Such conscious sedation can give one the appearance of rest, but it doesn’t actually allow for effective sleep, though one may feel that one has slept during that time.  It’s also not the sort of thing to use outside of careful clinical monitoring, as the death of Michael Jackson demonstrated.

Anyway, I had a moment‒subjectively‒of relatively deep sleep quite early in the night followed by a very prolonged period of miserable and stress-filled, anxiety-ridden sleep throughout the remaining hours, until I gave up and got showered and dressed and ready and came to the train station quite early for the train.  That’s where I am now.

It’s not too cold here, but the wind is relatively strong, making it feel colder, and so I have my hood up.  I imagine I look a bit like a poor man’s Ringwraith from a distance, dressed all in back as I always am.  Or maybe I seem to be a would-be Sith Lord.  Neither is a pleasant state in which to be, of course, but at least they have powers.  My powers, if that’s the right word, are mainly just mental abilities, and unfortunately, my best ones are not really put to much use, other than in this blog.

I’m so tired all the time.  Nothing is very much fun anymore, as Pink Floyd sang in One of My Turns, from The Wall, disc one, side B, fourth song from the end.  Don’t Leave Me Now*** has already become an obsolete, already-too-late situation for me, which leaves only Another Brick in the Wall Part 3, and then Goodbye Cruel World to finish up the first half of that album.

I did get some new reading glasses yesterday, somewhat stronger than the previous ones, and I’m pleased to relate that they seem to allow me to read a normal, printed page (without adjustable type size) adequately.  I even read three or four pages of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible yesterday, and maybe that will be the beginning of something more.  Right now, I probably wouldn’t read it even if I had it in front of me.  But hopefully, with that one barrier reduced, the vector sum of that system in phase space will change, and I’ll do some more reading.

This leads me to wonder if it might be better if I overshot the vision target and got reading glasses that are stronger than the ones I have now.  Maybe I should try that experiment.  Thankfully, reading glasses are pretty cheap, so even if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be out too much money.

Perhaps I would even rekindle (no pun intended) my ability to read and enjoy print books of various kinds if I did that.  It’s probably a lot to ask or expect, let alone hope for, but it might be worth a try.  My life post-FSP is unrecognizable even to myself compared to the one before it.  I’ve said many times that I feel that I’m like a Nazgul, or some other mortal who keeps a “great ring”.  I have not died, but neither am I growing or obtaining new life; I’m merely continuing, until at least every breath is a weariness.  “…thin and stretched out, like butter scraped over too much bread,” indeed.

Anyway, that’s more than enough of that.  I mean the blog post, of course, but I also mean the other‒that drawn out, continued existence that has no true life to it.  I’m just weary, and I have no hope for anything good in my future.  I need to get to the end of that first disc.  I can see no real point in anything else; it’s all just trudging through an endless, primordial desert with no oases.

*Unfortunately, I don’t think that moving to Australia would make a difference, and they probably wouldn’t let me in the country, anyway.

**Most likely it’s a complex system that interacts with itself, with each aspect feeding back on the other, the sleep trouble exacerbating the depression and other issues, and those issues further worsening the sleep, until some relative dynamic equilibrium is reached.

***And I want to make it clear that I never did the abusive stuff mentioned by “Pink” in that song.  I am certainly an unpleasant person, but I never was one to put my spouse “through the shredder in front of my friends” let alone “to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night”.  If anything, being the recipient of such things would be more likely for me.  But even if she had been so inclined, my ex-wife was not capable of beating me to a pulp.  Not that she would have been so inclined, anyway.  Though I suspect that most people who spend very much time with me entertain that notion at least occasionally.  Goodness knows I do.

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Monday’s blogger at least still likes to learn

Hurray, hurray.  It’s Monday.

It’s probably hard to tell from the printed words, there, but I was being sardonic with that opening pseudo-exclamation.  I’m not excited that it’s Monday and the beginning of a new work week.  Then again, I’m not excited by much of anything.  Staying at the house doesn’t seem likely to be exciting, either.  There’s not much I can think of doing or any place I can think of going that seems exciting.  Nearly all the things in the world are on some spectrum from boring to stressful.

