depression

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Never mind

I’m not sure at all what I’m going to write about this morning, but it’s a work morning, and I’ve just arrived at the train station, so writing my daily blog post is what I’m going to be doing, at least for the time being.

My hands and fingers are a bit sticky and sweaty as I start this.  Obviously that’s not going to be evident in my writing—other than the fact that I’m telling you about it.  I walked just under 12 miles yesterday, total, since my bike is no longer an option, and I’ve already walked about 5 miles today, which explains the sweatiness.

17 miles isn’t all that much when you’re riding a bike.  Even I could probably do it in an hour.  But my bike is inoperable right now, and when walking, 17 miles is the work of over five hours, which is a fair chunk of one’s time, even over a day and a bit.  Not that I have anything better to do with my time.  My time is pointless.

I more or less deliberately arranged things to get here just after the time for the train I caught yesterday, because I wanted to have a moment in the station where I could start writing this post.  I like starting my posts at the station better than starting them on the train; I’m not sure why.  There is an occasional nice breeze blowing at my back and cooling me down, but it wasn’t blowing when I made my decision, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would happen, so I don’t think it was part of the calculus.

I’m working on adapting to new, slightly larger (and thus less tight) ankle braces, and the knee brace I got seems to be helping my left knee, though I woke up in the night last night with marked left knee pain, and had to put Icy Hot with lidocaine on it.  I think that was mainly because I had been sleeping with my ankles crossed, as I often do.  I guess I should probably break that habit.

It doesn’t really matter much, of course.  No habits really matter much right now.  I don’t expect to have any long-lasting habits.  What I’d like to do is be able to summon the gumption just to walk until it kills me (or to walk until I get back to where I grew up, or something along those lines).  That would at least be an interesting way to go.  The main obstacles to starting have been blisters and so on, and soreness in my knees and ankles.  But I think I’m at least getting past the blisters, mostly, and trying to find ways around the soreness.  If I pace myself, the soreness shouldn’t get in the way.  I hope.

I had almost, after getting myself into better condition by working my way up toward this idea, decided to take “another route”, what with the bike and all, and see if I could make it through to continuing with life.  I have even started reading one of the books by Matthieu Ricard, the French-born Buddhist monk and so-called happiest man in the world.

It’s an interesting book, but he isn’t saying anything I haven’t heard before.  I’ve done meditation, quite a bit; when I was younger, I used to meditate and/or do self-hypnosis every day, usually more than once a day.  Weirdly enough, meditation seems to tend to make my depression worse, though it does calm my anxiety somewhat.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll find any worthwhile answers.  I don’t expect to find any, though I’m not ruling it out.  But there needs to be some better reason to carry on than just the vague notion that “people care about you” or “people would miss you”.  While there are people who will be saddened if I am gone, it’s not going to be a deep or very direct sadness, because there’s no one with whom I spend any significant time.

No one else’s day to day experience will be changed significantly whether I live or die or whatever.  The vague notion that there are people who care about me is a nice thing and a good thing, as far as it goes, but it has no local consequences, and it’s not a strong enough reason to stay alive.  It’s like the old saying, “That plus a buck fifty will get a cup of coffee.”  Of course, nowadays it would be more like at least “that plus five bucks”, but the idea is the same.  It’s not really consequential, because it’s really just an idea, some kind of abstraction.

The vague fact that there are people hundreds and even thousands of miles away who care about you and would be sad if they learned that you were dead is not enough of a reason to be alive.  After all, they would only be sad if they learned that you were dead.

And they would only learn it indirectly, because they are not actually present here in my life.  No one I really care about is actually here, nearby, and frankly, I don’t blame them.  I don’t want to inflict myself on other people.  I hate myself severely.  One of the last (or least) things I would want to do would be to inflict myself upon those whose happiness is important to me.  I don’t bring people happiness.  People who are around me tend to become more unhappy.  I’m no fucking good, and I never have been.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m getting at.  None of this makes very much sense, and it’s certainly not worth the effort to try very hard to make sense of it.

I hope you have a good week, and if you’re celebrating any of the upcoming holidays, I hope you enjoy them.  Take heart in knowing that that they’ll be a little bit better than they might otherwise be because I won’t be present at your celebrations.

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Whatever.

Well, it’s Monday, the beginning of the first full week of April in 2023.  I walked to the train today.  This was not out of any cross-training notion or related goal.  Rather, it was a consequence of something that happened on Saturday.

When I arrived at my destination train station after work on Saturday, walked to where my new bike was double-locked to the bike rack right at the main entrance of that train station, and where people are coming and going and waiting for trains all day on the platform, I found that my bike seat had been stolen, post and all.  Since I am nowhere near good enough a rider to bike back to the house in a standing pedaling posture, I had to walk the bike back to the house on Saturday evening.

So, that’s that.  I give up.  I’m not going to get a new seat or anything; just flush the money I spent on the bike down the toilet, and good riddance to it.  I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like relying on external, physical mechanisms, because worrying about maintaining them makes me tremendously stressed out.  Well, that was true, and this whole debacle has driven that point home.

I don’t mind relying on my computer only because computers are so comparatively easy to replace nowadays, and the information in not solely locally saved but is online in various senses.  If all of that goes haywire, the problems will be very large scale indeed, and personal irritation and inconvenience would probably be only a minor part of the situation.

Anyway, I’m writing this on the train now—not the first or second train of the day, but still one earlier than I would have caught if I had taken the bus to the other train station.  I’ve already walked five miles, so that’s good exercise, at least.  I have a new spandex knee brace on my left knee, because that knee has been given me some trouble with all the walking.  I think the brace is doing me some good, so far, but I’ll know better at the end of the day.

I don’t really see too much point in trying to avoid pain.  I’m never going to be able to avoid it, anyway, and my attempts to do so seem often just to trigger worse pain of new kinds.  Not that I think I deserve any better, but pain does get in the way of some things.

