depression

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“I am still right here”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and in the American ordering of date numbers, the date is 12-3, (which means “December 3rd”, not “9”).  That’s mildly fun, since it has 1, 2, and 3 in order.  In 20 years, we’ll have 12-3-45, which is also kind of fun.  But we’re ignoring the century number, which ruins everything:  12-3-2045 if you “spell” it out.  See what I mean?  I guess in 2542 years we’ll have 12-3-4567.  That’s much more amusing, but odds are good that by that time, we’ll have different ways of representing the date, so it probably won’t work.

Oh, well.  Life is indeed unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha as you might say.  

I’ve been trying to find something interesting to read, but neither fiction nor nonfiction seems able to grab my attention.  I’ve tried reading books about computer science/machine learning, and about the nature of mathematics in general, and about political philosophy, and about physics, and so on.  I can’t seem to summon the energy to focus or get into any of them.

I did listen to the song Like A Stone by Audioslave* for the first time during the last several days.  I got the chords for it and everything.  I’ve played the video over and over (as I do) and practiced singing it and playing it myself.  It’s got a lot of barre chords, so it’s good exercise for my left hand (which can get very sore) but otherwise it’s fairly simple.

It’s a good song.  Even so, I can only distract myself with that for a short while at a time, and the whole thing is already losing interest for me.  But then again, so is Radiohead, and the Beatles, and Bowie, and Pink Floyd, and all those other people whose songs I play and sing for myself.  It’s all just been done, and it’s just me trying to amuse myself, like when I used to play tabletop RPGs alone as a teenager, rolling random encounters and making stories up based on those as I went along.

I almost wish I still had my old role-playing games, like Gamma World and DragonQuest and Villains and Vigilantes (and even D&D) as well as some dice and hex paper, so I could play again.  But probably, if I had them, I would find them boring, too.

I am not interested in online RPGs, especially not the MMORPG things, especially the ones with graphics.  I have no interest in playing role-playing games with strangers.  That’s an almost horrifying thought.

The problem is clearly with me in all of this.  I got spun off years ago from having any kind of the close and consistent social interaction (outside work and my interlude of prison) which had previously served to keep me more like a human.  Since then I’ve gotten, or felt, more and more…different.  I’ve always known I was weird, really, but in the past I had family and friends around to keep me from going off the rails too much.

It’s a bit like a neutron.  As you probably know, neutrons in a nucleus, where they interact with surrounding nucleons via the strong force, are stable effectively forever.  However, a neutron outside the nucleus decays with a half life of only about ten minutes.  That means that after an hour, only one in 64 such neutrons will not have yet decayed.  After two hours, that would be only one in 4096.  They will all decay eventually.

That’s just an analogy, but it’s apt, I think.  I am a free neutron (and cheap at twice the price!) and must decay before long.

I think I just don’t have any capacity actually to connect to any other beings, anymore.  I don’t feel as though there’s anyone whose interests even complement mine, let alone match up to any reasonable degree.  And when I try to interact with people at a more personal level, it tends before long to be the case that we are both awkward and uncomfortable (but especially me).

Oh, well, again.  I have no reason to expect things to be otherwise, nor to expect to find any “kindred spirit(s)” out there.  I’m way past tired of trying to change myself to fit in with other people, to try to make them happy.  I tried to do that in the past, really pretty much all the time; it slowly but surely wore me down and wore me out.  It never ended up working, anyway; at some point or other, everyone I love has, consciously or unconsciously, found me not worth the effort of being around.

And what have I become, my sweetest friend?  I’m a neutron, a sustained interaction between the up quark field, the down quark field, and the gluon field(s), and I will decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron-antineutrino.

Okay, I’m pushing that metaphor way too far, sorry.  Bottom line, I know I’m weird and unpleasant, and I am not worth the trouble even for myself, let alone anyone else.  If someone wanted to help me or save me, I couldn’t encourage them, not if I were being honest and kind, anyway.  I’m not a good pony, and I don’t recommend betting on me.  “I will let you down; I will make you hurt.”

*Quick Chris Cornell-centered “dad joke”:  Where does an Audioslave work?  In the Soundgarden behind the Temple of the Dog.

