depression

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“Be resident in men like one another and not in me”

Well, I’m on the laptop (computer) again today.  I specify that it is the computer because I want to make it clear that I’m not on anyone’s actual lap top.  I don’t think there is anyone out there whose lap could tolerate me sitting on it—I suppose Santa Claus could maybe use his magic, but it’s a bit early in the year for him, even given holiday-time mission creep—and probably even fewer laps on which I would be able to tolerate sitting.  And one cannot really be on a lap around a race track or in a swimming pool, unless one is actually going around that track or swimming, either of which activity would make it very difficult to type.  I guess the top of such a lap could be thought of as its beginning, as in “taking it from the top” in music.  But that wouldn’t change the writing difficulty.

That’s a weird opening to a blog post.  Sorry.  I think I’m particularly weird in the morning, or at least I’m a particular kind of weird in the morning.  I know that, as with many people suffering from depression, my mood is often at its worst in the morning, but sometimes I’m at my least weird and my most sane—from my own point of view, anyway—in the morning relative to the middle of the day or the afternoon or the evening.  Often I feel most sane when I’m most depressed.

It’s quite frustrating when, by the end of the day, my energy level lifts a bit, because then I have a hard time relaxing and getting to sleep.  But, of course, it’s not as though I can sleep in, or sleep late to make up for staying up too late.

I will say, though, that last night I got nearly four hours of sleep (pretty uninterrupted once I got to sleep), and it felt surprisingly deep.  I had at least one dream of which I was vaguely aware, because it was interrupted when my alarm sounded.  I don’t remember anything about the dream, other than that it was a dream, and I awakened feeling quite disoriented*, thinking it must be much later than it was.  It wasn’t.  It was just as late as it was, as one might expect.

My work friend who had the stroke is apparently doing pretty well, which is good news.  It feels so ironic to me how often people around me, ones who have a lot for which to live, and who have good reasons to be healthy, and who have families and friends, are stricken with significant health problems.

I’m referring to serious, dangerous health problems here.  I have some health problems—chronic pain, stuff like that—and I certainly have mental health issues.  But I’m the person I know whose life could most easily tolerate significant health setbacks, or at least the one whose ill-health and/or death would have the least impact on those around me and the world at large.  Even so, on I go.

Yet my life, such as it is, is in fact steadily eroding.  It has already become quite a poor, puny, pathetic little remnant of a life.  I don’t do anything other than go from my one room (with attached bathroom/shower) to work and back, and I write this blog.  I don’t play guitar or write fiction or sing or any of that anymore.  I’m getting more and more tired of even non-fiction books.

I don’t watch any ongoing TV shows other than things like Loki, which is quite limited, and Doctor Who.  Unfortunately, even the latter is something that I wish I could watch with someone…and not via a cheesy-ass “watch party” thing online.  I don’t understand how those could be any fun at all.

I have a hard time even visualizing people I know when I’m not around them.  I mean, I know they exist, of course, but I can’t readily imagine what they might be doing, or that they’re doing anything in particular, if I’m not with them.  I know they exist, but I only really feel them existing when I’m in their presence.

Maybe that’s part of the whole ASD thing, I don’t know, but it’s always been very difficult for me to maintain any form of relationship over significant distances.  There have been exceptions, but you could count them on maybe half the fingers of one hand.  And those exceptions always involved nearly-continuous communication.

Still, while of course I know, intellectually, that other people are all still there when I’m not in their presence, I don’t seem intuitively to model them except when they’re nearby—and when they’re nearby, I don’t so much model them as watch them in a kind of analytic way (though I do feel the noise of their emotions).

So, when I’m alone, I often feel*** truly and completely and fundamentally alone in the universe.  I often feel that way even when other people are around, though there are some distractions and intellectual engagement that help make that a bit easier.  But there have been relatively few people in my life with whom I feel really connected, and eventually most of those people have gone far away or cut ties with me or died or whatever.

Who can blame them?

So, anyway, that’s the deal.  It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s payroll day.  And tomorrow will be my traditional Thursday post.  I sometimes entertain the notion of writing blog posts in the afternoon or evening, and seeing if the content is different in character, and if anyone would notice.  But to do that would require serious restructuring of my routines and schedules and things, and I don’t think I’m up for it.  Also, morning is when I have time to do this.

I’m awake anyway, so I might as well use that fact for something productive…if that’s how this can be described.

Please try to have a good day.

*It’s weird how the Brits tend to use “disorientated” even though the root word is disorient, not disorientate (which sounds, perhaps, like the name of Catherine Tate’s sibling or child**).  I guess even in the states we say “disorientation”, but I think that’s just because “disoriention” would not flow very well.  I’m probably biased.  One related thing I find frustrating, and found especially frustrating when I was in medical practice (and training) was how many doctors, even American ones, would refer to the state of having been dilated as “dilatation” instead of just “dilation”.  It feels like they lost control of themselves, and only just barely were able to resist saying “dilatatatatatatation”.  It makes no good sense.

**Of course, Catherine Tate is her stage name, so it would be weird for a sibling or child of hers to have the last name “Tate”, to say nothing of the first name “Disorien”.

***I don’t think I’m alone, of course.  I’ve never been tempted by the philosophical position of solipsism; it doesn’t make any sense, at least in its literal form.  But I definitely feel a sort of intuitive pseudo-solipsism in some senses and at some times.  By that I mean I am the only person I have any actual sense of persistently existing.  On the other hand, I can sometimes “feel” other people’s emotions, in a sense, when they’re around, and one on one that can be good when one is a doctor.  However, when there are a lot of other people around it can quickly be overwhelming, especially if it’s also literally noisy.  Two kinds of cacophony is too much.