There’s only one way to escape pain completely.

I’m trying to read and listen to some heartening books and/or podcasts and so on, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to find books or podcasts or blog posts—or shows or videos or anything else—that are interesting.  The world basically feels like a wasteland; it’s dry and barren and dusty and dismal and as far as the eye can see—my eye, anyway, and its paired partner—there is no source of life, no oasis, no water or food.

It’s not even particularly hot or cold; that would make it more interesting than it is.  It’s just stupid and pointless, and so am I.  I’ve failed at all the things that matter the most to me in the world, and at many things that matter less.  I’m no good at taking care of myself, and frankly, I don’t feel motivated to try.  I’m just eroding and decaying and cracking into bits, slowly but inevitably.

I should be angry about having my bike seat stolen.  I’m mostly just discouraged and fatigued.  Not but what I think whoever did it should be punished, though I doubt they ever will be.  I sometimes think I would gladly kill the person who took it if I could do so without any chance of facing legal consequences.  I recognize that it would be out of proportion to the specific action, of course, but little, petty thefts like these undermine the very substance of civilization, and lead people like me steadily and inexorably closer to despair, and for what?  Someone gets a new bike seat for which they didn’t have to pay.  Maybe they pawned it for a small amount of money and used that to buy drugs or alcohol.  If the former, I can at least hope that they got something laced with enough fentanyl to kill them.

I probably wouldn’t kill such a person even if I could get away with it, to be honest.  I have very strong impulse control, and as I think I’ve said before, I don’t think I have any right not to be uncomfortable.  The inability to feel self-righteous prevents a lot of terrible deeds in the world, I think.  So many atrocities are committed by people who believe they are good and are doing good, or doing right, or think they are justly vengeful because they think have been wronged in some real, important way.  And so they will wrong others, propagating cycles of cruelty and revenge and malice.  It’s pathetic.

The world is a shithole, and there are fewer and fewer things in it that make up for that fact for me.  But it’s not as though I deserve anything better.  I give up.  I’m not going to try to improve or grow or entertain any possibility of reclaiming or rebuilding my life.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics always wins, anyway.  It always will.  I’m tired.  I’m tired of trying.  I’m just about out of gas.  And the week is only just starting.

weird wasteland

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Move along; there’s nothing left to see. Just a body. Nothing left to see.

Well, it’s Tuesday morning now, and I’m writing this while already at the office, because I didn’t leave last night.  I should have gone to the house on my new bicycle and ridden it to the train this morning, but unfortunately, there were snags.

First of all, the bicycle was delivered after our normal business hours.  Amazon allows us to put time constraints into the delivery instructions, and we have done so, so it would be nice if they attended to them and made sure to get things to their destinations during delivery hours, especially when they are expensive items.  I waited around after work for it arrive.  Then, unboxing it, I saw that it wasn’t technically the color I had ordered, but it wasn’t too far off, so that didn’t bother me all that much.

Then, after reading all the way through the instructions once before beginning, I then began to reread and do the necessary assembly.  However, the bike seat post clamp, or whatever it’s called, turned out not to be the kind actually described in the instructions, and as I was realizing that there was no slot in mine for an Allen key, I fumbled about and the seat post slipped and fell down into the frame of the bike.

It fell deep down.  And though it slid in quite easily, somehow, it does not slide out nearly as readily.  Indeed, it doesn’t seem to want to slide out at all, not even a millimeter.  The company’s website just recommends turning the thing upside down and using a rubber mallet or something similar to hammer at the base until the post falls out.  It hasn’t budged so far.

This is a problem that has been occurring frequently for some time, apparently—there are complaints or inquiries on their site going back three years and more—yet there has been no such simple preventative fix as to, for instance, put some kind of barrier in the structure so the post can’t slip past its top into the frame.

Of course, if I had put the seat on the post first, this wouldn’t have happened, but the instructions tell you to put the post in first.  I’m not sure why.  I’m not sure if there is a reason.  This does, apparently, occur often enough that people in YouTube videos advise putting the seats on first.

It’s maddening.  Anyway, I was working on the stupid thing, trying to figure out how to dislodge it, until far too late to catch the last train back toward the house.  So, I “slept” on the floor in the office again.  I just wanted to have the bike to ride home; it was the first thing to which I’ve looked forward in I don’t know how long.  My coworker said it’s literally the first time in 2023 I’ve said there was something I was anticipating positively.  He’s probably right.

Also, yesterday we missed another potential palindromic number sequence in our recording numbers for verifications.  Don’t worry about the specifics too much, just know that I decided that, if one would come up before too long a time had passed, I would take it as a message from the universe* to try to decide to live.  But the chance passed, yet again, not to my surprise.

And this last Saturday was the “anniversary” of the destruction of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings.  I wish I had just killed myself then, as I considered doing.  I’m so frustrated.  I haven’t been able to get anything right in I don’t know how long.  Like the song True Love Waits says, “I’m not living.  I’m just killing time.”

And time is killing me, but it’s doing it too damned slowly.  I’m tired and I’m in pain and I’m trying not to give in, but it’s so much effort, and there’s no fucking payoff.  Am I just staying alive today so that I can just stay alive again tomorrow, then the next day and the next week and the next month and the next year…just staying alive because people think that’s what you’re supposed to do, and biology builds those drives into everyone?  What is the point?  I hate myself, anyway, and all that I’ve become.

Oh, and in case you’ve recently joined the readership of this blog, you should know, this isn’t about the bike, per se.  I mean, the bike is frustrating because it was an instance of me trying to do something proactive and positive, and then via fumbling, stupid mistakes I made it go wrong and made it more frustrating than it ought to be.

