depression

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A hump is just a dip when viewed from the other direction

It’s Wednesday, now.

At some level, I feel as though that’s all that’s worth writing about today.  But of course, if people only wrote what was worth writing about, most of the material online—including the online versions of venerable print media like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the various other big newspapers and magazines in all their incarnations, and many books—would never exist.  While that often seems like it might be a good thing overall, when I think of the matter soberly, I think that’s probably not true.

While it is true that, especially in the era of anti-social media, much of what is written in the world is at best noise, at worst anti-information, I suspect that reducing the overall amount of it wouldn’t improve the net amount of good or useful stuff.  It would just shrink everything in proportion.

I suspect that most of everything that’s ever been written or said (or drawn or sung or what have you) is probably forgettable and pointless.  But the way the forgettable is sifted from the memorable is…by memory.  I don’t just mean storage, obviously.  Somewhere out there, I’m sure one can find some stored version of a significant fraction of all that’s been written, for instance, in the twentieth century and later, and even on back into, say, the sixteenth century, though we’ve lost more of the latter, I’m sure.  Nevertheless, back then, when writing was not as easy as it is nowadays, there was probably a greater pre-writing filter.  But even so, it’s only a tiny fraction of the stuff then written that survives, in recollection and in use, to the modern day.

For instance, I’ve read at least one play by Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and although it was good, it wasn’t great.  But, then again, not all of Shakespeare’s stuff was truly great.  Some of it survives just because it was Shakespeare.  But the truly great Shakespeare stuff—well, wow!  There’s a reason people are still reading it after four hundred years, and even still making movies of it.  It may be that even greater writers’ works have been lost entirely, but that doesn’t seem as likely as the possibility that the work of more mediocre writers has been lost.

Anyway, I don’t know just at what I’m getting.  Certainly, I don’t expect that my own thoughts or writings will survive me.  They probably won’t even survive as long as I will, which is a rather sad thought, and one that I hope is wrong.  Still, I don’t really expect that I’ll be some newer instantiation of the old Herman Melville, Moby Dick situation, in which a work is barely noticed during the author’s life, but is later considered one of the greatest works of its era’s literature (especially if you leave out all the trivia about whaling…of which, by the way, there is very little in my writing).

Even if it turns out that my fiction and/or my non-fiction writings not only survive me but endure into the centuries of the future, it’s not as though it will do me any good.  I’ll be dead either way, and the world will almost certainly be better off—and certainly no worse off—for that fact, even if it happens today or tomorrow.

Of course, today I’m going in to the office, because it’s payroll day, and so I need to be there no matter what.  Though yesterday, during the part of the day when I was feeling most depressed and stressed and despondent and miserable—you know, most of the day—I considered just not showing up, not coming in, not doing anything ever again.  I’m not really much more enthusiastic this morning, but I don’t like to leave people in the lurch, not when I’ve allowed them to depend on me even to a minor degree.

Of course, letting people down in the long run is something at which I seem to be exceptionally skilled—or perhaps “talented” is a better word.  I certainly seem to have a knack for disappointing the people I love the most.  I suppose that I may also have a knack for disappointing people about whom I don’t give a flying shit, but, well, in that case it doesn’t exactly weigh on me much.  Let strangers and would-be users be disappointed in me.  I don’t really care.  I’m disappointed in myself, too, but I don’t like myself anyway, so I don’t really care what that asshole thinks about how much I’ve let him down.

But I do feel horrible about having let down my parents and my ex-wife, and especially my children.  Many of my strongest feelings and memories are those of loss and horror when those people have found that I was not worth keeping around in their lives…not too close, anyway.  I can’t actually blame them; it’s hard to live with someone who has chronic pain and dysthymia, let alone (apparently) some form of neurodevelopmental disorder.  But, of course, I disappointed and alienated people before the chronic pain, and sometimes when the dysthymia was not fully active and/or hadn’t dipped down into its many occasions of full-blown depression.  As for the other, well, if it’s there, it’s always been there and always will be there.  I don’t know how much it’s contributed to me being an allergen to people (metaphorically), and it’s a bit of a moot point, since there’s not much I can do about it.

Anyway, I’m very tired.  I don’t even know what I’ve written this morning, or why, but I have to go in to the office because it’s payroll day.  We’ve had a prosperous and productive few weeks, but for me that just tends to mean that things have been busier and I’ve had more work to do, and—worse—there has been more noise and chaos and more interruption in routine work.  This doesn’t help much when I’m already frankly veering even more than usual toward violent self-destruction.

But I can’t do anything much about that except try to continue and try not to inconvenience and be a bother and a detriment to the people around me if I can help it.  That’s about as high as my aspirations go anymore, and I don’t think I succeed at many of even those not-so-lofty goals very often.

Oh, well.  I hope this will all be over soon.  I need this all to be over soon.  I want everything (from my point of view) to be over soon.  I can’t tolerate it all much anymore.  At least it feels that way, though who knows what my breaking point actually is?  I’ve felt many times before that I was approaching it, but it hasn’t happened yet.

It has to be there, though.  I’m finite, I’m mortal, so there is a point at which I will no longer be able to endure, and I will finally and catastrophically and permanently break.  I’m kind of looking forward to it.

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What would a moribundt cake taste like?

It’s Tuesday now, in case you weren’t aware of that fact.  I’m feeling less perky this morning than I was yesterday, which I guess isn’t all that odd.  I’m also not sure what to write today—even more so than usual.

I’m rather tired, both mentally and physically.  Yesterday during the early part of the day I had a fair amount of energy, but then in the afternoon, sometime a bit after three, I think, my mood just crashed.  I felt physically fine; my pain wasn’t worse than usual, and was probably slightly better than average.  But I just felt the wind go out of my sails and lost nearly all my motivation.  I’m not sure why.  It was while I was drinking a Coke Zero®, which I don’t usually drink, but I doubt that it was the cause.

Possibly part of it was that my coworker had shown me some pictures from his daughter’s christening, and it reminded me of some baby pictures of my daughter and son, and so I pulled those up on my phone and showed a few to him.  Then, having opened that particular Pandora Brand™ can of worms, I looked through a lot of other pictures of my kids on my phone, and was reminded how much I have missed of their lives and how much I miss them, and how I’m probably never going to see them in person again.

I’m a surprisingly sentimental person, but I don’t think anyone else at the office is ever able to tell when I’m feeling so.  I’m not sure much of anyone around me is ever able to tell when I’m feeling down.  It’s frustrating, as I’ve written here before.

It’s rather as if one were in the process of drowning, coughing up water, waving, hoarsely calling out for help, and all people from the shore or the pool-side—very nearby, more than capable of tossing a life preserver or something similar—do is say thing things like, “That’s a good sidestroke you have”, and they mean it with complete sincerity.  They’re not teasing or taunting.  They’re not trying to be cruel, and they’re not knowingly being callous.  They honestly don’t seem able to tell that I’m about to drown…even people who’ve known me all my life.

Or perhaps they figure I just want to drown, and they don’t think it’s their place, or their right, to intervene.  I certainly sometimes make arguments and diatribes that might make it seem as if I’ve arrived at a desire to die because of some philosophical thought process; I’m well-read and I’m good at making sophistic arguments, so apparently it comes across as convincing, as a well-thought-out and definitive personal statement of rational, or at least reasoned, intent.  But all I’m really doing is trying to express how absolutely morose and hopeless I feel.  Such moods, however, are apparently rather opaque, whether on my face or in my speech or my behavior, and perhaps even in my writing.