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“From childhood’s hour I have not been as others were…”

Well, it’s not just the start of a new “work week”, it’s also the start of a new month‒the last month of 2025.  That’s December, by the way, in case you didn’t remember or were confused by the month’s name, which indicates that it’s the tenth month, not the twelfth.

Don’t be confused by the fact that this month starts on a Monday, by the way; it’s when the first of a month falls on Sunday that the month will have a Friday the 13th.  This month will have a Friday the 12th.  I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s mildly disappointing.

It’s hard to be clear why I find that as disappointing as I do.  I mean, I like prime numbers and particularly the number 13, but every month has a 13th day.  I guess it’s because of the supposedly unlucky implications of Fridays the 13th that I want to embrace the day.  Is that sympathy (for something not alive) or is it perversity?

I suspect it’s a bit of both.  I tend to feel sympathy and affection for peculiar things, and literally to feel bad for some inanimate and even abstract entities when I think they have been unfairly maligned.

But I do also tend to have a sort of affection for things that others fear.  I don’t know if that’s a defense mechanism or what.  But, after all, I did make a brief (failed) series of blog posts called “My heroes have always been villains.“

Whatever.  It doesn’t really matter.  I’m just a weirdo*.  What else is new?

Not much, of course.  I mean, I’m on my way to work, because I am working today, though I don’t feel very well.  But then, I never really feel well.  I’ve been in pain literally for more than 20 years straight, so I never do feel “well” anymore.  Every time I get up from my chair in the office, such as when I need to use the bathroom, I feel a bit like the Tin Man, trying to kick painfully rusted limbs into motion.  That’s just one example.

Do I have a heart, unlike the Tin Man?  I don’t know about the metaphorical one, but the physical one is real, because I had surgery on it for a birth defect when I was 18**.  It’s probably true, though, that my metaphorical heart is also defective, perhaps more so than my literal heart.

Who am I kidding with “perhaps”?  Of course it’s more defective.  For one thing, there is no surgery to repair a metaphorical organ.  You’d think that something conceptual might be easier to alter or repair than something physical, but that would only be the case if we understood how the whole thing works well enough to be able to figure out how to make adjustments and‒more crucially‒which adjustments to make and when.  It’s at least as difficult, in its way, as trying to control the weather.

What am I going on about?  I don’t know.  More pointedly, one could ask why I am going on‒with this blog, with work, with my life, with anything.  I’m wasting your time and mine, I think.  Mostly I’m wasting yours I suppose, since my time is a waste from the start.

Well, no, actually, that’s not entirely true.  Everything that led up to the birth of my children was absolutely important.  I would not change anything up to that point.  Any negative experiences that happened to me until then were worth it.  After that, though, there are many things I would change if I could‒indeed, there are probably many things that I cannot even bring to mind that I would want to change.

I don’t know what they might be, and I don’t really try to dwell on such things‒that’s probably part of why I dislike, or at least don’t enjoy, the weird manga/anime/light novels in which someone gets (for instance) hit by a car and seems to die, but is sent back in time to an earlier stage in their life and gets to live it again, but with their old memories, so they can change their outcome.

Yes, there is a whole slew of such stories, just as there are oodles of related “isekai” stories, where someone dies and ends up reborn in some “magical” world.  I guess that’s a bit related to things like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, but he didn’t have to die to go to the Land, he was summoned.  And also, when Stephen R. Donaldson wrote those books, back in the 70s and 80s, the idea was relatively original, or at least not wildly overplayed.

Speaking of overplayed, I’ll call this blog post to a close now‒and by that criterion, I ought to call everything to a close.  I am badly overplayed.  I jumped the shark 13 years ago or more.  I don’t know why they keep renewing this show.  But I appear to be under contract to keep playing this stupid role as long as the show is renewed.  I wish I had an agent to whom I could talk about getting out of this with minimal fuss and mess.

Alas, that will probably just be up to me, and I’m not good at doing things with minimal mess, though the “fuss” part is at least something of a question.

Anyway, enough.  This is stupid.  I’ll just wish you all a very good day, and a good week, and a good month/rest of the year, and then a most excellent year next year.  And, what the heck, while I’m spitting into the ocean, I wish you a truly wonderful remainder of your lives.