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I searched for form and land; for years and years I roamed

It’s Friday, and since I don’t work tomorrow (on what would have been my Mom’s birthday), it really is the last day of the work week for me.  Not that I have anything planned for the weekend, other than doing my laundry on Sunday morning.  I don’t know whether I feel worse on the Fridays before I work on Saturday, or on Fridays before I don’t, but neither one is worth anticipation, and today is no exception.  I feel quite blah.

I did not walk (nor jog) to the station today.  I got slightly stiff, and had a mild exacerbation of my back pain, during the day yesterday, and decided I would give myself a break this morning for my body to do any adapting and recovery it needs.  It’s a bit of a shame; the weather is semi-cool and there is a nice wind blowing, so it would have been pleasant for walking.  Depending on how I feel this afternoon, I may walk back from the train, but then again, I deliberately wore boots today to discourage myself from not letting myself rest.

Also, of course, I like my boots, and wanted to wear them.  As you can see, I have not given them away or otherwise disposed of them yet.

I’m trying to do the whole “I love the world” thing, but I’m having trouble with it.  I haven’t given up yet, but my mood seems to get in the way even of that much.  It’s apparently hard for me even to say that I love the world, let alone myself.

I wish my mood were more consistent.  Little moments where mantras work and when I feel that I’ve made some progress give me a false shot of hope, but then‒as always‒I wake up ridiculously early in the morning and just watch the clock until it’s late enough that I can say, “Fine, you might as well just get up.”  Then I find every little thing stressful and irritating.  Maybe I give up trying to give myself calm, positive self-messages and just try to get in some regular mindfulness meditation and/or self-hypnotism.

Or maybe I should just give up, full stop.

I would obviously like it if I were to be able to be in at least a neutral mood most of the time.  Of course, it would be preferable to be able to be positive a goodly amount of the time, but that’s a lot to ask.  It would even, as I said, be acceptable just to be glum all the time so that I didn’t get all the yo-yo action that drives me ever crazier.

No, I don’t appear to have any clear form of bipolar disorder, based on clinical criteria, just in case anyone’s wondering.  I’ve been seen and evaluated by a decent number of mental health professionals, and though, of course, they could be wrong, they seem to have a consensus about my dysthymia and depression, and none of them seem to consider any form of bipolar to be an issue.  Although maybe I’m masking symptoms and signs of that, even from myself.

It seems unlikely, but I’m apparently pretty good at masking in general, so who knows?  Not me.  We never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.

Sorry, I slipped into quoting a David Bowie/Nirvana song there.  It’s a good song (both versions) and it’s fairly simple to play and sing, so that’s nice.  I haven’t ether played or sung it in quite a while, but I listen to it from time to time.

I think it’s interesting that, in the Nirvana version, Kurt changed the line in the second verse from “We must have died alone, a long, long time ago,” to “I must have died alone, a long, long time ago.”  He definitely gave away some of his internal issues in his choice of lyrics in a lot of his songs, and apparently, even in his covers.  It didn’t do him much good, unfortunately; he certainly didn’t seem to get the help he needed.

I guess it’s hard.  The world is very big and impersonal, and though it is beautiful in all sorts of ways, it does not seem to give a flying f*ck at a rat’s a*s about any particular, extremely finite, living creatures.

Anyway, I guess it’s fitting for me to end the week on a downer, since I tend to start the week on a downer, and the occasional upbeat posts are the exceptions.

I’d like to say something snarky and dismissive and contemptuous to close out, but I really do hope that everyone who reads this has a good weekend, as do all the people whom all the readers love and about whom they care, and then on out to six or so more layers.  What the heck, why doesn’t everyone have a good weekend?  I, myself, don’t expect to do so, but it would be at least some consolation if everyone else in the world did.

See if you can all do me that favor, please.

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Self-treats and self-tricks

First of all, Happy Halloween.  It’s my favorite holiday, but I’m not doing anything to celebrate this year.  We haven’t been decorating the office or anything, and I’m not going to dress up, though I usually do.  It’s just not very much fun anymore, and there’s no one with whom to celebrate it.

I had a brief period yesterday afternoon until evening when I decided to attempt an experiment on my mood (it’s not a new idea)*.  I had been idle for a bit near the end of the day and checked YouTube and saw that there was a video on a channel called “Mended Light” which is partly run by the guy co-runs “CinemaTherapy“, but this one is more directly mental health oriented and he does the videos with his wife, who is also a therapist.

Anyway, the reason it caught my eye was that it was about “Why don’t you love yourself?” or something along those lines.  The video wasn’t as trite as one might expect it to be, given that, and there was a linked follow-up that brought up one of their earlier, related videos, which was also not as trite as it might have been.  Thankfully, these were both less than fifteen minutes long, and I could play them at double speed and with closed captions.

The points made were focused on some simple but non-trivial ideas about how you don’t want to love others or especially yourself in a sort of “earned” or “purely value-related” way, because no one is perfect, and if you already have a hard time loving yourself, then you’re never going to be able to avoid doing things that make you judgmental toward yourself.  So the idea was that if you love yourself in a way that is more…I don’t know, not unconditional but maybe just not judgmental, you can see yourself as worthy of love even if you’re imperfect (which, of course, you are).  You can, in a sense, choose to love yourself.

That doesn’t preclude you from trying to better yourself‒it’s not to be confused with narcissism.  Even a parent that loves a child tremendously can still try to teach the child, and punish bad behavior, reward good behavior, and try to guide the child in a good direction.  Only a fool thinks someone can be born a perfect, fully-developed being with no room to improve.