Honestly, yesterday afternoon, I fantasized about finding the nearest pawn shop, of which there are many near where I live, and buying a gun and shooting myself.  I tried to imagine the process of doing it, and I didn’t feel hesitant.  I was very depersonalized, as I think the term is.  I felt that I could have cut off some of my own fingers with minimal difficulty.  I also felt that, even in the office, if someone had handed me a loaded pistol—especially if it were a nice, single-action revolver—I could have put it in my mouth, pointed it toward my soft palate, and pulled the trigger.

At that stage, what would have stopped me would have been mostly the issues of mess and rudeness.  It would be better to go find one of the areas of south Florida—there are many—where there basically are just lots of plants growing (and oodles of arthropods), such as along the train tracks but between stops, and do it there.

Anyway, obviously I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t do that stuff yesterday, unless I’m a ghost who is able to write a blog.  I do sometimes feel like I’m undead, as I’ve said before on this blog, but that’s not a literal thing.  I don’t think ghosts or zombies or any of the rest of such things actually exist, at least not in any supernatural sense.

I wish I could find some situation or circumstance where I could readily do something that would be good, that would maybe save some people’s lives or something, but would kill me.  Stepping in front of a child that was about to be shot or something like that might be good.  And, of course, I would wish that I would have the will, the courage, to carry out the act.

That’s always a worry.  Oh, well.  Life sucks.

I at least got a relatively good walk in last night.  I arrived at the destination train station and walked to the nearby bus stop and waited for the bus to arrive, but the app didn’t even show the usual real-time update on its position.  How quickly we become spoiled by such things!  So I watched as the arrival time of the bus came and passed and then five more minutes, and then five minutes after that, with no sign—in person or on the app—of the bus.  So I gave up, after wasting half an hour, and walked the five miles back to the house.

I considered stopping at McDonald’s© on the way, but decided I didn’t want anything from that particular fast food shoppe.  One of the great things about not eating during the day is that, by the time it’s time to eat for dinner, I don’t really feel hungry.  And, weirdly enough, walking the five miles back to the house was easier after not having eaten than it ever was after I had eaten, in the past.  This makes sense, biologically.  All my system’s resources were available for moving and walking; none were diverted to digestion, and I certainly have more than enough stored energy for the trek.

Unfortunately, since I’d foregone the fast food€, I needed to stop at a convenience store¥ and get something for dinner, but the one I chose didn’t have much that I wanted, so I had to settle, and had a relatively small and not terribly good dinner, at about ten o’clock at night.  Oh well.  Life, as I say, sucks∞.  Frankly, I think it would be nice just to stop eating entirely.  I may see if I can work my way toward that.

Anyway, this morning, my dips—the exercise, I mean—were noticeably easier than just a few days ago, which is always nice.  It would be nice to die with a lean but toned body, though I suppose it hardly matters.

And, now, I’m really going to have to head toward the bus stop, because I hate getting there when other people are already there if I can help it.  I hope you have a better day than I have, no matter how good a day I may be surprised to haveΩ.

[P.S.  Later in the morning:  The train announcement by the conductor includes the sentence, “We would like to remind you that safety and security are our top priorities.”  This is clearly false.  If those were their top priorities, the train would never run at all, and no one would be allowed on it.  Thus it would be as safe and secure as was possible…and the train would be utterly useless.  Safety and security can never truly be top priorities, at least not in any simple-minded sense, and even sensible safety is often not prioritized in any rational way.  I know people who fret over whether someone with a minor cold touched something of theirs, but who habitually drive over the speed limit, fail to signal, fail to come to complete stops, and not don’t pay full attention to what they are doing when driving.  It’s maddening.  People are idiots; life is idiotic.  I do not hold myself as an exception to those last two statements.]

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Wheels keep turning, unless they’ve gone flat–then things fall over

Well, in case it wasn’t obvious, I did not write a blog post yesterday, as I suspected might happen—or not happen, I guess.  I toyed with the idea of just quickly getting onto my blog account and writing a note that I was off from work and trying to rest, but even that took too much mental and physical energy.  So, sorry if anyone was worried.  I did mention on Wednesday that I thought I might take the next day off, so hopefully no one was too concerned.

I’m still pretty tired overall, but nothing like I was on Wednesday.  By the afternoon, I was really feeling confused and slow and still having those annoying little out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye flashes of movement that I thought were cockroaches (if they looked like they were nearby) or cats (if they looked more distant).  It’s a strange pairing, because I like cats, but have at best a mixed attitude toward roaches.  Oh, well, who knoweth the mysteries of the mind, with its vigour?

Anyway, I got back to the house Wednesday night—not early, but not later than the previous few days, at least—and I took two Benadryl and some Aleve and Tylenol (because it’s easier to rest when one’s pain is at least blunted) and I soon fell asleep, by 11 or so, I think.  I only woke up a few times during the night, but was able to get back to sleep because of the lingering effects of the Diphenhydramine, and only really woke up at about 5:30 in the morning, which is quite late for me.  But I also lazed about and dozed when I could during the day, so I did make up for some of my deficit, though as experts will tell us, one doesn’t truly make up for lost sleep.  One just works one’s way asymptotically toward the baseline one was “supposed” to maintain.

One also cannot build up a surplus of sleep, more’s the pity.

It was a fairly uneventful day, which shouldn’t be too surprising.  At one point I had the thought that I would try riding the bike to the train station today (though yesterday, today was tomorrow), but at a slow pace, to see if that helped avoid triggering a pain exacerbation.  I went out to look at the bike and saw that the front tire had gone surprisingly flat in the week or so since I’d ridden it last.  Still, I wasn’t worried.  I had my handy-dandy USB charged tire air pump, which works like a dream.

I got the pump out and attached it, and it seemed to be a bit slow inflating—then, I heard a weird little noise, and it stopped inflating, and the pressure readout dropped, and soon it became clear that there was a rupture somewhere.

I don’t know how it ruptured from sitting in the back of the house for roughly a week and then being inflated after losing air.  It’s very annoying.

Anyway, I quickly looked into how one repairs flats on bike tires and so on, and decided to order some same-day deliveries of replacement inner tubes (more than one because, if I was going to bother doing it, I might as well keep some spares), and a tire lever thingy, or whatever those are called, and also some stuff called “slime” that works a bit like “Fix a flat” I guess.  But by the time it arrived, I was by no means inclined to try to use it.  I’m still tired, and though I rested, my motivation, my will to live, and most importantly, my capacity to deal with the little, artificial tasks of life really are still all but nonexistent.

Oh, and another thing happened that was interesting.  I had ordered some food for delivery, and was making my way out front to wait for it, and found that my scooter—which had been moved without permission by the others who live in the house when they had what I guess was a Mother’s Day party on Sunday night, which was rather loud—which had clearly not been on the best level spot, had fallen over on its right side.  I’m not sure how it happened, but again, it had been moved to a less stable spot than I had put it in.  Now this is not some cute little scooter, easily returned to an upright position.  This is a 650 cc Honda Silverwing, and is essentially a motorcycle without a manual transmission.  I haven’t ridden it for a while because its tires have a slow leak and it’s a pain to have to inflate them and worse to replace them, and the battery has died, but anyway, it’s what it is.