Wishes have no power, maybe, but mine are at least sincere.

*And also a creep, no doubt.  What the hell am I doin’ here, indeed.  I really don’t belong here.  Not that I’m convinced that anyone does.

**The birth defect didn’t happen when I was 18, of course‒it was found when I was 18, and operated on within that same year.  But it had been there since at least the time I was born, more or less by definition.

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Black Friday Sun, won’t you come?

Well, it’s officially “Black Friday” here in the US at least‒an ironic name that referred to the fact that the day after Thanksgiving was, at least traditionally, the busiest shopping day of the year, so going holiday shopping (mainly for Christmas) was always considered an ordeal.  And therefore…well, therefore everyone went and did it.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you look at it that way.  But that’s the way humans are, isn’t it?  Think of the hoarding of toilet paper that led to self-fulfilling prophecies of shortages during early COVID-19 days.

So, anyway, I’m going to the office today, because we’re open.  We’re also planning to be open tomorrow.

I wish I were sick.  I mean, I’m sick in the head (ask just about anybody, if they’re being honest) and I have chronic pain and all the fun associated with that, but I am not acutely ill, let alone ill enough that I could mentally excuse myself from going to work.

I wonder what would happen if I just decided not to go.  I wonder what would happen if I just didn’t go to work, didn’t write my blog, shut my phone off or put it on airplane mode, and just vegetated until I wilted and became compost.  Not very much, I suspect.

I mean, people at work would try to figure out where I was, because it’s work, and if I’m not there, someone will have to pick up the slack.  And I think my sister would try to figure out what had happened to me.  But that’s most of it.

A few people would worry, but that would only be for a while, and then even all passing thought of me would taper down, asymptotically approaching zero, but in the fashion of a quantum event‒more episodic and sporadic in measurable character than a seemingly smooth decay, but nevertheless getting closer and closer to zero all the time.

I’m tired.  Also, frankly, I’m uninterested.  The two things may be related.

None of the things I do for entertainment‒for distraction really‒are working very well anymore.  I am particularly bored of being in pain, of course.  That gets old very quickly, especially when it’s chronic, and mine has been there for decades now.  It’s not a warning of some life-threatening process happening, it’s just a set of alarms that are broken so they’re stuck in the “on” position.

Of course, my main problem(s) is/are me.  I’m a piece of merchandise that’s defective in many ways and in more than one system.  Believe me, if you got me as a present, you would hope whoever bought me had kept the receipt.

Anyway, I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday if you celebrated the holiday.  I ate a bit of junk food at the house, but it wasn’t very good, and it seemed to give me some gastrointestinal trouble, so that wasn’t a lot of fun.  There was nothing good on TV, unfortunately; I started to watch the Lions game (American football), but got bored very quickly.

I watched some videos on YouTube, but I’m running out of things there that are interesting.  The best thing I saw was a couple reacting to Rogue One, but that’s still very much a simulated, twice removed illusion of watching a movie with friends, so it’s a bit lame.

Obviously‒I hope it’s obvious‒I’m giving you my viewpoint on these things, not claiming to have some definitive, objective take on them.  If people enjoy something and it does no harm, then it’s a positive and “good” thing, so I mean no disparagement.

I am not a good measure for how good things might be, because I tend to see things in a less than optimistic and upbeat fashion.

That’s enough for now.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, though it’s difficult to see why.  Maybe some catastrophe will befall me and become a blessing to you all (and to me) by finishing everything for me.  In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend.

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“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.

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The blogger’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m starting this post with my traditional salutation.  Well, actually, I already started it with that salutation, so I’m telling you what I did right after you just saw that I had already done it.  It’s not terribly efficient, but I guess at least I have provided some explanation for the uninitiated.

As of today, there are only eleven shopping months until my birthday, so you might want to start thinking about what you’re going to do to celebrate when the time comes.  Not that there’s any guarantee that I’ll even still be around for my next birthday, but maybe you’ll want to commemorate it in some way after I’m dead.