That’s certainly a reasonable point of view, I thought, and it was not a new one to me.  Somehow, though, at that moment, it felt newly salient, like something I could grasp.  And since I’m in fairly desperate and perilous psychological circumstances, I thought it was worth a try.  So I went back to some old ideas of auto-suggestion that I first read about and started using way back in junior high, after reading a book by Leslie M. LeCron.  I decided to do a sort of mantra (I’ve done this sort of thing before, sometimes for years at a time, including when I was in prison).

I would just say to myself, repeatedly, while walking or when idle, “I love myself”.  Before long, I started to add another phrase, making it, “I love the world, and I love myself”.

It probably sounds silly, but again, I’ve done such things before, and it has worked for certain purposes.  I think it made a difference for me in high school, where no one could reasonably say I was academically unsuccessful.  I used to do a full self-hypnotism thing with auto-suggestion a couple of times a day for years.  It wasn’t about loving myself then, but more about self-improvement and related things**.  The self-hypnotism also helped calm my mind, I think.

Anyway, I felt pretty darn good for a few hours yesterday evening, but I suspect this was a primary fact, not a secondary one.  In other words, I think the uptick in my mood was what made me feel open to the notion of self-improvement, not the other way around.  But the words did help me focus on the good things, about the outside world, at least, and I felt less hostile and even had a slight “warm glow” feeling.

I also did some extra walking (totaling about 9 and a half miles for the day).  And I had about one and a half small mixed drinks in the evening to celebrate (the half was because a moth flew into my drink about halfway through and I poured the rest out).  I also ate some leftover Chinese food from Sunday’s lunch, because it would go bad if I waited too long.  That latter choice was probably a mistake‒I ate too late in the day, and I have some heartburn now, which is, of course, unpleasant.

Anyway, this morning I got up (though, as always, I’d been waking up on and off for hours) and could not even think the words of my proposed “mantra” to myself.  This has happened to me before when I was trying to do positive self-talk.  It ends up feeling not like I’m trying to reprogram myself or whatever, but simply that I’m lying to myself.  Of course, as the song Billie Jean implies, it is possible for lies to become true, and that’s part of the point of auto-suggestion, e.g., “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”  But so far, today, when I try to do the mental chant, the words turn to sand in my metaphorical throat.

Maybe it’s the heartburn.  Maybe it’s because I had an even worse sleep than usual.  Or maybe I’m just not able even to say that I love myself unless I’m already in an unusually good mood.  Maybe I’m amazed at the way I hate me all the time (ha ha).

I don’t know.  I don’t even know why I’m sharing this.  But at least partly I want you all to know that I’m not just giving in and imploding.  I’m trying to improve; I’m trying not to hate myself and my life.  I’ve been trying not to be depressed for a very long time‒for centuries, for millennia, and that’s despite the fact that just 11 days ago I turned 54.  [That’s the same age as Matthew Perry (well, he was 2 months and a day older than I)].

Anyway, Happy Halloween, again.  I don’t know what you’re all going to do for the day, but hopefully at least some of you will have fun.

vagabond happy halloween

*Spoiler alert: it hasn’t lasted even twelve hours.

**I didn’t feel like I needed help loving myself then, though most of the time I deliberately pretended to be egotistical, in what I hoped was a humorous, self-mocking sort of way.  I already didn’t actually like myself much, but I didn’t really dwell on it.  Still, my “heroes” were usually the villains of stories; I certainly never could imagine myself as any manner of traditional “good guy”.  How could something like me be anything but an antagonist?  But at least I could be a villain who got stuff done and achieved some kind of progress or something.  Nevertheless, I have never seen myself as anything but a potential bad guy, and those were the characters in books and movies and comic books with whom I identified***.  It wasn’t until the Harry Potter books really that I found a hero that I could truly admire and find inspiring yet “real”, and a villain for whom I had no significant admiration at all, despite that fact that I did a post about him in the brief series to which I linked above.

***It’s amusing when I read or hear clichés about how “nobody sees themselves as the villain” or similar, like in The Talented Mr. Ripley.  That’s utter bullshit.  People who say or write such things have clearly never explored many potential aspects of human beings and similar-appearing but alien creatures like me (ha ha).  Many people see themselves as the bad guys in their lives…and the real bad guys, who are never very inspiring or impressive in real life, only too easily take advantage of such people.

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Sometimes every night can feel like Devil’s Night

I walked to the train station this morning after having walked less than a mile and a half total yesterday‒it was a deliberate break.  I arrived just as the 610 train was pulling in.  Indeed, I was stopped at the railroad crossing by the lowering of the gate that presaged that train’s arrival.  I’m pleased to be able to say (honestly) that I felt no urge whatsoever to try to catch that train.  It would seem that I’ve internalized the fact that waiting at the station for twenty more minutes is both useful and pleasant, giving me a bit of time to cool down and dry off a little.

It is a bit less breezy today, so I’m a bit sweatier than I was most days last week.  I also decided not even to bother wearing shorts this morning, since‒given the spandex knee and ankle supports I wear‒it exposes all of about three centimeters of very pale and faintly scarred legs to be cooled down.  I imagine that I look like some old Bavarian school child wearing weird, black lederhosen when I dress that way.  That’s not as big an issue, though, as the fact that I’m building up too much laundry.  It took way longer yesterday to clean all my clothes than it usually does.

I know that I received at least two comments on my post from Saturday, but I have not stopped to read more than the first few words of either one.  I just want right now to thank the people who made those comments‒it was obvious from the first few words that they are positive and supportive‒and let them know that I appreciate their responses.

I’m sorry to reveal that I haven’t read them fully yet, because of a very strange but intense anxiety that doesn’t quite make sense to me.  I’ve really sunk pretty low, I guess, when I find it stressful even to read comments on my blog that are obviously positive.  I don’t get it.  What is wrong with me that I get intimidated by even that level of interaction?  It’s absurd, but not in a pleasant or funny way; it’s frankly rather contemptible. Those people deserve a better response from me, and I do intend to make some reply soon, hopefully today.  Sorry it’s taking so long.