I wasn’t even sure if I could lift it back up, but I tried, and I was able to do it—probably unwisely, given my failed back surgery syndrome—and then jockeyed it back into a better spot with some difficulty, as the front tire is low.  Hopefully, no one touches it again.  As it is, some of the paneling is cracked from the fall.

It’s little things like this that just wear me down steadily and surely.  There’s no upside to having to deal with them (obviously) and there’s no counter-balancing bunch of relatively good things in life to make up for them, or to re-energize me after I’ve gotten stressed out by dealing with them.  I know they aren’t major issues or crises, but that’s even part of the problem.  One feels motivated and even energized to deal with major issues when they happen—or else, one doesn’t feel too chagrined if one is overpowered by major issues and has to seek help.

But dealing with the minutiae of daily life is just mind-numbingly irritating, and there is no compensatory satisfaction to doing them, no reward other than just being able to get past them—which is preferable to the alternative, or else I wouldn’t bother, but is not even transiently satisfying.  It’s just the slight and temporary relief of a kind of psychological pain, which will inevitably return.

I wish meditation didn’t give me so much trouble with my depression, which it seems to do.  It would be nice to get past the sense of self and the dukkha of life.  Maybe I should try fasting or something, if I can work my way up to doing that.  Trouble is, as I think I’ve pointed out before, food is at least a slightly reliable source of minor, temporary pleasure.  But I’m overweight, anyway, so food mightn’t be a bad thing to eschew (get it?) for a while.

Maybe I’ll do that, if I can.  I’ll let you know.  Meanwhile, it’s about time to leave and head for the bus.  Thanks for letting me indulge in venting my thoughts here, those of you who read them.  It’s the only outlet I have, so unfortunately, it bears the brunt of a lot of tedious dreariness.  I try at least to be mildly funny when I can.

I’m not sure if I succeed at that very often.  But it’s one of those things about life; you have to laugh when you can, or else you’ll just cry.

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A ledge on the edge of a bottomless pit

Well, I got almost no sleep last night, to the point where calling it “last night” feels very odd and surreal, since my consciousness has been continuous—more or less—since yesterday morning.

I think I dozed for about twenty minutes, total, over the course of the night, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, though when it comes to subjective experience, it’s always difficult to be entirely certain of all the details.  In any case, I just wanted you to know that, if I’m even more bizarre and erratic than usual, that’s at least part of the reason why.  I know that I’m misinterpreting many of the things that I see out of the corner of my eye, currently, experiencing visual illusions that border on being hallucinations.

I really don’t know what I’m going to do.  I apologize for always dumping all my negative crap on here, no doubt alienating many potential readers, but I literally have no one else with whom I can talk about things like this.  I certainly don’t want to converse about this with anyone who is still willing to talk to me at all, because my unguarded thoughts are poisonous, even to me, and all the more so to anyone else.

It was partly a good and partly not so good day at work yesterday.  Of course, I was very busy, but for the most part I kept up with things and even kept a positive demeanor (for me, anyway).  However, there was overflow of work well into lunch hour, so I didn’t get much break, and didn’t get a chance to rest my back.  So that’s not in very good shape now.

More than one usually sensible person tried to push to get deals in situations where it wasn’t really ideal, and we supposedly have criteria to guide us on this, but the boss doesn’t stick with his own rules consistently.  When you do that, people will tend to try to push around the rules, since they recognize that they aren’t absolute.  And I end up being the only gatekeeper on these things, or the main one.

So I have to be the official asshole of the office, I have to be the bad guy—which should be fine, considering my love of villains, but it really is not.  It also feels futile, because I’m always being overridden, and I have no power or authority to put my foot down against the owner of the business.  So I just get angry and frustrated, partly just because of the inconsistency.  And when I say that I’m angry and frustrated, I don’t mean it in a lighthearted way.  I get really angry, but since I’m not easily able to express or release my emotions even at the best of times, they just churn inside me, and I hate myself because I get so hatefully angry.  I feel that I want just to burn everything down, to destroy it all.  But of course, I won’t do that because I have no right to do that, so instead I’m inclined to destroy my things and to harm myself, psychologically and physically.

I do it, sometimes.  I’m frankly surprised that my guitars are not in pieces yet.

Then, at the end of the day yesterday, a person in the office with whom I get along as well as anyone ended up staying quite late trying to close a relatively annoying deal, and of course, I have to verify and then process and record the deal, so it’s not as though I can leave until everyone else is done.  The boss waited, since he was driving this coworker to the train station, and he offered to take me there as well, but I was too wound up to want that.  I wanted to walk to the train—it’s only a mile, anyway.

But I was so angry and so stressed out, anyway, somehow even more so because it was someone I like, and toward whom I don’t want to feel the towering rage and frustration that I know people can’t quite even tell is happening—though they know I’m upset.  Why would I not be?  I live farther away than almost anyone else in the office, and I have to leave last, because I’m the one who processes and records and locks up.  Also, it’s just annoying as hell that people flout the schedule that we nominally have, since it’s a schedule we have had all along, and it hasn’t changed.

But again, it’s one of those things where, if a rule or a schedule isn’t enforced, people in general don’t take it seriously.  They think they can do whatever they want, or at least they push, they test, they see how far they can go outside the boundaries of the supposed rules, and eventually the rules might just as well never have existed.  And I get so mad, and when I get so mad at someone I actually like it makes it worse, and I really hate myself that it gets me so upset.  I hate feeling that way.  But I don’t seem to be able not to feel that way, not for as long as I’m trying to keep going, anyway.  I would have to give up completely in some sense not to care, not to let it bother me.

So, I didn’t get back to the house until just before nine last night, and one would think that I would be able to get to sleep after such a stressful afternoon and evening, but that was not the case.

I was thinking to myself at the office as I waited for that last deal finally to finish, that I have to be at the office today (which was tomorrow, yesterday), and I need to be there through this Saturday, since my coworker who can do some of the things I do won’t be around.  But after that, there will be at least two weeks in which I am inessential, and in which, if anything happened to me, there would be time and situational setting for the office to adjust to me being gone.

The only real problem would be payroll.  If I have a complete breakdown, and if I crash and burn, as I actually hope or at least wish I would do, then it will be minimally disruptive otherwise, and as for payroll, well—it’s not like I’m the only person in the world who can keep track of sales and commissions and splitting of deals, and keep track of who is paid by the hour versus (or in addition to) commission, and note when people arrive and leave if they’re hourly, and scan written records to keep for future use, and download phone recordings to the local hard drive, and update the sales board numbers on the fly in his head, and keep track of whether we need to order more coffee or more sugar or more paper towels or toilet paper or coffee cups and to order them.

I may well be the only one with an MD (and a supposedly very high IQ) who is doing such things for a small sales office, but that, I guess, is what happens when one is quite smart but has a chronic mood disorder, and chronic pain, and (probably) a neurodevelopmental disorder.  Such a person cannot manage the nonsense that living in the world of humans entails, cannot maintain a sensible and successful lifestyle without people close to him who can help him do that.  So one ends up where one ends up—ultimately, the grave, of course, but in the meantime, there are many ledges on the way down to the pit.