It’s not that I don’t think I can fix the problem.  Obviously, I can fix the problem.  I just don’t want to have to fix the stupid problem.  I’m tired of fixing problems.  I’m tired of effort, of trying to achieve…well, anything at all.  I feel like my life has been a constant attempt to build a sandcastle while the tide is coming in.  Oh, and there’s a hurricane coming.  And I don’t have any tools.  And the sand is basically really gravel.  But mainly, I’m just rotten at it, and I don’t seem to be getting better over time; rather, I am getting worse.

Oh, well, enough melodrama.  Sorry, everyone.  I really ought just to bring the show to a close.  It’s pathetic.  We’ll see, I guess.

distortedbike

*Though I don’t actually believe the universe sends messages; it’s just a conceit, a sort of reverse Russian Roulette.

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Dreary is as dreary does, as we say in…well, nowhere. But it’s true nonetheless

Well, it’s Monday morning again, and I’m sitting now at the train station.  I seem to be getting in better shape.  Though I left at the same time as usual, I’ve arrived at the station in time for the train earlier than I usually catch—only to hear the announcement that this particular train has been cancelled.  That means I’ll be catching the next one, which is likely to be more crowded because of the cancellation of the prior one (and I really hate crowds) though there seem to be rather few people waiting at the station than usual.

It’s not an auspicious way to begin the week, though I suppose an optimist might think that it’s likely only to improve from here.  I am not an optimist, however.  Maybe I used to be, but I’m not one now.

Anyway, I’m on my way in to the office, one way or another.  The blisters that had formed on my feet when I wore the shoes that I’ve since thrown away have mostly resolved, or are on their way out, and they certainly didn’t trouble me on my walk this morning, though my right ankle is twinging.

That’s my old injury from college, acting up.  Ithaca, New York, it turns out, can be a perilous place to play an aggressive game of catch, because the land is hilly and irregular, and if all your weight comes down on your right foot after it’s reached an unexpected dip in the ground, well…let’s just say that when it happened to me, it made a sound that my friend, with whom I was playing catch, heard from where he was, quite a ways away.  We thought my ankle might be broken, but it was just a very bad sprain.

Of course, student health was partway up Libe Slope, so it was good that I had friends back then to help me hobble up.

Today my new bicycle is supposed to arrive, so I don’t expect to be walking back from the train station this evening, but rather to be riding.  I’m sure there will be at least some minor soreness related to using a bike for the fist time in nearly a decade, but at least it’s low impact exercise, and I’ll gain some time back from my walking.

I’m still listening to The Lord of the Rings as I walk, though I also listen to some podcasts sometimes.  This morning I heard the entire chapters relating Merry’s and Pippin’s meeting of Treebeard, all the way to and through the end of the Entmoot, and on into the beginning of the next chapter, to just before Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli meet “the White Rider”.  It’s an exciting part of the story, and we’re approaching the bit that I usually like best, the battle of Helm’s Deep.

Unfortunately, I found myself feeling very melancholy as I listened this morning.  That may be partly because I’m starting a new work week, even though Saturday was supposed to be a day of portent*, and I was really hoping for something momentous or dreadful or revelatory to happen to me.  But at least part of my melancholy is just that The Lord of the Rings was a love I shared with my ex-wife, and I have a hard time still enjoying the things we used to enjoy together.

That’s rather dreary, I know, but I’m just not the sort of person to make deep attachments easily, and especially not to be able to let them go easily, and without much severe pain.  Reminders of them make me rue my ongoing life.  Certainly it hasn’t been worth much since at least the time I was invited to be a guest of the Florida DOC.  I have experienced much more negative than positive since then, and really, it was mainly negative (though with more positive to counter that) for quite a long time before then.

Alas, I have not yet been cast into a volcano, but we can always hope for something of that sort to happen.  There was a time, as I said, that I was relatively optimistic, but now I feel just worn out, and in pain, and even my attempts to get into shape cause issues for me.  And before me I face only the rolling, grinding, dreary passage of the weeks to come, doing the same pointless things, which bring no ultimate benefit to anyone.  I don’t write fiction or play music or draw or anything of that sort anymore, and I don’t have any friends, and I don’t see my kids, and the rest of my family is far away.

I really ought just to call it quits here.

Of course, I’m hopeful that I’ll enjoy riding my new bicycle enough that it’ll at least give me some fun for a bit.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too much.  But at least it should give me some extra time, and a bit of freedom to go farther in the time that I have, while still exercising, and that’s something, at least.

Of course, what I really want is to go very, very far from where I am, so far that I can never return, even in principle.  But I’m a bit of coward, and I also don’t want to be rude.  So, instead, I’m trapped where I am, hoping for illness and/or accidents.

It’s annoying.  And, again, it’s a dreary way to start the new work week—as is, no doubt, reading this blog post.  I can only apologize; but I can’t pretend to be other than as I am.  What would be the point?

glass-spilled-water

*Nothing interesting happened then, though.

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For a blog of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Hello and good morning.

It’s the first Thursday of Spring in the northern hemisphere, and of Autumn in the southern, so I’m writing my more traditional Thursday blog post, though there will be little to set it apart from all those that I write on any other day.  For that, I apologize.  I think my writing must grow tedious after a while (if not sooner).  My own words are nearly always tedious to me, as is my own thought.

I’m sitting at the bus stop, today, because yesterday I decided to re-try a pair of shoes I haven’t worn in a while.  They are quite nice in that they are lightweight, and also because they are porous, and so “breathe” well.  However, after my eleven miles of walking yesterday, they gave me several new blisters, albeit small ones, and that’s terribly frustrating at this stage.

I’ve treated the blisters, more or less, but they are still annoying, and today I’m wearing my Timberland boots, which at least didn’t give me blister when I last wore them.  But they definitely don’t have the porosity of the other make of shoe, and they are heavier as well, though for boots they are remarkably light.