Heck, maybe I’ll even be famous after I’m dead.  That would be a little bit ironic, right?  I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice, in a sense, for a lot of people to like my books (and maybe my music and my other writing) after I’m gone, but I won’t know about it, so it’s at best a theoretical niceness.  It would be better if people liked them while I’m alive.

I’m very bad at self-promotion, though, and I’m also bad at connecting with people who do promoting for others.  I have a poor self-image, for one thing (the fact that it’s bad doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate), and I also am just very socially awkward and find it very uncomfortable and even shameful to try to talk myself up, as it were.

I guess I would have been better off if I were a narcissist without shame; then I might be much more successful.  Heck, I might even be elected president, against the better judgment of practically every sane and sensible and moral and situationally aware person in the whole effing world.

At least the shameless don’t tend to be hypocrites.  That’s small consolation for everyone else, I guess, but the truly shameless don’t even pretend to try to follow any moral code that other people follow, and in that tiny way only, it’s mildly refreshing.

Let’s not go down that road, though, shall we?  It’s a depressing insight into human nature.

It’s the holiday season now, so to speak, at least here in the US.  Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, in fact, and the office is more or less certain not to be open, so I won’t be writing a blog post then.  Instead, I’ll be cooking a turkey and making some stuffing and potatoes and cranberry sauce and green beans and some pumpkin pie and apple pie and all that for all the guests who will be coming to celebrate with me.

Actually, though, since all my guests are imaginary, the food can be imaginary as well, which does save on expenses.  If I have nothing else, I have a good imagination.  I can dream up the best Thanksgiving feast you could ever eat.

Mind you, if I’m doing the dreaming, it’s going to conform to my tastes, and I don’t feel too bad about that.  All the above items are, of course, things I’ve always enjoyed at prior Thanksgiving dinners.  There will, however, be no mushrooms of any kind in my feast, nor zucchini, nor eggplant (these latter aren’t really part of most traditional feasts, anyway, unless I’m very mistaken).

Also, though there will be salad—I love a good salad—there will be no cucumbers, no tomatoes*, nothing related to avocados, and no walnuts or pecans or stuff like that.  Still, I don’t need to go into an exhaustive list of banned foods, since I’m the one imagining the feast; I just won’t add them!

When other people are involved, though, it can be useful to have a list of items someone cannot or will not eat.  Then, whatever someone makes to eat should be at least tolerable to everyone.  And after all, even merely tolerable food should be quite a good thing, since food is a fundamental and necessary good.

It’s a bit like sex:  even relatively boring and banal (don’t!) sex is better than almost anything else one might do on a given day, unless there are factors that get in the way**.  Of course, because of all the cultural baggage we have about sex—partly rooted in the idiocy of Saul of Tarsus, but amplified by other various repressive assholes throughout history—sometimes even sex between consenting adults can be associated with lots of hang-ups and discomfort.  It’s a shame, really.

Oh, well, it’s not as though I’m the most well-adjusted and clear-headed of people, so I only have so much of a leg to stand on to criticize other people’s foibles.  I’m so socially awkward and alexithymic that I’ve generally felt uncomfortable ever initiating anything, even in a long-term, committed relationship.  I also have a habit of trying not to impose my feelings or preferences or urges on other people, so I tend to feel ashamed or guilty about even considering making amorous overtures.

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m sharing these embarrassing details.  Maybe I’m dying and this is some kind of subconscious confession or something.  I mean, of course, we’re all dying, all the time.  But it may be more precipitous in my case—I’m not aware of it being so, but I don’t know—and maybe my inner mind could pick up on the fact.  Or maybe it has plans it’s not telling me.

All right, enough.  I hope you have a good Thursday and then a good day on each of the rest of the days of your life.  You’ve slogged through my weird writing; you deserve some type of reward.

TTFN

*I like—often I love—almost everything made from tomatoes, but raw tomatoes gross me out.

**In my case, sex has a lot in common with my Thanksgiving feast, ha ha.

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Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday

Well, it’s Tuesday and I’m already exhausted after just one day of work for the week.  Mind you, it was a strange day at work, with people struck with family tragedies, people with personal catastrophes (such as a DUI), my coworker out sick, and all that sort of stuff.  The things that were/are not usual were manifold, and they are very unpleasant to me.