I don’t recommend this as a way of being, not even to myself.  I’m trying to find ways around it, or rather, to counteract it, but all my previous attempts have not succeeded in any durable fashion, as should probably be obvious.  Various medications, various therapies, lifestyle changes, exercise‒none of it has worked.  Some time ago, I had some hopes that trying marijuana that a former friend had would at least help my pain, if not my depression, but it did neither after two tries, and when I tried too much when I was in particularly bad pain, it made me quite sick to my stomach.  I was throwing up for a few hours (not continuously, of course, but it was still pretty bad).

It’s ironic that THC is used to treat nausea in many cases.  Evidently, my nervous system is too atypical for such things.

I recently happened upon some videos about psilocybin, specifically that there’s a study beginning on using it to try to treat some of the negative symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.  I know it has been used to treat recalcitrant depression and related disorders, including depression in people facing terminal cancer.  Psychedelics have always sounded intriguing, and people make much of them, but I think, given my experiences with other meds, I would be very frightened to try any of them.  My mind is not my friend, and I worry that I would be particularly prone to a “bad trip”, and there’s no way to abort such a thing once it has started; one just has to go through it to the other end.

Speaking of being anxious and frightened of things that many people find beneficial, I had meant to retry riding my new bike yesterday, and perhaps to ride it to the train and then into the office today, but I find myself subtly terrified to do so.  The beginning of last week was just so exceptionally painful and horrible that I am frightened of reinitiating it.  I wish I could know that it’s something that would resolve after a time, but it seemed to worsen over the course of the three or four days I was riding, until by last Monday I was bed-ridden, and I was even grumpier and more cheerless than usual on Tuesday, if you can imagine such a thing.

I think I’ll have to forgo it.  My boss really liked the bike, and offered to buy it from me if I can’t use it, but then I need to get it up to the office, which would mean riding it.  I don’t see myself carrying it.

My train is coming in five minutes.  I’ll pause and then return to this once I get on the train.

***

Okay, I’m on the train now.  What was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, the bike.  I guess I could have it shipped up to the office.  I think Uber even provides services like that, or I could try to see if there’s a way to set up an Uber in a vehicle that can carry the bike.  It’s a thought.  I don’t see my boss making a trip all the way down to my place to pick it up.

I guess I should stick to walking, even though it’s slower.  At least I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts and such while walking.  Nothing beats The Fellowship of the Ring as walking accompaniment, since it’s all about a journey on foot.  Even walking has its troubles, of course‒I have spandex braces on my left knee and right ankle to address the little bit of walking I did yesterday, and the right side of my back is in moderate spasm.  But that sort of stuff is par for the course.  If/as I lose weight, some of that will decrease, and some of it may even disappear.

Life is annoying on so many levels.  But at least there are lots of videos on things like hyperbolic geometry and computers and tensors and matrices and Einstein’s field equations and things like that.  It’s often the case that if I find several different people explaining the same thing I end up with a much deeper understanding.  Each teacher or author or whatever approaches things in a slightly different way, with different emphasis.  When one sees a subject from multiple angles, one tends to get a more complete and thorough understanding of it.  In this, I guess it’s analogous to binocular vision, which gives us depth perception.

I really want to read Zee’s book on quantum field theory, but although these new glasses are better for such smallish print, I think maybe I should have gone even higher on the strength.  Maybe I’ll go to the drugstore over lunch and pick up a stronger pair.  It would get me a bit more exercise, at least.

Please don’t emulate or internalize my negative outlook on things; I have no desire to see a world where more people are depressed.  Do try to keep learning.  Try to build as accurate a map of the world‒in all senses‒as you can.  Be ruthless with yourself in that process.  Your biases will try to trick you, and they will never stop trying, so you need to apply active countermeasures against them.  It’s a pain, but it’s important (and often satisfying and even thrilling) to work toward as accurate a map as you can get, not one that shows a world the way you would like it to be or you believe it to be.  A poor map will be less likely to get you anywhere you might want to go.