I threw away the shoes I wore yesterday, and the other pair I have like them.  I don’t want to be tempted to try them again after a few days.  They had done their time, in any case, and the soles were getting rather worn.  They weren’t bad shoes, by any means, but for longer walking—at least if you’re using my feet, about which I have no choice—they seem to cause trouble, even after long months of use.

I know, I know, this is all very boring, and again I apologize.  I’m a boring person; what can I say?  At the very least, I’m certainly not pleasant.  I’m just a glitch in the program, a flaw in the crystal, a smudge on the written page, a grain of sand in the bottom of a shoe, or a spot of bird droppings on an otherwise beautiful painting.  I might be a curiosity for a bit, and even, from certain angles, seem to add something here or there, purely by chance.  But after a while, there’s only so much interest anyone can have in looking at feces on a canvas or tolerating the effects of buggy computer code.

Before long, everyone who is very close to me much of the time gets weary, and they go away, to save their sanity or their mood or whatever.  Apparently, I’m something of an emotional toxin or allergen.  I’m even allergic to myself, frankly—which makes me a sort of mental autoimmune disorder.  Well, I can’t change the nature of reality, I suppose.

This Saturday is the 25th of March.  According to Tolkien’s calendar, that is the day on which the One Ring fell into the Cracks of Doom and was destroyed, causing the final downfall of Sauron.  It’s an auspicious day.  Regrettably, there are no handy volcanoes in Florida—nor anywhere reasonably close to Florida, as far as I know.

I think I’ve heard that people in Japan sometimes throw themselves into Mount Fuji, but I may be misremembering that.  Anyway, falling into an active volcano is not a peaceful sort of thing, unlike what happens to Gollum in the end of the Peter Jackson movies.  One doesn’t have a soft, gentle landing on the surface of the lava, to sink slowly into it, apparently not even quite realizing what’s happening.  No, this is molten rock we’re talking about.  It is much denser than any flesh, and a human—or other animal—will not sink into it at all.

The initial impact of a fall onto lava seems likely not to be much gentler than a fall onto solid rock.  And then, of course, it is very hot, searing and boiling the flesh that hits it almost instantly.  There are YouTube videos in which you can watch this demonstrated (not on a live creature, but on a bag of stuff that’s roughly the same composition as a living animal), and it pops and skips about, flaming and sputtering like splashes of water dropped onto a very hot pan bottom.  Only worse.

One wouldn’t suffer for long in such a situation, of course, and it would certainly be quite spectacular, though I doubt a participant would appreciate the spectacle.

But anyway, though the Ring might of course first rest gently on the surface of lava before melting into it, Gollum would not sink at all.  He would, rather, be incinerated violently.  In this, interestingly, the makers of The Rings of Power, seemed to understand volcanoes better.  They trigger the initial eruption of Orodruin by rerouting a river so that its water flows through underground tunnels before emptying into the lava chamber and boiling explosively, setting the whole thing off.

It wasn’t quite a realistic depiction of such an event—I think if water fell on a flat, placid lake of lava such as we see in the show, it would certainly boil, and probably explode, but I don’t think it would trigger a general eruption like we saw, since it was above the magma, and would remain so, because of comparative density.  But they had to make it clear what was happening, so I guess we can give them some slack on that front.

Also, I don’t think the surface of the lava would actually be red hot liquid, unless it was actively flowing.  If it were exposed to the air, as it seemed to be, I would think it would crust over a bit, with the very surface darkening.  But I might be wrong about that.  I suppose that depends on just how hot it was.  I’m no volcanologist or geologist or whatever, so if anyone out there is an expert, I would welcome your input.

It doesn’t really matter, though.  I’m not going to be encountering any volcanoes, I shouldn’t think.  And though I have often toyed with idea of going to stand before the entrance to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in lighter fluid and gasoline, and setting myself on fire, I don’t think I have the willpower to do it.  It’s an intimidating prospect.  It would be hard for people to ignore, I have to admit, and maybe it would make people stop and think about the horrors perpetrated upon so many people by Florida’s badly managed criminal justice system, and the flawed priorities of such systems in general in the modern world.

More likely, people would just think I was crazy.  They would, no doubt, be correct, as far as that went.  But that wouldn’t necessarily mean my other points were wrong.

Anyway, I don’t expect that I’ll do that; I’m a bit too much of a coward.  But it would be nice if something momentous happened this Saturday.  I won’t be at work, so I won’t be writing a blog post, which means I’ll basically be lying around with nothing of interest to do.

What else is new?  Hopefully the rest of you are enjoying the beginning of the new season, whether it’s Spring or Fall.  Some major holidays are fast approaching, at least among the western religions.  If you celebrate them, and have family and/or friends with whom to share them, I hope you look forward to them and enjoy yourself tremendously.  You might as well.

TTFN

volcano 3 in 3D

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A rough bot slouching through the murk

It’s Wednesday morning, and though it’s actually slightly after six o’clock, I think it’s still reasonable to add, “as the day begins”.  Certainly the sun is not yet rising; the eastern sky isn’t even lightening yet.  I’m waiting at the train station, as I was when I began writing yesterday, and I’ve already walked five miles so far today (having walked a total of about eleven yesterday).

My endurance is definitely improving over these past few weeks, which is good.  It would be puzzling and perhaps even distressing if my endurance were getting worse.  I can, however, imagine my ability to walk long distances deteriorating because of injury or arthropathy—also, blisters and similar, and indeed I’ve had to deal with those over recent months, which is why it has taken me so long to get even to the point at which I currently reside.