I wish I could tell you that I had a good weekend, or that I feel less depressed, but it really wasn’t any kind of restful time or anything.  Mostly what I did Saturday evening and Sunday was eat a few indulgent things and watch “reaction” videos on YouTube.  I may have noted this before, but watching such reactions is, in some ways, almost like watching a show or movie with a friend who hasn’t seen it before.  Even that fact, though, is rather depressing.

Speaking of friends and reactions and comments, I just want to make it clear again that I don’t really respond to Facebook comments about my sharing of my blog posts on that venue.  I don’t even necessarily read them.  Dealing with Facebook and the like is more stressful than dealing with comments here.  TwiXter would probably be even more stressful, but I don’t really ever get replies to anything on that venue, though I share each post there.

I finished Sapolsky’s new book, and it was good.  I can’t help but recommend it highly.  I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t say more about depression.  In the end, what he mostly said (apart from reiterating that it was, like all else in the brain, a purely biological process) was to relay some facts about depressive people being more accurate in their assessment of many things rather than being irrationally negative‒whereas most people are irrationally positive, especially about themselves (I’ve known about this research for years).  So, to paraphrase Sapolsky, depression in certain circumstances can be seen as a pathological dysfunction in one’s capacity for self-deception.

Maybe.  Certainly it is possible that simply to face reality in as unbiased a fashion as possible is inevitably depressing‒which is a further depressing thought in and of itself‒and that all optimism entails delusion at least at some level, or at the very least, it entails ignorance.

This is related to the fact that I ask for people to give me (hopefully) new ideas when trying to offer their support against my depression, because I don’t want to feel better by means of self-delusion or even via neurological manipulations (though the latter may be a bit better).  But maybe ideas alone can’t help against my depression‒certainly CBT didn’t work that well for it‒since it’s more about the tendencies of the state of the system than the outputs of any particular thought processes or program or whatever.

What I should probably do is just give up on trying to feel better.  As those who read Saturday’s post can probably tell, I often get close to that.  It certainly can be hard to keep trying; I’m ever more discouraged.  And now we’re approaching the end of my favorite month, and we’re getting deeper into the longer, darker days of the year.  I didn’t really want to make it this far, to be clear, but I derailed my momentum for my previous plan for the sake of coworkers, and I haven’t yet regained it.  But that can be corrected, at least mostly.

Meanwhile, I continue to tread water, but the ocean gets colder at this time of year, and the waters get choppier.  It wouldn’t be surprising if a particularly big wave drove me under for the final time soon.  It wouldn’t even be really unwelcome.

I’m also constantly, if half-heartedly, seeing if I can lure in some sharks.  That’s a further metaphor, of course, but it has a specific meaning in my mind; it’s not just a vague notion.  I won’t get into it more for now, but maybe I will, later.

I hope you all have a good day, and have a good week.  For those of you who recognize the pseudo-holiday, have a Happy Devil’s Night.  Try not to burn down any inhabited buildings or anything, okay?  No need to give Devil’s Night a bad name.

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Please use caution; this blog post MIGHT be “triggering”

It’s Saturday, and I’m at the train station, having walked here again this morning, as I did yesterday.  It’s a bit interesting that my pedometer reads as me having walked about 5 and a half miles, when the Google Maps distance from house to station is just barely shy of 5 miles.  But, of course, that assumes more or less direct travel and my walking may meander a bit, and I take up my waiting spot at the very farthest end of the platform (to board near the front of the train).  Train platforms do tend to be long, because trains are long.

I had a very difficult day yesterday, as you may have been able to predict, if you read yesterday’s blog post.  I felt pretty horrible, despite having done my walking in the morning‒no endorphin effects, it seems, were available, or they were swamped by other forces.

During most moments of the day I felt angry and sullen and, especially, hopeless.  I frequently thought about things like dousing myself with a mixture of lighter fluid (2 kinds) and rubbing alcohol and setting myself on fire, or taking blades from the supply of replacements for my box cutter and just cutting my wrists or neck open.  It was a bit like the way one feels when one stares over the edge of a high cliff or bridge:  it would be so easy just to jump, in many ways easier than not jumping.

And it was enticing, though not in any exciting kind of way.  It was a curiosity and a sense of despair combined with a dark feeling of compulsion, and I thought of the possibilities frequently, imagining what they might be like, how it would feel and all that, without any fear, though I recognized that I would not want any pain to endure long.  Despite that, at one point I contemplated just smearing my face with charcoal light fluid and lighting it, or alternatively splashing it with Drano or similar, just to ruin what’s left of my visage, because I don’t like how I look or feel, so I might as well just take the final step of ruining how I can ever possibly look, so I no longer need even to bother imagining that I might be able to recover some of my past health or strength.

Of course, I didn’t actually do any of those things, though I brought the lighter fluid and the blades and everything out and got them near at hand, so that at least I could really feel the salience of the ideas.  I don’t really know how close I actually came to doing any of the things I contemplated.  Maybe I was not close at all; or maybe only the slightest nudge of the wrong kind would have been enough to topple me over the edge.

I certainly didn’t feel very hesitant or resistant, nor did I feel afraid.  I did not, however, want to inconvenience or frighten (or traumatize, let’s be honest) the people at work.

I also don’t want to “trigger” any potential readers who might have similar urges or self-hatred or depression or proneness to such thoughts‒that would truly be terrible.

I am likewise not trying to tell lurid and shocking tales just to get a reaction or attention‒except in the sense that I want to make it clear, in a way I’m not readily able to do face to face (so to speak), that I’m really not doing well at all, and that I could probably use some serious help.  I am not good at seeking help, though.  I hate myself too much to want to save myself, at least unreservedly.