Also, I’ve had a dull, kind of pressure-like headache for the last perhaps 18 hours (with some lulls), and it feels almost like a “mini migraine”.  It certainly interferes with my mental acuity.  It may interfere with my writing; I can’t really tell.  If anyone notices anything regarding that, I would be grateful if you would let me know*.

I also feel a bit queasy, which goes along with the low-grade migraine notion.  I am going in to the office anyway, though.  First off, I don’t know if my coworker will still be out sick, and I don’t want to leave other people too much in the lurch.  In addition, if I get behind on things for one day, I’ll just have to catch up on things the next day, eliminating any potential benefit from resting for a day.

Also, let’s be real:  I don’t enjoy spending time at the house.  I need to rest there frequently‒longer than I actually do‒but it’s not pleasant for me.

Speaking of rest, I had a really bad sleep last night.  I mean, I didn’t sleep more than maybe half an hour before 3 this morning.  Then I dozed for a wee bit‒less than an hour.  But now I’m up, exhausted but not sleepy.

What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is the point?  Why do I bother going on?  Is it just fear of death that prevents me from dying?  Or is it also the fear of hurting people who matter to me?

But if they love me, why would they want me to suffer?  I understand that there is nothing they can do for me, of course.  But then they should accept things they cannot change, not wish for some other person to endure without reward or with no assistance.

Actually, all these things, these wishes from other people, are in my head.  Very few people have said they want me not to die.

I don’t think that’s because all the other people do want me to die.  Most people are probably pretty much indifferent.  Most people don’t worry about other people much because they’re too busy imagining that other people are “worrying about” them.

But they aren’t.  It’s just not workable.  People think about other people, of course, and especially about their family and friends.  But they cannot think about them much.  I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s hard enough trying to pay attention to oneself and one’s actions, to try to manage one’s days and nights, one’s work, one’s meals, one’s rest.

The percentage of time spent dwelling on other people instead of oneself cannot be very high in the double digits, if that.  This is not an indictment or a judgment.  I think it is literally just about all that people can do.

This is surely why narcissists are always so unhappy.  They can never get as much attention as they wish and imagine they deserve from other people.

We should all probably let go of our sense of entitlement.  The universe “promises” us all one thing and one thing only:  that everything, all this that exists around us, like ourselves, will end.  It may then begin again in some sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it ended.  Just because there’s another sausage after the link, doesn’t mean the preceding sausage isn’t nevertheless gone.

Wow, that’s a weird analogy or metaphor:  The universe as one sausage in an endless chain of sausage links.

I guess it makes as much sense as many such metaphors, and more sense than some.  I don’t really know what point I was trying to make, if there was one, but at least it ought to be somewhat memorable.  That’s worth something, right?

I’m too tired to contemplate any more at the moment.  I’m going to finish this off now and call it good enough.  I hope you all have a good day (or rather, that each of you has a good day).

But in closing, a thought just occurred to me.  Remember, mushrooms are not vegetables.  As fungi, they are more closely related to your fish and your chicken and your beef (and you) than they are to corn and carrots and peas and potatoes.

Okay, that’s enough.  Please have a good day.

*My gratitude is probably utterly worthless, of course, like my sorrow and regret and disappointment, not to mention my love and my joy and my dreams.

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“…like a ghastly rapid river, through the pale door…”

It’s Monday again.  It keeps doing this, starting a new work week, despite the demonstrated futility of everything.  You’d think that our culture had all read The Myth of Sisyphus as one and had decided to embrace that futility.

But, of course, embracing the absurd and working endlessly and finding happiness in that meaningless repetition is just what the exploiters‒whoever they may be‒would want you to do.  So maybe

But if so, it’s almost certainly an accidental one.

Even true “conspiracies” in the world (which are less common than you’d think) are, I suspect, rarely planned out ahead of time; they simply happen.  Some course or tendency exists that a few alert people, or just lucky people, recognize as something they can exploit for their own gain, and they do, and the process becomes self-reinforcing.  But no one thought it up.  It’s like the nonrandom survival of randomly varying replicators.  Reality is too complex for even very bright minds to create highly complicated and intricate conspiracies ahead of time.