But I think I’m getting past that particular barrier.  In fact, this Sunday, while my clothes were washing, I walked to the local convenience store barefoot, just to see how sturdy my feet were*.  It was fine, though I walked more slowly than usual.  I also, apparently, walked quite differently, with my left foot at least, than I do when I’m wearing shoes, because my left foot and hip got quite achy and sore a bit later that day, as though I’d put unusual strain on joints and muscles.  It’s an interesting realization, and it makes me want to experiment a bit more with barefoot walking.

One good aspect of all this walking is that I can listen to audio books and, to a lesser extent, podcasts as I do it.  I like audio books; the experience of listening to an audio book is very similar for me to the experience of reading a book in print.  I tend to read books in a very “audible” way, in that I tend to sound out the words in my head as I go along.  I think they call that “subvocalization”.

Apparently the old “speed reading” concepts recommended against this habit, but I disagree completely.  I don’t read particularly speedily, though I don’t read slowly, either.  But I do read deeply.  My ex-wife was always a very fast reader—she even took speed reading courses when she was younger—but she often did not recall many details of the things that she read for very long.  At least, she didn’t recall them the way I recall them.

I think one learns better with the combination of visible and audible (even if imagined audible) processing of the information.

That being said, even when solely using audible input, I of course form visual images—not of the words, usually, but of the ideas, or of the scenes, or what have you, depending on the subject matter.  There are also books and podcasts that I’ve listened to multiple times, and I think—as I do with books—that I get more out of them because of the repetition.  It may not be super-fast or anything, but I am pretty sure that I understand the things I take in more deeply than many people do, and I make connections rather easily from one area of knowledge to another.

Today I listened to Sean Carroll’s most recent podcast—about artificial intelligence, which is of course an au courant subject.  I also recently listened to a “Making Sense” podcast by Sam Harris in which two AI specialists had a discussion with him, and I subsequently bought their most recent books:  Human Compatible, by Stuart Russell, and Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.  I’ve read the first and begun the second.  It’s certainly a fascinating subject.  I don’t think it’ll ever be as interesting as fundamental physics, but that’s not a terrible insult.  What is, after all?

It’s all pretty pointless no matter what, but at least it’s distracting.  I need something to pass the time, since I don’t have any friends or anything—other than “work friends” I guess, but that’s not exactly the same thing.  I’m still very discouraged and despondent, and I see no future** for myself.

I feel rather as though I’m walking in a metaphorical fog.  I don’t even have any image of my immediate surroundings, nor of anything that lies ahead.  As far as I can tell, there is nothing that lies ahead.  There is certainly nothing toward which I can make any deliberate path.  I know the ground about may well be treacherous, with pitfalls and cliffs and quicksand and even dangerous predators; and I am not-so-secretly disappointed that I haven’t encountered any of the f*cking things yet.  Dangerous wildernesses aren’t what they used to be, it seems.

Well, that was a wholesale slide into clunky metaphor overlapping with reality and with slightly abstract conceptual space, and it’s a bit opaque, I’m sure (though I guess that is appropriate, given my metaphor).  Sorry about that.  Even I’m not sure what I mean.  I’m not sure about much.

I need to quit this stupid world.  Every day, its idiocy seems to grow—“the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  But no revelation is at hand, I’m afraid.  There’s nothing waiting to be revealed.  Behind the curtain is just another curtain, and another one after that, ad infinitum—row upon row of tattered, moth-eaten, pseudo-velvet, gaudy and tacky material.

Wait, what the hell do I even mean by all that?  Sorry, I’m just indulging my own stupidity here.  Try not to let it bother you.

foggy road

*I brought a pair of crocks with me to put on once I got to the store, because they don’t want people without shoes to come in.

**Though I do pay rent.

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In nature’s infinite blog of secrecy a little I can read.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday morning once again, and so it’s time for me to attempt to create a simulacrum of what used to be my typical, once-weekly blog post, back when I used to do my fiction writing every non-Thursday morning of the week.  It won’t really live up to expectations, I wouldn’t think, since the situation is now so different.

For one thing, I can’t talk about my fiction writing, since I haven’t done any fiction writing since before I last posted The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and previously, Outlaw’s Mind, both of which are uncompleted stories and are likely to remain that way until the end of the universe—barring, of course, the possibility that the universe goes on forever and every possible quantum state thereof is eventually realized somewhere, somewhen.

Indeed, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, as seems to be the case, and if our understanding of quantum mechanics and the maximal entropy state of enclosed regions of spacetime are correct, or even reasonably close to being correct, then somewhere out there in space “at this time” there are an infinite number of versions of me who have completed both stories, and many others besides, and who are world-famous authors.

I used scare quotes around “at this time” because, obviously, given the finite speed of light/causality, and the flexible nature of time depending on relative motion, the concept of simultaneity is fuzzy at best.  Nothing outside one’s local light cones can be considered to be in one’s past or one’s future, but they are also not exactly “now”, either.

Still, we can give an overall statement about the age of the universe for things that have little to no “peculiar motion” relative to the cosmic microwave background and say that such things have gone through about 13.8 billion years since the hot big bang, on average, and it’s not nonsensical to do that.  So, if by “at this time”, I refer to other regions of a spatially infinite universe that have passed through roughly the same amount of local time since the big bang, I’m not incorrect in saying that there are an infinite number of “me” who have completed their stories—and there are an infinite number who have not, and there are an infinite number of every possible variation.

None of that does me (or you) any good, because—being outside my past and future light cones (and yours, which are almost identical to mine)—those distant regions are completely causally disconnected from us, past and future, especially given the accelerated expansion of the universe.  I suppose an Einstein-Rosen Bridge/wormhole could conceivably connect such distant regions, in principle, assuming such wormholes can even happen, which is far from certain.

There are those who hypothesize that quantum entanglement happens through wormholes (small ones), and there are those who have even tried to connect distant multiverses with the many worlds of a branching Everettian quantum mechanics, but I don’t think either of those things is close to having been rigorously described, let alone tested, nor are they generally accepted by the physics community.