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Learning about science, troubles with reading and socialization, and (not) writing fiction

It’s Saturday morning, and boy was yesterday’s audio blog a little weird.  I think it’s not so much that I said anything particularly weird—certainly not for me—but rather the odd meanderings thing took, from musing on the fact that I’ve been losing any joy of any kind in my life, becoming more and more bored or even irritated by more and more things that used to be interesting, on to the various declining cinematic universes and finally to thoughts about General Relativity.

At least that latter part encouraged me to read some material and watch some relatively hard-core YouTube videos about General Relativity and its mathematics.  By “hard-core”, I don’t mean there was any graphic sex involved.  First of all, I don’t think they allow stuff like that on YouTube, but even more to the point, I don’t see how one could work such a thing into an educational video about matrices and tensors and stuff like that.  I mean “hard-core” as in being more in-depth than just a general information, analogy kind of educational presentation, and especially that it talked about the mathematics underlying the science.

Not that I’m against the more general stuff.  I certainly began all of my interest in science with general knowledge/information.  When I was a kid, growing up (which is what kids do if things go well), I had a whole bookshelf I called my “science shelf” full of various kid-level books about everything from biology to paleontology (there were lots of dinosaur books—my first career ambition was to be a paleontologist) to “how things work” kinds of books and so on.

I didn’t really start to have as much physics and astronomy related material until after Cosmos came out.  That show was the reason our family got our first color TV.  I also asked for (and received) a hardcover copy of the book for my 10th or 11th birthday (it came out in 1980, I think, so it should have been 10th), and I was very pleased.  That book and show really triggered my love of space-oriented and physics-oriented science, including—of course—cosmology.

I chose my undergraduate college precisely because it was where Carl Sagan was a professor, though I never did meet him.  I would have thought it presumptuous and appalling to try to seek him out and bother him with gestures of my admiration and thanks.  I tend to feel that way about inflicting myself upon anybody—friend, foe, or stranger.  I just feel that I don’t have any right to intrude upon anyone else’s life or time, and also that I frankly don’t know what to say if I do meet them.

It’s a bit sad, though.  By most accounts, Professor Sagan tended to be quite pleasant and positive toward people who liked his work, and he considered himself—according to him—first and foremost a teacher.  He certainly taught me a great deal.  Though his books are now somewhat out of date, they are mostly still great repositories of fact and interest, and they remain overflowing founts of wonder.  I feel confident in recommending them to anyone, most prominently Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, and especially The Demon-Haunted World.

Of course, I’ve read a lot of his intellectual descendants since then, and his cousins as well in other fields (Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Dawkins’s books and collections about biology are wonderful, too, for instance).  One thing I like about listening to podcasts that focus on ideas is that the guests are often people who have recently (or not-so-recently) written books, and if the subject is interesting I can read their books to get more deeply into their work.  I first encountered David Deutsch and Max Tegmark (and many others) on Sam Harris’s podcast, for instance.

And, of course, I have also read books by Brian Greene and Sean Carroll (and others) about physics in general.  It was to The Big Picture that I turned yesterday after my audio blog, in addition to the aforementioned video, to review some of the mathematical basics of General Relativity.  From there, maybe I’ll go on to the YouTube videos of Leonard Susskind’s* real graduate level lectures at Stanford, and to reading Sean Carroll’s textbook.  I’d also like to read through Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, which I’ve mentioned before (with the thought of going on to his textbook if I can).

I have Zee’s layperson-oriented book in hardcover, but the print is small, and it’s difficult to read.  Still, I took delivery yesterday of a new set of reading glasses that are slightly stronger than the ones I was using, so I hope they’ll make it easier.  I’d really prefer to learn by reading than even by watching videos.