I feel like someone who has swum or been stranded so far out to sea that land is no longer in sight‒I’m not even certain in which direction it lies‒and the prospect of swimming back to shore seems so daunting and exhausting and hopeless that the idea of just giving up and drowning seems easier (and perhaps better).

And, of course, one occasionally wishes for sharks to come.  But shark attacks are much fewer and farther between than fear and popular culture would lead one to believe.

Oh well.  It seems that I can tread water for a very long time, to push that analogy farther*.  But I am very tired in many ways and I never can seem to get enough sleep‒which I guess makes sense when one is treading water.  I don’t know which way to go, or how I would possibly be able to reach shore even if I did.  Maybe the Coast Guard or some friendly fisher-folk will come along and happen to see me and rescue me.  Or perhaps I’ll just go under.

Whatever happens to me, I hope you all have a good remainder of your weekend.

*This analogy at least helps to explain why it’s so frustrating when well-meaning people say things like, “Hold on, keep going, don’t give up.”  Imagine a suspense movie in which someone is stranded out at sea and is treading water but they have a radio or phone or whatever, and someone says to them (over the phone), “Just keep treading water, keep swimming, there are people who would be sad if you drowned.”  And the swimmer, optimistically trying to complete the speaker’s sentence, might say, “Is a rescue party on the way?  Are you in a boat or a search plane?”  And the caller says, “What?  No, no, nothing like that.  I don’t have a boat or a plane or anything.  I just don’t want you to drown.”  And the swimmer asks, “Well, have you called the Coast Guard or the Navy or the Police or something?”  And the phoner replies, “Oh, no, I haven’t called anyone or tried to get you help or anything.  I just don’t want you to drown.”  Such a swimmer might be justified in finding the exhortation to keep swimming a bit presumptuous and irritating, perhaps even maddening and disheartening.  I’m not saying this reflects the actual attitude of such “callers”.  I’m quite certain that they have the very best of intentions.  But this is the way it can feel for the person who is struggling, and who is told to try to hold on, but given no material help in doing so.

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Don’t worry; this won’t be like yesterday’s post

It’s Friday again, and I’m working again tomorrow, so this won’t be the end of the work week for me.  I did not walk to or from the train station yesterday, deciding to give myself that recovery day after nearly 24 miles of walking over the previous two days.  But I did walk to the station this morning.  I probably won’t walk back this evening, but that will depend at least a bit on how I feel.

I started off the morning yesterday in a moderately good mood, at least for me.  As you may have noticed, I was rather silly and self-indulgent as I wrote yesterday’s post, of which the footnotes were almost longer than the main body.  I feel better about such footnotes while reading Determined, because Robert Sapolsky seems at least as fond of frequent and often extensive asides as I am.  Maybe it’s something to do with having the name Robert*.

I often imagine that my less dark and somber and repetitive posts‒like yesterday’s‒will be more popular than my usual ones.  That’s certainly how I feel when I’m writing them:  “Here, at least, is something that readers might be able to enjoy, and which deals with somewhat interesting subjects.”

However, time and again, I have found that such posts receive fewer likes and comments and so on than my darker posts.  It’s been similar to the way my interactions with other people in the workaday world‒and before that, the academic world‒tend to be.  When I’m feeling relatively good, and feeling good about myself, people seem to find me confusing and irritating (at least based on the ways they interact with me, and their expressions, and the impatient tones of their voices, and their tendencies to keep their distance).  Maybe I just get too hyper and silly.

On the other hand, when I’m dysthymic and even fully depressed, although people do seem to find me a bit of a downer, they don’t seem to mind me as much.  It’s frustrating, but it’s been a long-standing pattern that I’ve noticed throughout my life.  It makes it that much harder to want to bother trying to be upbeat and energetic.  What’s the point, if when I’m actually feeling halfway good about myself I just rub other people the wrong way?

I guess maybe it would be different if I truly didn’t care whether people liked me at all or found me a pain in the ass.  But there are at least some people with whom I like to be on friendly terms, if I can, and that very class of people seems to find an upbeat, positive, energetic Robert to be annoying.  I guess maybe I’m just too weird overall; and at least when I’m depressed, the exposure of others to my weirdness is blunted, whereas when I’m in one of those increasingly rare states of higher energy, my weirdness comes out in full force.

I’m tired of this, anyway, all of it.  The universe, even in a form recognizable as similar to how it is now, may continue for tens of billions of years, but even the small span of years since I last saw my kids‒about ten and a half of them‒seems functionally eternal to me.  And, of course, depending on the time scale one uses, it could seem huge to anyone, and on other scales it can be unnoticeably tiny.  If one proceeds along orders of magnitude, rather than some linear measure, then the human lifespan is somewhere in the middle between the Planck time and the life of the universe, at least as we know it**.  But that’s neither here nor there.

When one is feeling depressed and hopeless***, people are prone to say things like “Be strong” and “Hold on”, as if these were self-evidently good things to do.  But they are not self-evidently good.  They are very much context-dependent.

If one follows such advice regarding a feud or vendetta or some other culturally negative or destructive matter, one is prone to do far greater harm than if one just let things go and gave up.  Think of Ahab in Moby Dick.  And wouldn’t it have been better if Hitler had killed himself ten years earlier than he did?  If many of the mass-shooter/suicide perpetrators had skipped some steps and just killed themselves in the first place, would not the world‒and its memory of those individuals‒be vastly better?

I need to leave, I need to escape, I need to stop trying.  I’m too exhausted.  Above all, I need to stop even hoping to be upbeat and positive.  It tends, mainly, not to be profitable (metaphorically or literally) for me.