And, of course, now I’m on my own, living in a single room (with attached bathroom) in a house in south Florida, and I’m not up to maintaining even a scooter or a car, irritated even by having to deal with a bicycle, especially when it seems to make my back and hips and legs worse when I ride, which is maddening, because otherwise I kind of enjoy riding it.

Anyway, I’m shrinking inward, and my mind is shriveling, and I think I’m on my way out, one way or another.  If I had any purpose, if I had any meaning in my life, I probably could endure indefinitely—I have a fairly deep well of persistence or stubbornness.  It doesn’t work to my advantage, though.  It just leads me to keep torturing myself, chipping away at myself, eroding myself, grinding me into dust.

The whole process is taking too long.  Anyway, I should get going and head for the bus…because that’s what I do, I guess, I just keep going…I keep going until I break.  But I am breaking; I’m in the process.  I don’t think it will be long now.

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A session of digression but without a confession

Hello, everyone.  It’s Monday morning, and I’m still at the house, sitting on the piano bench—the only piece of furniture I use for sitting, though I almost never play the keyboard anymore—and writing this blog post on my laptop.  Last week, every post was written on my phone.  Also last week, my posts didn’t get as many views or “likes” as they usually do.  At least, that’s my impression, and I wonder if writing on my phone contributed to the outcome.  I haven’t actually done an empirical, side-by-side comparison of the numbers, so I could easily be wrong about the posts’ popularity.  Perhaps it’s more a sign of my emotional state than the state of the world.  As Radiohead so aptly sang in There There, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  Or, as I like to say, “Just because you inferred it doesn’t mean it was implied”.

Still, this is my own blog, so I suppose I can allow myself to proceed from my subjective point of view.

I’m not looking forward to this week.  My coworker with whom I share some of my duties is out today and tomorrow, and I’m also going to be working this coming Saturday after having worked this last Saturday, since said coworker was/will be out of town.  I had already had a week of terrible sleep, even for me, which didn’t help.  I did take a bit of rest yesterday, though I had to do my laundry.  But a lot of the resting was simply me being wiped out due to the fact that I had some form of (presumably food-borne) enteritis, so I didn’t feel well at all, despite taking some loperamide*.  That illness, at least, appears mostly to have run its course, for which I am grateful.  It’s not pleasant to try to commute while fighting a lower GI issue, but it’s not as though I can stay out of work today with my coworker out.

Sorry, I know all this trivia about my day to day life is probably both boring and depressing.  What can I say?  I’m a depressing and boring person.

Yesterday, between trips to the bathroom, I picked up the Les Paul guitar that my former housemate built, because I wanted to practice some more on that David Bowie song I mentioned last week.  As with most songs, it sounded even better on the Les Paul.  It’s the best sounding instrument—of any kind (which includes cellos, pianos, guitars, violins, and keyboards in general**)—that’s I’ve had the privilege to play.  He did an amazing job with it.  The red Strat he made is also excellent, and I love it, but the Les Paul is almost miraculous in its tone.

It was remarkably dusty, but that didn’t bother me too much.  I’m not one to polish or tweak or maintain things, except when using them, and then only to the extent that it’s necessary in order to use them.  My brain just doesn’t work in such a way that, for instance, I would ever notice or care that a car I owned could use a car wash, or that my room was cluttered, or that my desk was cluttered, or whatever.

Cars and the like are merely things one uses for a purpose, as far as I’m concerned.  And I’m actually quite happy that I seem to have been spared the whole social hierarchy, showing off, keeping up with the Joneses, owning things as status symbols, and so on, kind of mentality.  I’m not intimidated by so-called superiors, and it usually doesn’t occur to me that I ought to be so.  I’m also not disdainful of so-called subordinates, and I am provisionally convinced that this is the correct attitude.

Of course, all this sounds a bit like a species of showing off in its own right, I guess.  I don’t mean it that way (though I am glad of it, as I said).  I just recognize now that perhaps some of the things that have always been true about me, and which I guess are different from the way many other people are, may in fact be related to ASD if I do indeed meet the criteria for that.  I have never been a person who cared about owning the latest popular brand of sneakers when I was a kid, or a particular brand of clothes or jacket or whatnot—I honestly couldn’t even understand why people cared about such things.

I did like some things that I thought looked cool, or neat, or interesting sometimes, and I still do.  I also had a jacket, on the left breast of which were pinned dozens upon dozens of buttons depicting the band, The Police, because I was fairly obsessed with them and bought every such button I encountered.  But I am not and have never been the sort of person who would have put racing stripes or LEDs on a motorcycle, or tried to get bright chrome doo-dads for a car.  A car is just a tool.

So is a guitar (or a piano or a cello).  These are wonderful tools, and I care more about them than I do about cars, because their purpose is to make music, which is much more aesthetically pleasing than just being able to get places quickly and easily while sitting on my fat bottom.  Even so, what matters in a guitar, say, is the sound.  I honestly don’t really give a flying f-ck at a tiny little rat’s a-s if it looks shiny or fancy or whatever***.

I don’t know how I got started on that big and pointless digression.  I suppose I’ll be able to see the route when I go back to edit this, though I still might be mystified by it.  At least it fills the page, so to speak.  And it isn’t even late enough that I would normally have left for the bus stop, which is good, because it’s raining a bit, and even with the bus shelter roof, the rain tends to get little splatters on the laptop screen if I write there.  I definitely write much faster on the laptop, though at least doing the phone stuff last week doesn’t seem to have hurt my thumbs too much.

I have to work up my courage to go in to work, though.  I just need to survive until Saturday, at least, because I don’t want to leave everyone at the office in the lurch.  After that, it’ll be two weeks in a row where I won’t be working on Saturday (to make up for two weekends on), and so there won’t be any time when my presence is essential—well, except for payroll, I guess, but I can’t be too tied down by that.  Having to prepare the payroll for people is not by itself an adequate reason to continue living, not indefinitely.

I’m not sure I’ve ever found an adequate reason, even during the times when I was reasonably mentally stable.  I just didn’t much think about it, not in any serious way.  When you’re not feeling depressed and/or stressed, you don’t really need a reason to continue, you just coast along on the surface of biological drives and follow the local path-of-least-action.  At least, I do.  But it’s been a long time since I’ve had a noteworthy interval of not being depressed and/or stressed, and unfortunately, when depressed, time seems to take much longer to pass than do the times in between.

Probably, reading my blog posts feels like that sometimes.  Meaning that the time is much longer, more wearing, than other times.  Apologies for that.  I hope you have a good week, nonetheless.  And to all you mothers**** out there, I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day yesterday.

*Look it up if you don’t know what it is.  It’s an excellent product.

**I’ve also briefly played a saxophone—a cheap one bought from a flea market.  It made a lovely sound, and I enjoyed diddling around on it and making absurdly loud but cool noises, and it was easier to play than I expected it to be, but I lost interest pretty quickly.  I like to sing and play, and you can’t do that with the saxophone.  I do, in retrospect, regret that I had never even thought to try to work out and play the sax riff from Baker Street.  What a missed opportunity!