Of course, all this is probably just “pie in the sky” thinking.  My biggest difficulty is just summoning the will, the energy, to do these things.  It’s similar to the trouble I have with writing fiction.  I have quite a few story ideas I could write, but I have no drive, no desire to do the writing.  There’s no percentage in it, so to speak.  It’s not as though I have any fans out there telling me how much they like my books and want more.  I mean, my sister has read them all, and she liked at least most of them, and says she really liked The Chasm and the Collision.  That’s very nice, and I do appreciate it.  Apparently, though, it’s not the required stimulus for me to want to write more fiction.

Perhaps nothing would be.  Perhaps I’m just deteriorating too much, or have deteriorated too much.

Or perhaps it’s that I feel that a truly tiny minority even of people who engage with fiction do so in written form nowadays.  There’s too much competing immediate gratification out there, and primates—probably almost all life forms—are prone to fall for immediate gratification, and to someone else doing the imaginative work for them.

I fear that much of the general population has allowed their personal imaginations to atrophy, much as physical health atrophies when someone goes everywhere by car.  People even play Dungeons & Dragons online now, apparently.  That seems weird to me.  I don’t think I could really stand to play role playing games with strangers.  Playing them with my friends, as I did back in junior high and high school, for countless hours, was greatly enjoyable, and I think it did exercise and improve my imagination and my story-telling and story-creating “muscles”.

Oh, well.  I don’t have anyone with whom to do any of that stuff now, and I can’t even really imagine trying to find new people with whom to do it—see my above discussion about inflicting myself on people for part of the reason, but that’s not the only one.  I also don’t want to invest the considerable necessary stress and effort and anxiety into trying to find friends with whom I actually share interests—if such people even exist—and then have it all go sour or just go away as nearly every other relationship of any kind that I’ve ever had has done.  The juice, however delicious, is not worth that old vice-grip-on-the-testicles (and on all the joints and tips of one’s fingers) level squeeze.  The juice doesn’t last, anyway.

I’m on the train now, and I’m not exactly producing anything edifying, am I?  I’ll bring this week’s writing to an end, but I hope I’ll have the will to keep studying, at least.  And, of course, I hope most fervently and sincerely that all of you have a very good weekend.

*I also have his series The Theoretical Minimum in kindle and/or paperback and/or hardback form; his most recent one was about GR.  But I’ve had trouble reading physical books of any kind (let alone the Suss kind…ha ha) lately; I’m hoping my new reading glasses will help that.

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Audio blog for Friday on anhedonia, fatigue, declining entertainment franchises and Newtonian and Einsteinian physics

This is an oddly meandering audio blog that I made this morning, having little desire to write much, and it goes from my troubles with depression and lessening interest in any former source of joy to the fact that even Star Wars and Marvel franchises are going downhill (with speculation about the causes) on to physics–first Newtonian then Special and General Relativity, and ponderings about the nature of near-light-speed travel and its potential effects when a spaceship passes the Schwarzschild radius in the direction of its motion (and even a tiny dabble into cosmic strings, which are not to be mistaken for the “superstrings” of string theory/M theory).  I find no firm conclusions, but maybe it’s mildly interesting somewhere.  It’s longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully not too long.

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“…all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits…”

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer at the train station.  I brought the computer back with me last night because the bases of my thumbs have been—like so much of the rest of my body—really killing me (albeit slowly) lately, more so even than usual.  I guess writing the blog post yesterday on my smartphone didn’t help soothe them any.

It’s the last day of January in 2024, if that’s important to anyone.  Actually, it’s the last day in January in 2024 even if that’s not important to anyone at all, anywhere.  It’s just a fact of reality, one of those things that is so whether anyone even notices that it is.  Of course, the names of the months and the numbering of the days and years and all that are “made up” and effectively arbitrary, but once the system is in place, it is a fixed thing.  It is what it is.