Anyway, it still doesn’t help any of us, because clearly, if there are alternate versions of ourselves living better lives than we are*, they have no back-and-forth connection with the lives we currently are living—the wave function has split, the states have decohered, they are not the same beings, even if movies about multiverses win many Oscars and/or make a great deal of money.

What was I talking about again?

I don’t know.  I’m very tired.  I ended up sleeping in the office last night.  I did this deliberately; it had nothing to do with train problems or anything.  I just didn’t feel like going back to the house.  I was tired (still am) and there’s nothing at the house for me that is any more enticing than there is at the office, other than a shower.  And I don’t really care about a shower right now.  For whom would be grooming myself?  Whom am I trying to impress?  All is vanity, as it says in Ecclesiastes.

It’s a funny line for a religious text that some people say contains the infallible word of an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and omnipresent deity that made everything, deliberately and specifically.  If that were all the case, why would it say all is vanity?  Of course, the argument could be made that these were the words of some ancient human (Solomon or David, one of those kings, is supposed to have been the author of Ecclesiastes, I think), not the direct words of the creator of the universe, but if that’s the case, then clearly the bible is not literally true in all its parts**.  But that’s hardly the only case of seemingly contradictory portions of religious texts, is it?

Anyway, it’s chilly here for south Florida—about sixty degrees, which feels cold when you’re used to 70’s to 80’s, but would no doubt feel beautifully balmy to people back in Michigan or Ohio.  It’s certainly far warmer than intergalactic space, which is only about 2.7 Kelvin (so it’s about 286 Kelvin hotter here).  Then again, it’s much cooler than the heart of the sun, and cooler yet than the heart of blue supergiant stars.  And those are all vastly cooler than just later than one Planck time after whatever initiated the big bang.

Of course, there is, in principle, a maximum heat that any local region can achieve, because if the local energy is high enough, it will form a local black hole, and also the uncertainty principle will kick in to separate things.  Although…if everything is uniformly very hot, such that there is no net curvature of spacetime in one local region relative to another…maybe that’s where inflation comes from?  If there is inflation***.

Anyway, that’s enough nonsense.  I’m just jabbering and chattering, because I don’t really communicate with anyone day-to-day in any way other than this about things that interest me.  I’m very alone and very tired, but I’m also very bad at doing the whole social interaction thing, so I’m kind of stuck.

I’m inclined to say that I deserve it—that’s how I feel—but of course, as Will (played by Clint) points out below, such concepts are really vacuous.  There are a functionally limitless number of possible variations of lives that could be lived by a being that matches my rough description and/or has an identical past that diverged at some point.  I’m just living one of those possibilities, because, well, I had to be living one of them unless I were dead, which I’m not, unfortunately.

I hope most of you are having a better morning than I am.  Heck, I’d be delighted if everyone who reads my stuff always has better days than I do.  That would at least be some good news.  And, of course, somewhere out there in infinite spacetime—if there is such a thing—that situation is instantiated.

Don’t be jealous, though.  There are also places where everyone reading my blog always has worse days than I have.

Poor bastards.

TTFN

deserve

*And if there are, there are also infinite numbers of versions of us living every possible worse life as well.

**If in any of them whatsoever, which is a separate but related question.

***Well, by certain definitions, we could say with great confidence that there is inflation, since the universe is inflating now—that’s the “dark energy” you might have heard about—but it’s doing it quite slowly, doubling in size over the course of every about ten billion years, I think, at the current rate, assuming it’s a constant.  But if you change the time scale, it looks much the same as earlier, more rapid inflation…I think that’s the basis of Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, but I haven’t read his full book on the subject yet, so I may be misunderstanding.

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I don’t know what my point is (in many ways)

I’m sorry in advance.  I suspect this is going to be yet another boring-ass blog post like the two earlier this week.  Something about walking from the house to the train station seems to set me up not to write very well, or at least not to write in a very interesting fashion.

Maybe it’s just that I’m not writing anything new, but am just rehashing the same old garbage that’s always moving through my mind.  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that, though.  I can’t move anything through my mind but my own thoughts, and I can’t simply choose those.  If I could, I would probably choose not to be depressed, as I think anyone with depression would choose.

Of course, it may be the case that I would have a hard time choosing not to be depressed because—presumably as a consequence of my depression—I often feel that I deserve to feel depressed, that I deserve to hate myself, that I am right to hate myself.  But, of course, if I could choose to change my thoughts, then surely I could choose not to think that I deserve to feel depressed, and not to hate myself.  Here we see the beginning of a potential infinite regress, one that’s related to the fundamental ontological* problems with any concept of “contra-causal” free will.

We also run up against issues of fundamental identity, relating to the concept of “terminal goals” as discussed in AI research and the like.  There are instrumental goals—piecemeal goals, objectives, chosen as steps along the way to achieving terminal goals—and then there are the terminal goals, the fundamental goals, the things that are the root drivers of a system.

Could any intelligence with true terminal goals ever opt to change those goals?  How could it choose, as an instrumental goal, the changing of a terminal goal, when such a change would almost certainly lead it to fail in its terminal goal?  I think it was Robert Miles, in one of his Computerphile videos, who proposed a fictional example as a comparable choice to a human:  consider whether (if you are a loving parent) you would be willing, for any reward, to have your personality altered such that you wouldn’t care whether your child or children lived or died, and indeed, that you would be willing to kill them.

If you’re not a parent—not a loving parent, anyway—it might be difficult to see the bone-deep trouble with this, but I suspect that most reasonably normal parents would rather die than be altered so as not to care whether their children live or die, and for good, sound, biological reasons.  I certainly meet that description.

But the point at which I’m getting is to imagine if, somehow, I could once and for all cure my dysthymia/depression, but it would have the effect of changing my character, my nature, my personality—my terminal goals, if your will—would I do it?