***Though I do grant that the guitars my former housemate made are lovely.

****And I don’t mean that as “half a word”.

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Interior decoration in a derelict ruin

Okay…Wednesday, morning, smartphone, my room, starting before leaving for the bus, all that tedious nonsense.

There, that’s out of the way.

I’m really not doing too well, even for me.  Yesterday was quite stressful, for internal and external reasons, though some of the external reasons mean it was a good day for the office.  Meanwhile, I banged my own head (deliberately) so hard and so often that I got a headache, on top of a worse-than-usual day for back pain and sleep the night before.

Near the end of the day, I took to whacking the back of my hand with a heavyish metal tool.  My boss, who knows that sometimes I will thump my legs and sides and things when they are in pain and spasm, asked me, “Is that where it hurts?”

I replied, after a moment, “It is, now.”. He laughed, but I’m not sure he quite got my point or why I was doing what I was doing.  It was an attempt to distract myself not just from other physical pain, but from stress and anger and the overwhelming sensory chaos of the room by inducing pain.  It works for a moment at a time, and this method doesn’t tend to leave marks, other than some bruises at times.  There are other ways that last longer, but they leave marks, some of which can last a long time…some of which, even, are more or less permanent.

I’m trying.  I’m still taking Saint John’s Wort, and I know at a personal and professional level that it’s too soon to expect any major results, but I fear it’s making me feel worse.  I suppose if it at least triggers something, even something catastrophic, that’s better than my present status as some sort of specter* or ringwraith or phantom‒an undead, but without a purpose.

I’m not a zombie; they tend to be mindless, and in a sense, are far less tortured figures than an undead that is aware of itself, that retains a mind and a personality, but is unable to grow or obtain new life.

I’m trying to treat my allergies and respiratory issues, and studying and working on some breathing techniques that seem to be good, but it feels like rearranging the furniture in a house where the roof has already fallen in, the windows are all broken, there’s no light or water or heat, and winter is coming.  I wish I could just lie on the (figurative) sofa and let the cold take me.

I don’t actually have a sofa, though.  Shame.

If I were my patient‒as I’ve said before, I think‒I would consider referring myself for inpatient psychiatric treatment**, but since this particular patient doesn’t have insurance and lives in a state, in a nation, with shitty, shitty mental healthcare, especially for those who are not wealthy, the options are not great.

Better just to let go.

Hang on, I need to go to the bus stop.

***

Okay, I’m at the bus stop now.

My back is really feeling tight and sore today.  It’s very irritating.  I’m trying to do the things that will help it, such as particular stretches and exercises and whatnot.  I’m not riding the bike, I’m using my shoe inserts and knee and ankle braces, all that.  I have roll-ons and creams and the like that are supposed to help, and I take a rather large (and probably toxic) quantity of OTC analgesics/anti-inflammatories.  I even have a semi-portable massage chair at the office, which I bought, and a foot massager I was given as a gift to go along with it.

Nothing is working very well.

The trouble is, there’s no reason to assume that there actually is an answer or remedy for certain kinds of pain.  We have not been honed by nature with a figurative eye toward having a long, healthy, satisfying life, free of severe physical and psychological pain.  We’ve been honed by nature to be able to survive long enough to reproduce successfully and keep our offspring alive until they can fend for themselves.

The thing about chronic pain, both physical and psychological, is that they are invisible to evolution (more or less) because they tend to develop after the age and time of reproduction has passed.  Pain is useful in the short term, especially when we’re young, because it makes us avoid and fix (when we can) damage that might take us out of the gene pool.  Ditto for fear‒assuming that all these things are present in appropriate or relatively moderate levels, of course.

But the functions that work to improve reproductive success when younger, or at least don’t harm it, can persist and worsen and become pathological as time passes, but that won’t reduce the presence of any genes for these functions.  And, of course, the prevalence and levels of most attributes follow a roughly bell-curve distribution in a population.  Most people cluster near the local mean of any given trait, but there are always outliers, and with enough people, there will be individuals who are outliers in more than one, even independently varying trait.

And then, of course, there can be traits that are good for one thing but bad in another way, and which persist or are selected for because the short-term, reproductive good outweighs the downside from the “viewpoint” of natural selection.  The sickle cell trait confers relative resistance to malaria, but having two copies of it can consign one to a truly hellish existence.

Similarly, it may be that attributes that tend to associate with high intelligence‒systematizing ability, certain kinds of imagination, inventiveness, ability to solve certain kinds of problems, certain kinds of intense focus, and so on that can be extremely useful for any group and for individuals, and lead to reproductive success and more general success, especially in modern society‒may lead, when aggregated together in the right way in some individuals, to autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, and/or a tendency toward depression, anxiety, and self-harm.

Who knows?

The bus is coming soon.  I’ve gotta go.  In more ways than one, I really feel like I really need just to go.

*I’m often torn about the spelling of this word.  I prefer the “old-world” spelling with the “tre” rather than the “ter”, but I worry that it comes across as pretentious.

**Because prescribing a large dose of fentanyl and phenobarbital and digoxin and Valium would be frowned upon by medical and legal “authorities”.  And I don’t have access to such things now.

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There are numerous dimensional axes to reality; it’s probably best not to grind just one of them at a time

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and again, I’m beginning this post on my smartphone while still sitting in my room at the house.  I know that’s not very exciting news, but it’s one of the more noteworthy things in my day-to-day existence.  To quote my own song, albeit ironically, “Don’t you wish that you were me?”

I wish I had more interesting things to discuss here.  Goodness knows there are always many “interesting” things going on in the world, depending on your point of view.  But that’s the nub of the rub: interestingness* is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Many of the things that seem to intrigue other people seem dull to me.  And some controversial subjects about which I do have interest and at least some opinions are being addressed by others, to the degree that I really don’t have a whole lot to add.

I suppose the subject of mental health is near and dear** to me.  I do become irritated when the public argumentation about things like “mass shootings” using “assault” weapons becomes divided into poles of:  focus on restricting access to assault weapons versus focus on mental health issues, as though only one of the two matters could be addressed at any time by any government or political party.  But surely, these are semi-orthogonal questions, and both are worthy of discussion.

Now, I’ll grant you that, when it comes to deaths among civilians related to firearms in the US, more than half‒and sometimes as many two thirds‒are suicides, so here, mental health is truly a major concern.  I have personal experience with this danger; I used to target shoot recreationally, and owned a few pistols, but when I was deeply depressed, my therapist asked, rather pointedly, that I turn my guns over to her for safe-keeping, which I did.  Once I was doing better, she returned them, but later, after I had back-slid, I did come one sixth of the way to killing myself with one of them.

But all this isn’t really relevant to the so-called mass shootings, which actually make up a tiny (but slightly growing) fraction of even gun-related homicides.  Weirdly enough, it’s not a simple, one-dimensional question.  There are many things happening all at once, and some of them are independent variables, and some are dependent, and some are partially dependent, and the causal relationship from one to the other(s) can often be difficult to ascertain at a superficial glance.