Okay, that’s enough crap from me for now.  I’m working tomorrow, so the plan is for me to write another bloody post then.  I doubt that I’ll be lucky enough (or that you will be lucky enough) to have events intercede and let me stop trying anymore before then.  But I can always at least hope for the final disappearance of hope itself, even in its flimsiest fragments, so I can just call it a life and be done.

Maybe I’ll get lucky.  If not, well, I guess I’ll write some more tomorrow.

*I don’t really think so, of course.  It’s just a silly thought.  Though he has apparently also had lifelong trouble with depression, so maybe that could be a more realistic connection.

**Of course, if one thinks of the time needed for even supermassive black holes to evaporate due to Hawking radiation, we are far closer to the short than to the long.  Then again, when compared to infinity, any finite number, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero.

***And particularly if one expresses the fact that they feel suicidal.

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“No, I mentioned the bisque…”

Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, it’s Wednesday, I walked 5 miles to the train station, the weather is decent with strong wind for the walk.  The 610 train is just arriving, and now I’m waiting for the 630 one so I can cool down and dry off a bit.

That just about summarizes current events.  Oh, also I can honestly say that walking a total of 8 miles yesterday in the New Balance shoes seems to have worked well.  My left foot is essentially fine‒though I woke up once during the night to realize that, lying on my side, I had the arch of my left foot pressed almost aggressively against the ball of my right foot.  It made me wonder if that strange posture was a regular sleep habit and if it contributed to the foot arch pain I’ve been having.

Evidently, though, based on the fact that the foot is fine now after my five miles so far this morning and eight miles yesterday and that sleepy posture, it didn’t contribute much, if at all.  So, alas, there seems no saving grace for the boots.

I had the temptation to retry the other, slightly larger pairs that I had stopped wearing because they had caused me trouble before, just to try to rescue the boot-wearing.  This is how stupid I can sometimes be, it seems.  I really need to get rid of all of those so that I’m no longer tempted.  I wish I could give them to a good home or something, but I don’t see how I would be able to work that out.

It is good, at least‒I guess‒that I’m able to have gone so far over a couple of days without my ankle or arch or knees or hips acting up at any atypical level.  I am, on the other hand, at least a bit surprised and even slightly disappointed that there was no trace of any of my old, typical endorphin thing yesterday‒my mood wasn’t even briefly bolstered by the long walk.  And, so far, I don’t notice any sign of it today.

Maybe it’s just that the seasonality of my affective disorder and my ongoing, generally deteriorating mental health is overpowering any tendency to get a boost from exercise.  I’ve never really been one of those people for whom regular exercise effectively treats depression*.  Indeed, even when I was running six miles at a time and was in great shape, I still had the same trouble with depression.  Well, it was not “the same”, I guess.  It’s evolved over time and is worse now in some ways than it was when I was younger, though now I’m at least more familiar with it.  In fact, it’s one of the few recurring constants in my life since I was a teenager.  No wonder people don’t like to be around me too long if they can help it.

Anyway, that’s that and it is what it is, and all those other tautological bullshit phrases.  Speaking of which, a whimsical question just occurred to me:  “Is slackology the opposite of tautology?” That’s a very silly and stupid thing to say, I know, but what are you gonna do?  I’m stupid.

I must say, the 630 train is noticeably busier than the earlier ones tend to be, which makes sense, I guess, since it’s getting closer to the typical time for a workday to start.  However, the Tri-Rail people have adjusted for that, and this train has an extra car compared to the usual ones (the others all seem to have 3 passenger cars, whereas this one has 4).  Thus, though there are more people, it’s not more crowded.  Well done, Tri-Rail!

Okay…well, I think that’s that**.  Nothing interesting is going on, really.  I’m still reading Sapolsky’s book, and I listened to some LotR this morning.  It’s a good story to hear while walking, since it’s about a great journey (among other things).  God knows how many times in my life I’ve either read or listened to The Fellowship of the Ring, specifically.  I had read it more than 20 times even before I finished high school.  I almost surely must have passed 50 at some point in the more than 30 years since.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing much does.  So I’ll call that enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Though, of course, I cannot know that I would not have been even worse had I never engaged in regular exercise in the past.

**To repeat the tautological cliché from before.

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How can one walk in such a State?

Well, here we all are again.  I’m at the train station, having walked here this morning.  The weather’s not bad for walking; it’s warm, but not terribly humid, and there’s a good breeze.

I fear that the following conclusion is inescapable:  I will have to dispense with my boots for any serious walking, and possibly indeed for simple, day-long wear.  Though I walked a total of less than two miles yesterday, and had on knee supports and whatnot, my left foot and my right Achilles tendon, and my hip and back all were quite uncomfortable by the end of the day.  They were all still rather stiff and in pain this morning as I started out (now wearing my New Balance walking shoes) but by the time I’d gotten close to the station, that seemed to have been mostly wobbled out.

So…I feel better after 5 miles in these shoes than after just a physically idle day in the boots.  It’s very sad, and I’m probably far more disappointed than makes any sense at all.  I like those boots a lot.  But I have too much chronic pain already through which to fight to try to get anything done, so I really cannot expose myself to that extra damage.

I really ought to get rid of the boots just to eliminate the temptation to use them, lest I wear them in a fit of unjustified optimism and set myself back significantly.  It would be good to be able to donate them to someone or something, but I don’t really have the wherewithal to do so.  I have no usable vehicle, nor a driver’s license* to drive to an appropriate place for donation, nor anyone to drive me there, and I don’t want to take an Uber for such a purpose, and certainly not to renew my state ID.  If I’m not going to seek medical or psychological/psychiatric help for my much more serious concerns, then I’ll be damned if I’m going to supplicate myself to the bureaucrats of one of the most benighted states‒ironically so, given its nickname‒in the US.