This is the nature of reality, of course.  Despite political disinformation, or ideologies, or beliefs, or wishes, or fads, or “political correctness”, or whatever subjective, parochial notion people might have, reality is nevertheless “out there”, and it does not bend to anyone’s desires except through concerted effort and thought and will.  Even then, the laws of nature, whatever they may be in their ultimate form, are clearly not optional.  The old saying goes, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” but there is no option not to obey nature.  It might be better to say, “Nature, to be commanded, must be understood.”

Even if the world were to turn out to be an illusion—some version of the Matrix, or a deceit of some other kind, perhaps some manner of hallucination—this would not undermine the existence of reality.  It would merely create relative barriers to our understanding of it.  Even if our universe were to turn out to be a simulation in a simulation in a simulation, on and on, as far as one arbitrarily might extend the chain, there would still have to be some underlying, ground-state reality in which the simulators and the simulations can exist.  A dream is not a free-floating thing, able to dream of other dreams that can then dream of it.  It requires some foundational place in which at least the first dream can occur.

All that’s pretty self-evident, I guess, so I’m sorry to bore you with the rehashing of such ideas.  It’s just that I encounter notions such as the whole “perception is reality” and its relatives too often, and they are maddening.

Then again, many things are maddening to me, especially lately, especially when my pain is flaring up.  Much of the world that I perceive is maddening.  I feel angry toward almost everything in the universe, and I have fewer and fewer respites in the form of distractions that make me at least temporarily joyful.  Pain doesn’t help, obviously.  Being in pain makes everything darker in general, and I’ve been in pain for roughly two decades, with no single day’s break from it.

The Dread Pirate Roberts said life is pain.  This is a simplification, of course; it would be more accurate to say that pain is a ubiquitous and necessary part of life.  That’s one of the reasons I hate it in general.

I particularly hate my own life, especially as it is now and as it feels to be more and more becoming over time.  There are so many things in the office, for instance, that increasingly drive me to want to lash out, physically—against the inconsistencies, and the idiocy, and the counterproductive chaos.  The noise also doesn’t help, frankly, and my pain makes things that I would normally at least be able to tolerate difficult even to endure.

I’m tired pretty much all the time.  I have no desire to play music, let alone to write any, and no desire to read fiction, let alone write any.  It’s harder and harder to find even YouTube videos that are transiently interesting, or that cover science topics in which I’m interested in ways that I didn’t already know.  “Mainstream” movies and shows, and the fodder on the various streaming services, all seem so utterly banal and trite and submoronic.

The last movie I watched all the way through was No One Will Save You, on Hulu.  I enjoyed that because the outsider main character fought off the invaders and the humans alike until finally the aliens accepted her and left her to her usual nature while taking over all the humans in the town.  At the end of the movie, the young woman dances happily with the alien-infested townsfolk, finally accepted into a community, finally having come to a place where she belongs—among the aliens, if you will.  As the last scene pulls out from the dancing, we see green forests and pleasant scenery, with alien ships hovering overhead*, perhaps supervising everything.  Perhaps this is the state of the whole world at the end of the movie.  I didn’t find it in any way horrifying.  It was actually quite beautiful.

Of course, it is a silly conceit that an alien species would look so like humans (only slightly stretched and bent here and there), or that they would have any interest in us, or that they were only slightly more advanced than we are (presumably) such that they would have any difficulty securing the dominance of any group, let alone an individual.  It’s a bit like a scientist finding it difficult to keep a yeast culture in a petri dish because some single yeast cell is fighting back.

Perhaps I’m being unkind.  Perhaps the aliens could simply have overwhelmed the Earth (which in the end it seems they did) but they wanted to do some manner of experiment or more subtle control, and were sworn not simply to wipe out individual humans who resisted, even when one of those humans killed several of them.

I guess human naturalists wouldn’t necessarily kill a grizzly bear or a lion or a shark or whatever that had killed people who were trying to interfere with it in some way as part of their research.  Perhaps they would consider it lamentable but accept—just an inherent risk involved in what they were doing.  I don’t know.  I’m probably overthinking it.