Complex issues are rarely best understood via an “us versus them”, tribal approach, which rapidly tends to descend into ad hominem attacks and other manipulative, rhetorical, self-deceptive and counterproductive tactics.  Reality doesn’t actually take sides in general, and more importantly, it does not make exceptions even for people who are honestly and innocently mistaken.  The safest approach to dealing with it is to try to understand it as objectively and thoroughly as possible, without political bias or other tribal nonsense.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that fashion was a form of ugliness so repulsive that it had to be changed every six months.  Politics is in some ways slightly more durable…but only slightly.  The overarching trends can be important‒to humans and their victims and beneficiaries, anyway‒but the momentary fads and fashions and personality cults are so much candy floss, and they have essentially no relevance to the greater universe***.  Humans are tiny, pathetically self-important newcomers on the surface of one planet among hundreds of billions‒perhaps trillions‒in this galaxy alone.  Everyone needs to get over him- or herself‒or whatever pronoun-self an individual prefers.

I have thoughts and “opinions” about various subjects, about some of which I have reasonable knowledge and expertise, but one thing I notice very much is that almost every subject of controversy is more complicated than humans seem to tend to want to think.  That’s partly just down to primatology; humans approach many questions not from a position of dedicated, disciplined, rigorous, and self-critical seekers of truth, but as rival flanges of baboons, or rival groups within a flange of baboons.  They often behave not as if they actually seek to understand the nature of reality to the best of their abilities, but as monkeys throwing feces at other monkeys to gain or maintain a position in a dominance hierarchy****.

It would be nice if people could actually try to address the very real problems of adult mental health, which is still underappreciated and in an even poorer state than healthcare in general, instead of using it as a distraction from the orthogonal question of why there are an increasing number of “mass shootings” and whether restricting access to “assault weapons” would do more good than harm, and by what measures.

An honest discussion***** of serious topics should recognize that finding the truth is not a zero-sum contest but, ideally, a mutual exchange to mutual benefit.  No one has all the facts in hand at any given time, and probably no one ever will have all the facts, but to try always to gain more facts, more knowledge, seems to be a useful guideline.

But if you see someone who disagrees with you, even about an issue that you consider important, as merely an enemy, then you make yourself into an enemy, too‒not just of the person who disagrees with you, but of anyone who seeks objective knowledge and understanding of the world.

*This feels like it’s not really a proper word, but the alternatives that come to my mind seem worse.

**Perhaps something like “anti-dear” would be more accurate; a quantity with the same absolute value as “dear”, but on the other side of zero.

***Except as they might influence whether the creatures of the Earth ever truly initiate, as David Deutsch called it, The Beginning of Infinity.

****It’s in encounters with such tendencies that I find myself sympathetic with Lord Foul’s disgusted statement, “…yet in their pride they dare to name themselves earthfriends, servants of peace.  They are too blind to perceive their own arrogance…”

*****Note that I do not say “debate”.  I generally consider debate a poor means by which to seek truth, since the process tends to become merely a contest, a display of skill, where rhetoric and charisma become more important than actual facts, reasons, and explanations, and thus the spectacle devolves into mere chest-thumping by hubris-addicted apes.  Regrettably, the very courts of law take this approach, and thus we have the mortifying spectacle of a prominent murder trial pivoting on the mildly clever couplet, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit”.  If anyone saw and heard that and was not filled with abysmal despair regarding the criminal justice system, I don’t know what you’re missing, or what I’m missing.

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I didn’t write a blog post yesterday

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I’m back to writing on my laptop—the computer, that is, not the upper surface of my thighs when I’m seated.  Writing on those would not only be rather bizarre, but I think it would be quite difficult to upload such writing to WordPress without first retyping it, anyway.  And if I’m going to do that, I might as well just write my posts out longhand on paper before typing them in.  I sometimes consider doing that, but the time required is prohibitive.

I was off sick yesterday, which is why I didn’t write a blog post.  I had a migraine, with nausea, though somewhat regrettably, I did not find myself able to throw up.  So I laid on the floor with the lights off and the blinds drawn for a little more than half the day.

I’m going to be riding the bus to the train station this morning, though I was tempted to try my bike, because I got this new, portable, electric, USB rechargeable air pump on which you can set your goal pressure and it pumps up to that pressure very quickly then stops.  It came fully charged and worked beautifully on my scooter tires—then the scooter battery turned out to be dead, so I couldn’t use it.

I was frustrated, so I tried it on the bike and realized that, despite my earlier attempts, I had previously underinflated the tires a bit.  So, I rode the bike to 7-11 Sunday (and back—no need to leave it there), and I had no noticeable exacerbation of my back pain.

However, the trip to 7-11 is shorter than to the train station and back, and I’m a bit too nervous to do the latter today…cats walking on hot stoves and all that.  Anyway, I’m writing the beginning of this post (now) in my room in the house, but will probably finish it at the bus stop*, depending on how fast I write, which is, to be fair, pretty fast.

I started taking Saint John’s Wort again this weekend—it’s possible that’s what gave me a belly-ache on Sunday and then might even have contributed to my migraine yesterday, though I’m skeptical of that.  Still, it’s not as though any other antidepressant ever failed to give me side-effects, and most of the others require a prescription.

I tried the curcumin stuff, but it gave me stomach problems almost immediately, so that was a miss.  I’ve got Sam-E, or however they write that stuff, but it’s more of a supplement to treatment or whatever and I’d rather not start it at the same time as the SJW**.  Anyway, since “the wort” (as in “going from bad to wort”?) was the first and most effective antidepressant I’ve taken, so I’ll try it again as, potentially, the last antidepressant I take.  I simply cannot go on the way I am.

I’ve been trying to do mindfulness meditation, as you may know, and when I do it helps a bit.  I also try not to let myself by constantly distracted by other things from it when I’m at work, and it seems to be somewhat useful as far as it goes.  One of the biggest benefits to meditation is that it seems to make me less grumpy at the office, and less stressed out when people interrupt something I’m working on to ask me to do something unrelated, derailing my train of thought and my work process and everything.  I still dislike those things, but at least I don’t feel like I want to lash out at the people involved with teeth and fists and claws and everything to make them go away.  Well…I do feel like I want to, but I can at least keep from letting it show in my voice.

I think it only shows to me, anyway.  I don’t think other people ever really pick up on what’s going on in my head.  I feel like it ought to be obvious to everyone that I’ve been depressed and self-harming and feel suicidal and all that, but no one really says anything, and when I mention such things, people seem to think I’m joking.

I suppose I have only myself to blame for that latter problem; I have a dark and somewhat morbid sense of humor, and I guess my delivery must be pretty deadpan whether I’m joking or not.

Here’s a hint, in case anyone is paying attention:  If I ever say that I hate my life and feel like I want to kill myself, and to hurt myself, and wish I would catch pneumonia or cancer or trip in front of an oncoming car or just drop dead—even if I sound like I’m joking, even if I am joking—I do mean it.  It may not be the whole story of me.  Obviously it isn’t, because I’m not dead yet, but it is true, nevertheless.  I hate myself, and a big part of why I haven’t actively sought out help or whatever, or at least not much, is that I really don’t like myself, and don’t want help, or rather, can’t let myself seek help because I don’t think I deserve it.

I have no sense of anything like a future for myself; I can’t imagine a life even one year down the road, even one in the autumn of this year.  I can’t imagine another birthday.  I have no image of my own future life in my mind.  It’s just a fog of emptiness and entropy.