I arrived at the station in plenty of time for the 610 train, but I let it go, as I did the last time I walked here, to give myself time to cool down and dry off a bit before the 630 train.  Also, of course, I’m writing this blog post.

I’m reading Robert Sapolsky’s new book, and it’s quite good and interesting, though so far it’s made no points nor discussed any facts with which I wasn’t already familiar.  I almost “flipped” ahead to the last chapter, because Sapolsky says he’s going to be discussing some esoterica about depression there, and I know he is both personally and professionally interested in that subject.  I hope‒not much‒to maybe learn something new, though I don’t expect it to help me at all.

I also listened to Sean Carroll’s latest podcast yesterday, and it was interesting, but quite short.  I took note and sent myself emails about 2 books, one that the guest recently wrote and one that he mentioned, about which I’ve heard before.  In that moment, I thought they sounded interesting, and I’m sure they would be.  But now that I’m past that first instant of intrigue, I know that I’m not going to get them.  Nothing is particularly interesting; even nothingness itself is not terribly interesting.  I’m reading Sapolsky’s book because I’ve been waiting for it for months, and I liked his earlier book, Behave, and I enjoyed his “Great Courses” course.  He’s an interesting individual.

But there’s only so much I can do to maintain engagement.  I don’t have anyone in my day to day life with whom I can talk deeply about pretty much any of this stuff, and my own company isn’t adequate to keep a conversation going.

I don’t really watch any TV shows or movies or anything‒I mainly just watch “reaction” videos on YouTube, because that’s almost vaguely like watching the movies or shows with a friend who hasn’t seen them before…but not really.  There’s no back and forth, obviously, unless one counts the comments sections, which I don’t.

Also, I have to face it, pretty much none of the people whom I enjoy watching react to various movies or shows would probably want to hang out with me.  They all would surely have better things to do with their time, and certainly better people with whom to do whatever they do.  I’m not just making a snap judgment here; this has been my consistent experience in life.  Most people get tired of being around me before too long, even if they like me (or love me), and in all fairness, I have to admit that I find being around most other people quite stressful and tense much of the time, even if I like them.  A big part of that is, of course, born of fear, and the fact that I sense and recognize how much they think I’m weird and unpleasant, but it’s not as though I can just choose not to fear and sense and recognize those things.

It’s a conundrum indeed, to want to have friends but to have such a peculiar character and  such specialized and rarefied interests that like minded people are hard to find and that in any case one has difficulty maintaining relationships with other people even in the best of circumstances.

Oh, well.  Life is shit, but the world never promised that it would be kind or fulfilling or just or fair or pleasant.  It promises only one thing.

On that note, I’ll bring this post to a close.  It’s already overlong.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Also, my state ID expired Friday, and the stupid website for renewing it has been dysfunctional for as long as I’ve been trying to request a renewal.  I will probably try once or twice more, but I have no desire to try to make an appointment to go to the offices‒none of them are anywhere near where I live or work, and I obviously cannot drive to them.  There’s not really any point to getting the thing renewed, anyway.  It’s not as though my identity itself was granted to me by the state of Florida (AKA America’s syphilitic penis).  The whole state can drown for all I care…and before too very long, much more of it will indeed be underwater than already is.  I’d rather see it burn, but you can’t always get what you want.

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What are the odds that this is worth reading?

It’s Monday, October 23rd in the year 2023 (A.D. or C.E., depending on your preferred terminology) and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer.  I took the computer with me when I left the office on Wednesday, expecting not to bring it back, but here I am.

It’s really quite stupid.  But it is more pleasant to write these posts on the laptop computer—quite a lot more pleasant—than it is to write them on the smartphone.  Though more compact and portable, the latter is just awkward and irritating, and it still causes the bases of my thumbs to get sore sometimes.  Well, really, the soreness is at the carpo-metacarpal joints more than it is at the metacarpophalangeal joint, but basically it just feels like my thumbs are sore, and it becomes more difficult to grip things as it continues.

That’s probably about all the news I have for today.  At least, it’s probably the only news I have that’s even arguably worth sharing on this blog, though the arguability of the shareworthiness of even that news would probably involve a lot of distracting rhetoric and sophistry, neither of which is a form of “argument” for which I have much respect.  They’re about as good as taking the word of someone you’ve just met about some matter involving significant (but not life-changing) amounts of money because they “promise” you can trust them.

“Give me 1% of your trust, and I’ll earn the other 99%” is an expression sometimes used in sales.  I guess it works on some people, but I can’t see it ever working on me.  First of all, it’s not really a sensible way to put something.  What is 1% of someone’s trust?  How does one quantify such a thing as if it were a substance or population?

I could see asking for 1% of someone’s trust fund.  That might be worth a bit, depending (obviously) on the size of the trust fund.  But 1% of my trust, however one might reasonably measure trust, is some number so vanishingly close to zero that it might as well be used to calculate derivatives and integrals.  This is largely because I don’t actually believe in or endorse “trust” as a generally good idea, though that certainly depends on one’s definitions.  I think trust is a mostly vacuous concept.

I used to say that I trusted my mother and my father, and with everyone else I took calculated risks.  But of course, that was really just me trying to be clever.  In reality, it’s all calculated risks*.  It’s just a Bayesian prior estimate of the credence we give that, for instance, this person in question will behave as they say they will behave.  Then we will update our future estimate depending on how things turn out this time, using a sort of loosey-goosey, intuitive version of Bayes’s Theorem.

If we started off without a particular preference for “trust or not trust” for someone, our prior would be something like 50%.  If we thought someone was a metaphorical weasel by nature, it might be much lower, though if we’re being good Bayesians, it can never be truly zero.  I trusted my parents—by the time I was fully an adult, anyway—at a level close enough to 100% that it was rarely worth thinking about much.