It’s somewhat difficult for me to imagine, because I can remember times in my life when I was not depressed, and not all of them were that long ago.  I very much think that I was the same person at those times, fundamentally, as I am now.  There’s a continuity of thought, at least from the point of view of my present memory, which is the only point of view I have.  I don’t feel in any serious way that I was a different person either twenty years ago, or thirty years ago, or forty years ago, or whatever, back to as far as I can remember, to when I started grade school and a bit before.

Of course, I apparently have always had some form of ASD**—Asperger’s or whatever—though I don’t have a formal diagnosis.  Does anyone really have a definitive diagnosis for that, though?  The criteria are semi-arbitrary and are not based on a measurable, physical structure or quantity but a constellation of attributes.  Still, whatever the case, it is something inherent to the given person’s nervous system.  And it does seem to predispose one to depression (and presumably to dysthymia, and certainly to alexithymia), so maybe that tendency has always been there in me.

There are certainly many, relatively early times when I found myself feeling burned out or washed out, or just blank and empty and exhausted, but I didn’t connect it to anything or know why it happened.  By the time I started high school I was already having periods when I would be depressed and have suicidal thoughts.

But I didn’t hate myself back then—not most of the time, anyway.  I even put on something of a show of pretending really to think very highly of myself, to be egotistical and narcissistic in a playful way.  And I did have moments of somewhat megalomaniacal tendencies, but then again, I was good at a lot of things, and I got attention for it.

I definitely always felt different and weird compared to the people around me.  I tried to turn that to my advantage, to make it a defense mechanism—to make myself seem vaguely scary and dangerous because of being sort of crazy, I guess, to make sure no one messed with me.  But it is a fact that I did feel weird; I felt like I was strange, or crazy, and I also felt vaguely hostile and even borderline hateful toward many other people at least some of the time, because what stranger in a strange land of alien beings would not feel that way?

I don’t know where I’m going with this, or what point I’m trying to make.  Again, I’m sorry.  It’s not a very good blog post.  But if it helped you pass a few moments in which you would otherwise have been staring at a wall or—cat forbid—a TikTok video or something, then I guess it’s been worthwhile.

would i lie to you

*I think that’s the term for which I’m looking.

**Apart from the congenital heart defect, I mean.  That was definitely something I had at least until I was eighteen.

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WINTER forward, Fall back just doesn’t make sense.

Well, here we all are again—though I, at least, am not on the Mississippi.  I’m actually on the Tri Rail train, northbound between Hollywood, Florida and Deerfield Beach, Florida*.  But I suspect that most of you are not on the Tri Rail when reading it, though some small possibility of such an occurrence does exist.

There may well even be people reading this while on the Mississippi.  Of course, the Mississippi River is much bigger than the Tri Rail train system, and I think there is quite a lot of shipping of various kinds that goes on along its course, but I don’t know that there are very many people involved relative to the amount of traffic.  Of those people, a very small percentage are likely to be reading blogs (or other matter) relative to the people on the Tri Rail who might do so at any given time.

I’m sure there are legitimate ways to assess those numbers, but I don’t have enough information to do it.  I also don’t have enough interest to try to obtain the requisite information, even if it is available out there in the internet/web.

It’s a bit amusing to me that yesterday when I wrote my post, I was completely unaware that we had done the whole “spring forward” thing last weekend.  Part of the reason it didn’t occur to me is:  It’s not Spring yet, dammit!  What the hell is that, having the “spring forward” part of daylight savings time when it’s not even Spring?  Forget the fact that daylight savings time is a dubious practice to begin with; if you’re going to take the thing with the long-standing mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” and adjust the timing so it no longer applies…well, I can only say that such stupidity must have required an act of Congress**.

Anyway, it was funny, because I got on a train twenty minutes earlier than my usual one, and I noted, as I arrived, that the sun wasn’t even starting to come up above the horizon.  I thought to myself that it was remarkable how much difference twenty minutes had made.  But, of course, it was an hour and twenty minutes, it turns out, so that difference is less surprising.

Then, at the office, I noted that the microwave clock was off by an hour.  At first I assumed someone had just stopped cooking something and left time on it, but seven minutes and twenty-one seconds seemed like a long time to have left.  Still, people do stupider things.  I’m one of them, obviously***.

So, of course, as I reset the microwave clock, noting that no one had just left time on it, it flitted through my mind that maybe it was a daylight savings time thing, but again—it isn’t Spring yet, so I didn’t think that could be the case!

I was wrong, obviously.  It didn’t matter much to me either way, since even with the hour shifted forward, I was up earlier than my alarm by quite a bit, and I finally gave up and left, since I was up anyway, and that was why I got the earlier train.  Today, I just got up earlier anyway, again.

I’ve been walking to and from the train on both ends now.  Just since Friday, that means I’ve walked about thirty miles—twelve on Friday, twelve yesterday, and six so far today (rounded off, and with some loose change left out from the weekend).  I seem to have reached the point where I’m not troubled by new blisters, which is good, and I’ve adjusted my process the avoid such things in the future, for the most part.  I do have some achiness here and there, but it’s not that bad.  Sweat is my biggest issue, to be honest.  But I bring a change of shirt, and I have Lysol and deodorant aplenty, so as long as I rehydrate, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

I am a bit frustrated that I haven’t again experienced the “endorphin rush” thing I had on Friday.  Maybe that was just me being all pleased with myself for having walked so far already that morning, and wasn’t really exercise-induced endorphins.  Over the weekend, and particularly yesterday, I’ve actually been even more depressed than usual for me.

I guess you could tell that much from my post yesterday morning, and I can only say that my mood went downhill from there throughout the day.  My mental energy today feels slightly higher, but then again, I have overdosed on caffeine already this morning, purely because I didn’t want to be quite so glum when I got to writing this post.  It was deliberate.