Anyway, that’s the most interesting new movie or fiction I’ve encountered recently (not counting Doctor Who, which isn’t really new), but I don’t plan to watch it again.  I should cancel my subscription.  I should probably cancel all of my subscriptions.  What is the point of having them when nothing is interesting?

I’m very tired, and I’m very sore—it hurts to sit, and it hurts to stand and walk, and it hurts to lie down, just in slightly different ways—and I’m exasperated.  Also, my train will be here in a moment.  So that’s it for today.

*Are they “making home movies for the folks back home”, as in Radiohead’s Subterranean Homesick Alien?  Possibly.

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The title of this blog post is unrevealing

It’s Tuesday morning, and this is my first post of the week‒which I guess is not so bad, since a few weeks ago I had said I might not write any more at all.  I’m not sure why I am still writing, other than simply as a matter of habit, which tends to be strong with me.  Perhaps that really is the only reason.

I was not out “sick” yesterday in any traditional sense, but was instead out with a severe exacerbation of pain in a slightly unusual distribution: left foot, knee, and hip/iliosacral areas in addition to a bad flare up in my back.  Every kind of movement was painful for me, so I mainly just laid around taking aspirin and Aleve and Tylenol and trying to give my body a break.  It’s a bit better now, though by no means ideal.

I fear this pain was because of riding my new bike, even though I didn’t ride it very far or very long over the weekend, and it felt okay while I was riding it.  That latter bit is typical, though.  Things that trigger exacerbations often don’t do so right there at the moment.  They take time to build up and catch one by surprise, so one is never quite sure what the real cause of the flare-up is.

For instance, a cold front came in over the course of Sunday afternoon, and the temperature dropped by nearly thirty degrees (Fahrenheit) by Monday morning.  That brought it down to about 50, which is quite chilly for south Florida.  That may have contributed to the increased pain, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the main cause.

I did at least get a bit of rest yesterday, napping whenever I could, which is nice.  But I’m quite frustrated to get pain flare-ups from riding the bike.  It’s very discouraging.  I was hoping the bike would give me more freedom of movement, not less.

I did get to talk to my daughter on the phone on Sunday.  We’d been planning to talk for a few weeks but stuff kept getting in the way on her end, but finally she was able to call me yesterday.  It was very nice.  I hadn’t heard her voice in about 8 years or so, and it has changed, since she was a teenager the last time we spoke.  We had a nice conversation, at least for me.  She seemed to be enjoying herself, also, but one can never easily be sure, especially when someone is talking to me.

Also, I spoke to my sister last night, but it hasn’t been nearly as long since I last spoke to her‒about a week, in this case.  We had a nice conversation, though, as always.  As for everything else, well…there is nothing else, really.  I haven’t written any new fiction or played any music or drawn any pictures or anything else of value.

I’m taking an Uber to the office because it’s still pretty painful to move and I want to keep it to a minimum.  It’s also hard on the bases of my thumbs, writing this in the back seat using my smartphone, but I don’t know what else to do about that.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about much of anything.  I’m still very much at a loss about life in general.  I still haven’t been able to bring myself to look into health insurance.  I don’t have any future plans, really.  I’m basically empty‒except for pain, obviously, but I already mentioned that.

I also have a lot of free-floating anger a lot of the time, I guess that’s something.  At least, it is if you like being angry.  I never really have enjoyed it, though; it makes me feel guilty, even if I don’t act on it.  It’s not pleasant.  Maybe I should learn to embrace it, and all that.  At least it’s slightly energizing, temporarily.

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter, I guess.  I’m not sure that anything does matter.  I guess that’s all a matter of perspective, so to speak.

That’s it for today.  Try to have a good one, if you can.

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A monotone audio blog that may or may not be monotonous in other senses

Here is the audio recording I did this morning because I didn’t feel like typing anything.  As you will hear (if you listen) I am not really feeling very upbeat, even for me.  Sorry.  I don’t know if I have anything at all interesting to say.  If I do, well…enjoy, I guess.