I honestly don’t know how I get onto these subjects.  I know it’s probably boring as Hell**.  I’ll just close that topic by noting that my Bayesian prior for trusting myself is way lower than my prior was for my parents.  It’s not that I don’t think I’m reliable or anything; I’m probably reasonably reliable as a general tendency.  I just don’t like myself, and I’m almost always disappointed in myself, so it’s reasonable to predict that I’ll probably let myself down in any given circumstance.

For instance, I’ve let myself down already by even doing this blog post, because I’m on my way to work, because I didn’t use this last weekend as a good starting point for the process of my dreamed-of trial by fire and ice (to be ludicrously melodramatic).  That “trial” is basically a notion of a means by which to put oneself at a not-insignificant risk of death—knowingly—without it being anything that could lead one to be forcibly locked up.  There are things that a person can do that will lead to a significant chance of mortality*** if carried on long enough, but which are otherwise entirely unremarkable.  Even water can kill you if you just keep on drinking and drinking and drinking.  In fact, it takes less water than you might think.

That’s not my specific thought, however.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I think I would spend just too much time in the effing bathroom, and it would be a terribly annoying way to pass**** one’s final hours.  But there are things that I could stand doing that, if things go right or wrong (depending on one’s mood or viewpoint) could kill me.  That’s the general idea.

Anyway, that’s enough blather about nothing (and potential nothingness) for today.  I don’t know what’s going to happen from here, but I’ll try to keep you posted if it’s not too much trouble.

*So to speak.  We rarely actually calculate the risk, but rather do a  quick estimate.

**That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it?  It’s hard to imagine that Hell, as described in most religions, could be considered boring.  Demons and fire and brimstone and torture are things that at the very least don’t seem dull—though I suppose one might be tortured with a dull knife.  But as anyone who has suffered from depression probably would soon realize, “boredom” of a sort (i.e., anhedonia) is a major form of torture.  That’s one of the reasons I always found the apparently more modern notion (reputedly in Catholicism) of Hell as “being removed from God’s presence” a more interesting and subtle and less cartoonish notion of Hell than one gets in many evangelical forms of Christianity.

***If you were an immortal being, and you liked being immortal, taking any chance of mortality—i.e. of becoming mortal—would be something akin to Pascal’s wager, where the potential loss (of an infinite lifespan) would be so vast as to make the most miniscule possibility thereof essentially an intolerable risk.

****No pun intended, but nevertheless, not edited out.

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And damn’d be him that first blogs, ‘Hold, enough!’

Hello and good morning yet again.

It’s Thursday, of course, and‒being a bit compulsive, as I am‒I could not fail to start this blog post with some form of “Hello and good morning”.  For those of you who like that consistency, you’re most welcome.

I did not walk to the train this morning, though I am wearing my New Balance walking shoes, because when I awakened for the first time during the night‒sometime between 1230 and 1 am‒I already noticed that, despite a modicum of rest, my right Achilles tendon was sore and burning when I moved it.  It is still a bit sore this morning.  So, apparently, my interventions yesterday, such as they are, were not adequate to stop the boots from causing my weak spot trouble*.  I will at least say that the arch of my left foot seems reasonably okay, but even it has a bit of a twinge.

So, with regret, I fear I need to retire my boots for any serious long walking, which seems ironic, but such is life.  Anyway, the NBs are lighter and easier to carry along in any case.

As for other things, well…I don’t know.  I really don’t have much to report.  The weather is slightly warmer today than it was yesterday‒I’m not wearing a hoodie at the train station right now, but I’m comfortable‒but it’s nowhere near the oppressive heat and humidity we’ve had until recently.  It would’ve been a decent morning for walking, but there’s not much to be done about that.  I don’t want to exacerbate my heel.  “He’ll let the heel heal for a bit,” one might say of me.

I’m not sure if I’ll write a post tomorrow.  I’m not sure if I’ll go to the office tomorrow.  I almost decided not to go today, but I want to bring my laptop computer back from the office, and I forgot to do that yesterday.  But tomorrow, if I still feel like I do this morning‒or worse‒I may not go in.  You’ll know, if there’s no blog post tomorrow, that I haven’t gone to the office.  And, of course, as I have said, I don’t work this weekend.

After that, who knows?  I don’t have any vision of next week, frankly.  I have some vague notions and ideas, but I don’t know what will happen.

I also don’t know what else to write about today.  There’s nothing going on.  I’m still not writing fiction or singing or playing guitar or “piano”.  I haven’t done any drawing in a very long time.

I also haven’t been reading this week, really.  I haven’t made any more progress in Robert Sapolsky’s new book, though I was looking forward to it.  I’m certainly not looking forward to any other books, nonfiction or fiction.  There are no movies or shows of interest to me.  Not even the upcoming Doctor Who specials are of interest, nor the new season.  And though Loki season 2 has been okay so far, I could miss the rest without much regret.  I certainly don’t see anything coming down the movie pike that’s worth anticipating.

I think I’m just about down to the dregs.  I don’t have much to offer but muck and sediment and sand.  There might be people out there who are into that kind of thing, but I’m not sure who they are.  I appreciate all of you reading even when I’m writing absolutely nothing of value.  I wish more people could have read my books; I think there are some decent stories there, and it would be nice to share them with more people.  Oh, well.  I guess most authors feel that way, at some point.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think.  It’s a short post, but surely that’s a relief if anything to dedicated and loyal readers.  Have a good day and, in case I don’t write a post tomorrow, have a good weekend.  Please.

TT(FN?)

Welcome Home Medium in prog (2)

*It is, of course, an appropriate location for a weak point.