Anyway, that’s that.  Go ahead, take it as a joke or as the mind drippings of a dealer in melodrama.  I missed yet another potential palindromic digit sequence in recording numbers at the office last week, and it’s getting old even hoping for one, however fun it would be.  If one appeared today, I don’t  think it would matter (though it’s not possible, currently).  What’s the point?  Is getting eight digits that read the same front to back as the recording number on an audio recording verification system really a good enough reason to stay alive?

I mean, I like fun with numbers and everything, but they only have so much charm.  Hell, there’ve been at least two new Numberphile videos with Professor Grime, one of my favorites, and I haven’t bothered to watch either of them.  I couldn’t give a shit.

That’s not a good sign, in case you didn’t know.

Anyway, it’s getting about time to leave for the bus stop, and I’m already at over a thousand words in the first draft of this.  I do type quickly, and when I can just write what I think pretty much as I think it, as I do with these blog posts, it comes fast.  It’s much easier and quicker than speaking, ironically.  Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people seem to read anymore.  They all want to watch five minute smartphone videos on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, with their annoying, vertical aspect ratios that just don’t really work to make a watchable tableaux of anything but some juvenile face, most of the time.

There are a few brilliantly funny videos, I’ll admit, but they are short.

There are reasons both movies and TV are wider than they are tall and always have been.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that we evolved in a world where all the stuff with which we can interact is within a fairly narrow vertical range but a functionally unlimited one horizontally.  We and other animals don’t do much going up or down relative to moving along the surface of the ground.  Even flight takes place within a range much narrower than the horizon is wide.

But because smartphones are relatively effortless—and thus mindless—people make all those stupid vertical videos.  Heck, I’ve done it myself.  See?

video screenshot

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  Who knows what will come next.  I’m giving myself a last chance with the Saint John’s Wort, but it may be just enough to give me the will to make an end, who knows?  Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.  Maybe this blog will all be the beginning of a truly long course of writing, and maybe it will be the final records of a mind headed for catastrophic failure and death.  The latter seems more likely to me, but I’m unable to be objective about it.

Thank you all for reading, anyway.  You know who you are:  you’re the ones reading, and thus the only ones who will be thanked.  That’s kind of convenient, at least.

*I finished it at the house before leaving.

**Saint John’s Wort, that is.  It has nothing to do with “social justice” or the warriors thereof.  I’m not even sure that’s a coherent term, “social justice”.  Perhaps it’s merely a redundant one.  What’s the alternative?  Anti-social justice?  Asocial justice?  Solitary justice?  It’s weird.

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An intention to work on meditation

It’s Friday morning, now, and I’m writing this on my phone, because I did go back to the house from the office last night.  My boss actually made a point to have me leave a bit early; he took me to the train station himself.

I guess it was pretty obvious how worn out I was.  I actually felt rather giddy and weird much of the day, yesterday, but it wasn’t exactly a healthy feeling.  This morning I feel more like my usual self, which is not an improvement, necessarily, but at least it’s “usual”.

I’ve been reading a book called From Strength to Strength, by a guy who was on Sam Harris’s podcast and sounded like he had some interesting ideas.  It’s basically about how the abilities and habits people have as young go-getters, achievers, innovators and whatnot inevitably diminish over time, but that other abilities, and the possibility for a different and deeper kind of success, can happen after passing the peak of the “fluid” intelligence stage.

However, as he notes, it can be difficult for people whose habits of achieving have been honed and have worked well so far in their lives to achieve what they thought they wanted‒money, power, prestige, and so on‒to let go of those habits and move on to more rewarding “second act” kinds of things, like good relationships, family, teaching and helping others, and spiritual pursuits.

Now, I was certainly a high-achiever, but all my youthful rewards were taken from me by injury and ill-health, divorce, depression, and incarceration.  I lost everything I had except a few knick-knacks that had been lent to other people, and I lost my wife and kids (effectively), and I certainly lost any and all prestige I’d had.

The prestige stuff was never a huge deal to me, nor was “being a doctor” the way in which I defined myself (I’m not sure I ever actually “defined” myself in any way other than that I was the person thinking and doing whatever I was thinking and doing).  I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, when other plans got derailed due to my congenital heart condition.

Medicine was something I liked, though‒intellectually challenging and stimulating, full of science and learning, and centered around the ability to do real good in the world and relieve or at least lessen the suffering of some people within the reach of my arm.  That was good, because I have always felt a kind of inherent guilt over the very fact of my own existence, and have felt very much wrong in this world.  I’ve always felt that I had to justify, in some way, my continued existence, the inevitable depletion I caused of the planet’s oxygen and food and water.  Either that or I would simply need to embrace being a villain and willfully choose destruction and cruelty and evil.

That latter bit was too much work, though, and it’s hard to be a pure bad guy when you’re what might be thought of as a sort of anti-narcissist.

So, anyway, back to the subject.  I didn’t need to force myself to jump off the treadmill of my youthful power curve; I had already crashed and burned catastrophically.

I unfortunately have no close relationships whatsoever to cultivate anymore, not really.  My sister and brother, with whom I get along well and always have, are more than 1300 miles away, and my cousin slightly farther.  I cannot face the prospect of trying to move closer to them, to change where I am located, to try to find a new place to make a living, and to become a burden, even a minor one, upon those people‒even if they would be willing to take that burden up.  I am not willing to deliver it.  Not to them.

However, I may be able to try to approach some kind of “spiritual” life.  I can’t be religious in any kind of traditional, “western” sense.  I just can’t buy into that stuff.  I’ve tried.  I’ve read the whole Bible (parts of it multiple times), both testaments, including the first chapter of Genesis in Hebrew.  I’ve read as much of the Koran as I could force my way through (about half).  None of them are very impressive, and I’m willing to bet the Book of Mormon, for instance, isn’t any better.

However, I’ve always been pretty good at self-hypnosis and meditation.  I’ve had trouble with meditation in recent years, because, while it tends to reduce my tension and stress, it seems to exacerbate my depression.  However, that was often meditation associated with a sort of mantra, drawn from my time of self-hypnotism habits.  But maybe if I try simple, pure Vipassana meditation, it might be better.

I don’t think I could possibly become very much more depressed than I already am without crashing full-steam into a life-threatening‒or life-ending‒crisis.  And that would be at least some kind of result, so that’s not so very bad.

Anyway, I think I’m going to try, in my moments of lack of work, to get into a more persistent practice of mindfulness meditation.  I’m not ready‒and I may never be‒to work toward any metta (lovingkindness) meditation, because it’s hard for me to feel beneficent feelings toward the world in general, though it’s easier than feeling them toward myself.

It’s not true that in order to love others you have to love yourself; that’s patent nonsense.  It may be that you have to love yourself in order to be loved, but I doubt even that is close to being true.  These all seem to be just tropes and gimmicks trying to trick people, often with good intentions, to work on loving themselves.

Anyway, that’s a tangent.  I do hope that maybe, at least, being less tense will make me snack a bit less, since eating is almost a form of “stimming” for me, a kind of self-soothing behavior, a reliable source of at least transient positive feeling, strongly wired into the nervous system.  I don’t eat because of actual hunger, that’s for sure.  When I actually am hungry, I usually don’t eat, because the feeling, the sensation, is quite interesting and stimulating.  But, of course, these kinds of eating habits end up making me feel worse about myself, and they aren’t good for my physical health.