I’m really not prone to be kind to myself, am I?  In fact, I tend to be unkind to myself a lot of the time.  It’s not without reason that I did a cover of the song Hurt, originally by Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor.  I find that its lyrics more or less literally express my feelings and facts about me…except that, from my point of view, needles are for pansies.

Anyway, that’s getting too revelatory, and so I’ll draw to a close now—just for today, I mean, not permanently.  That may be coming soon, but it’s not here yet.  In the meantime, you can look forward to reading whatever I write tomorrow and the next day and for however long I keep going.  I really hope it won’t be very long.

You can place bets if you like.  I won’t do any match-fixing, or whatever the term is.  As Doris Day sang, whatever will be will be—as it must be, for once a thing happens, there is no way it can ever have been otherwise than it was.

*Actually, it runs between Miami Airport and Mangonia Park, which is in northern Palm Beach County, but I don’t go to either of those destinations.  Indeed, in all the time I’ve ridden the Tri Rail, I’ve never once gone to either of those two stations, though I’ve been to and/or through most of the stations in between.  This is perfectly understandable and predictable, given that they are the two termini of the line, and so one never passes through them en route to anywhere else.

**It is not without justification that Dave Barry once used “act of Congress” as a euphemism for “taking a sh*t”.

***Both in the sense that I do such “stupid” things and that I probably am one of the stupider things that people have done, though I shouldn’t disrespect my parents for bringing me into existence.  They had no way to know how I was going to turn out.

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Sometimes jokes are expressions of desperation.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Welcome to another Monday.

I walked to the train again this morning, as I did on Friday, and since I chose to get up and go a bit earlier today, I’m actually now on a train that will arrive at my destination earlier than would have the one I would have boarded had I taken the bus to the train.

Wow, that was a long and convoluted sentence, wasn’t it?  Sorry.

I think on Friday, after my first morning walk to the train, I started the day off a bit giddy, and I think that affected the quality of my blog post that day, so my apologies for that.  I think I was experiencing my first real endorphin rush from endurance exercise in many years, and it got me rather wired and a bit garrulous and—for me—outgoing for the very early part of the day.

That didn’t last, of course.  By early afternoon my general outlook was diminishing and deteriorating and various other verbs starting with “d” and ending in “ing”.  I don’t know how well that fact came across to others in the office, though.  I seemed to make people laugh a bit more than usual in the morning, and I certainly felt less tense than I usually did, but I can’t tell at all if my personality from their point of view was any different than usual.  Even when I’m profoundly depressed—in my immediate mood in addition to my general state of neuro-psychology—I tend to say sardonic things that people find funny a lot of the time.

I think this actually impairs my ability to convey the fact that I really feel deeply horrible.  People seem to assume that if you’re making jokes and are funny, you must be doing okay.  I can tell you from personal experience, this is not necessarily the case.  Sometimes jokes are expressions of desperation.  Just look at poor Robin Williams, if you don’t believe me.

But by the end of the day I felt tired and frustrated and grumpy and gloomy.  That was me on Friday afternoon, which makes me rather different—according to popular understanding, anyway—from most people.  Friday afternoon leading into a weekend in which I don’t work is not a prospect that meant much good for me.  I just sat around in my room at the house, alone—after walking home from the train, which at least caused another, if less notable, bump up in my mood.

I walked to local convenience stores a couple of times over the weekend, and I walked to Burger King on Sunday, and of course I did my laundry, but that was it.  I didn’t really do anything enjoyable.  I certainly didn’t spend time with friends, since I don’t really have any—though I did speak with my sister on the phone on Sunday evening, and that was very nice.

But really, I have a hard time being at all interested in anything much.  The YouTube algorithm is beginning to fail me with respect to offering me things I’m interested in viewing; but perhaps it’s me failing at the algorithm, in that I simply don’t have anything that interests me, and so YouTube can’t offer me much in the way of stuff I’d like to see.  It does occasionally offer me the little option box of being shown an assortment of things that I’ve never seen so far.  I’ve used that box once or twice in the past, but I don’t remember it being particularly beneficial.  I didn’t use it this weekend.

I wish I could find some longish-form fiction that I could enjoy again, like I used to.  Back when I was reading The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and The Belgariad, and later the Harry Potter books, and even things like The Sword of Shannara, and then The Elfstones of Shannara, or various Stephen King and related books, the books gripped my attention and could keep me occupied for quite a long stretch each.  Also, of course, in between reading books, I actually had a group of friends with whom I did things that we enjoyed.

Not so, now.  Now the only fiction that I’ve been able to stick with has been a few select Japanese light novels, most of them centered around high school kids, most of those being loners of some sort or another.  But these books, though I can stick with them, seem just to make me feel a bit more depressed when I’m done, as if they are surrogate friends or surrogate lives, and once they’re done, I’m even more alone than I was before.  And they are all ridiculously short, being light novels.

I have noticed a peculiar and rather amusing effect of reading some of these stories:  When they are written in first person, which is common, I often tend to think to myself in the fashion of the character for about twenty minutes or so after a bout of reading them, almost narrating my actions as if I were writing a first person story.  This goes away rather quickly, but it’s a bit unsettling.  It’s as though my sense of personal identity is so effaced that I just start mirroring the only identities from which I can get any inside view, which are those of first person narratives.

Oh, well, I think we’ve established already that I’m a weird person, so I don’t know why even I am surprised when I find new weird things about myself.  Maybe I’m just irredeemable—you certainly cannot save me up and exchange me for valuable prizes or anything of the sort.  If you save me up, so to speak, I just become wearisome.  Everyone who has ever spent a long time with me on a regular basis has ultimately found me not worth enduring.

I am one of those people.

I guess I don’t have an endorphin rush today.  I hope you have one, if you can.  They’re nice.