So, I’ll try to do the mindfulness stuff.  I might as well.  I’ve tried every class of antidepressant except MAO inhibitors in the past.  I’ve not tried psychedelics, unless you count my disastrous attempt to take a hit off a former coworker’s blunt that led me to feeling weird‒not in a good way‒and throwing up repeatedly for a few hours.  I’m very nervous about psychedelics, because my mind is not my friend, and I don’t know what it might do to me.  Anyway, I have no idea where I would even get psychedelics from, or even MDMA (which seems like it might be interesting, but is apparently neurotoxic).

I’ll try to try meditate, and who knows, maybe I’ll develop at least some insight and improvement.  If I do, I imagine the character of this blog will change.  That might be something to which my readers can look forward.

In any case, I work tomorrow, so in the shorter term, I will be writing some form of blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen.  Don’t expect any real changes by then, of course.  That would be almost ridiculous.

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The deep of night is crept upon our blog, and Nature must obey necessity.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 27th of April, the week after my son’s birthday, and I’m already in the office as I write this blog post‒because I never left the office last night.  It got to be late enough that, if I caught the next train, I probably wouldn’t have reached the house before nine, whether I took the bus(es) from the train station or walked.  That is what happened Monday night and Tuesday night.

Of course, If I’d had the bike at the train station I might have reached the house earlier, but I didn’t, and I don’t regret that.  Given that every time I ride that bike, it triggers a flare and a new (but not improved) alteration of my back and leg and foot pain, I think I’m going to keep it for “special occasions” or something like that, even though I’ll be paying for it for three or four more months or something like that.

Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?

Even if I’d caught an earlier train, I don’t think I would have had the energy to get back to the house from the train station, and had I reached the house, I don’t think I would’ve had the energy to come back to the office this morning.  I had sort of planned all along to stay here, because if I went back to the house, I didn’t think I’d be coming in today, and I wasn’t sure if I would be coming in ever again (if you know what I mean).  I guess maybe it was a kind of semi-conscious self-preservation thing, in a way.  But, of course, that can’t work forever.

It’s not a big deal if I stay one night in the office.  It’s not like it will produce a noticeable effect, outwardly.  I always wear one of 2 kinds of black shirts, the same kind of black pants (or trousers if you prefer), the same brand of black socks and one of three brands of black shoes.  Once you find something that’s comfortable for you, I say, you might as well wear that.

I prefer black because you don’t have to worry about matching anything; black goes with everything, particularly other black things.  It’s also a nice, outward representation of my character, my heart, my outlook, what have you.  And if I ever have to pass as a Sith Lord, I can do that.  I only wear black nowadays.  Even my underwear(!).

In any case, though, I don’t mean to stay at the office tonight, though if there were a shower here I might be tempted.  I feel very grimy and sticky, and that’s a particularly unpleasant feeling for me.  But it is dreary to have the daily ritual of going back to a place that feels no more like home than does the office or the train, and not much more like home than the bus, frankly.

Nothing feels like home, anymore.  The planet Earth doesn’t feel like home‒not that it ever really has, to be honest.

I find myself strangely envying my former coworker who just died.  That may seem insensitive, but it’s simply true.  He didn’t die instantly, with the initial heart attack, which sometimes happens.  He had a few weeks or more of being ill and having all other responsibilities taken away, and his family (and friends), aware of his ill health, got to come and be near him for one last time.  That might be nice.  I sometimes think that, if I were known to be dying of cancer (for instance), maybe my children would come and see me.

I don’t know what other sort of thing might engender that outcome, and I certainly don’t want to try to force my way into their lives.  They deserve autonomy and to be free from my odious self, who already screwed up everything in his own life, and caused them pain in the process.  But I would dearly love to spend time with them.

Of course, I do have a potentially terminal condition, and I don’t just mean “life itself” which is uniformly terminal as far as we can see.  I mean depression.  Depression has a direct lifetime mortality rate of about 15%, or at least that was the statistic the last time I checked.  That’s not counting the many things depression makes one more likely to have‒people with depression are more prone to various kinds of physical illnesses and to worse outcomes if they get those illnesses, and they are also more prone than others to drug and alcohol problems.

But I’m talking here about direct self-destruction: suicide, from the Latin “sui” meaning self, and the “cide” part that always means killing, as in fungicide, herbicide, insecticide, anthropocide, etc.  “Suicide” almost feels like it ought to be the opposite of “sui generis” but that’s not correct, and in fact they probably often go together, subjectively speaking.  Maybe it would be the opposite of “sui genesis”.  Could it also be called “sui exodus”?

Anyway, my point is that depression has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, but there are no Ronald McDonald houses for it (as far as I know).  It’s not a sexy/tragic/dramatic disorder worthy of Hallmark movies and that kind of twaddle.  It just sucks all around, because its very nature is to suck and to make everything in the universe feel like it sucks.  Maybe in this it’s like the very curvature of spacetime; tending to bend inward on itself and collapse, unless it is infused with a uniform, positive energy, in which case there will be a tendency to expand.

Believe me, I don’t have a uniform positive energy.  Maybe I used to, but my cosmological constant has long since quantum tunneled into a vacuum state so close to zero that it makes that of the universe, tiny as it is, appear flipping gargantuan.  I don’t know if I have a negative cosmological constant, which would make a kind of human anti de Sitter space.  Then I would collapse rapidly, which might be nice in and of itself.  Also, you could mathematically demonstrate the holographic principle on me using certain areas of string theory.

Maybe the state of suffering from depression is rather like being a human anti de Sitter space.  And the speed of collapse depends on how large the negative lambda is, but collapse is inevitable unless it changes signs.

Incidentally, it appears that people on the autism spectrum‒which I suspect I am, though I don’t have an “official”* diagnosis‒suffer from depression, including chronic depression AKA persistent depressive disorder AKA dysthymia (which I do have), at a significantly higher rate than the general population, are harder to treat, and also, if I recall, are more likely to commit suicide, and certainly to engage in self-harm.

I could have told you that.  Wait, I just did!

Okay, well, that’s more than enough for this Thursday.  I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow or the next day.  I’m scheduled to work on those days, and I suppose I will, since I don’t like to inconvenience the people around me.  But as I told a coworker yesterday, I’ve been staying alive for quite a long time mainly just not to inconvenience other people, and there’s only so much longer I’m going to be able to do it.  I don’t have any other drive to stay alive; there is nothing to which I look forward.  I’m tired.  Sleeping on the floor in the office is no worse than sleeping at the house, but that’s not saying much at all.

Someday, perhaps soon, my sign off on a Thursday will be “TT” rather than TTFN, because I won’t expect to return.  But for now, the expression remains:

TTFN

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*It’s an odd notion, the “official” diagnosis of anything.  I mean, it’s useful for things like insurance and statistics and science, and certainly there is some value in the judgment of experts on such matters, but it is not something handed down from Mount Sinai (the medical school or the Ten Commandments place).  No one can speak ex cathedra on medical diagnoses, or on any fact of nature, frankly.  So don’t put too much stock in them**.

**Unless it’s good chicken stock.  Good chicken stock is tasty.