I’ve written about all of this before, and frankly, I’m tired of discussing it right now.  If you’re interested, go find my earlier discussions, here and/or on Iterations of Zero.

Today, I’m not sure what to write about, though.  Nevertheless, I am writing.  I guess the Sisyphus reference comes all too naturally in such situations, doesn’t it?

I don’t really have much to discuss, now that I think about it.  I had a nice evening Friday, albeit too short of one, but otherwise, there’s nothing really going on.  At least, there’s nothing I know of in the world right now that’s of particular interest to me.

Despite the fact that I am coming off a full-length weekend, on which I had a nice Friday evening watching a few Doctor Who episodes with my youngest, I already feel very tired.  I think that’s probably not too related to broad corporeal processes‒though my chronic pain makes even stationary existence exhausting‒but probably has at least something to do with the waning length of daylight as we approach the Winter Solstice (still more than a month away).

I’m definitely a bit susceptible to seasonal affective effects, on top of my tendency toward difficult to treat dysthymia, which I now suspect has always been so difficult to treat because it’s related to my ASD.

Coincidentally‒but not surprisingly‒my first big and particularly recalcitrant depression happened not long after my ASD repair*.  It’s fairly common for patients to suffer from depressive syndromes after having had open heart surgery.  I didn’t know this at the time (I was only 18) but I experienced it firsthand, and I learned all about it later.

I even wrote a review paper about the neurologic side-effects of surgeries that involve heart-lung bypass.

Again, I’ve written about all this crap before; I’m sorry to rehash it.  Please feel free to go hunt down the various mentions of all this in my prior writing here and on IoZ.  If anyone finds any particularly interesting tidbits, feel free to share them and/or the links in the comments, so others might be able to find them more quickly than you did.

I know, I know‒no one is interested in any of that shit, no one is going to look it up, and no one is going to share it.  I’m being patently ridiculous.  But I feel that I must write something, since I’m writing at all.  Thankfully, I’m nearly at the target number of 701 words, so soon I’ll be able to draw this tediousness to a close, at least for today.  It’s too much to hope‒for you, for me, for everybody‒for this to be the last such post for anything other than tragic reasons.

Life is almost always disappointing, though if you don’t expect things‒as the Tao recommends‒you will not be disappointed.

Speaking of expectations not playing out, on the way toward the office this morning, I waited at an intersection where there is a right turn arrow that crosses what would be my route.  Before the walk signal turned, a car turned in front of me, as was appropriate.  Then the signal changed and I had the right of way, so I went.

As I half-expected, a car on its way in went to turn right and had to stop short to avoid plowing straight through me.  I took no evasive action, just muttered to myself, “Hit me, hit me, hit me…” as I walked along.  Alas, the driver did no such thing, so as I continued through the intersection, I looked back at the car and muttered, “Pussy.”

Of course, it was not the car’s fault.  Though capable of motion, it was a fundamentally inanimate object, with no arguable or even fanciful sense of agency.  Its shape made it clear that it was well over a decade old, and it certainly predated any AI drivership, even if it had been the right make and model for such things, which it was not.

It was the driver who was not willing to kill (or even just injure) a random pedestrian who was obeying traffic laws and signals.  I guess that’s actually commendable.

All right, that’s enough of this idiocy for now.  I hope you all had a good weekend and that you will have a truly exceptionally wonderful week‒and then that the exceptional wonderfulness becomes the norm, and all your future weeks become brilliant, but you never become complacent about it; you are always grateful and happy.

I would also like a unicorn pony.

*The heart one, not the neurodevelopmental disorder.  Acronyms really are a potentially treacherous form of data compression, aren’t they?

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“Vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow…”

Well, it’s Friday at last, and the day I mentioned earlier this week—you know, 11-14-25.  I’m sure you all “got” the slight fun I found in this date, and I’m not going to go into it any farther.  If you’re interested, you could go back and look at that earlier post.

I’m writing this on my lapcom today, for the first time since last week.  It will—or should—be the last post before Monday, because I don’t think we’re going to be working tomorrow.  At least one of our best closers who comes in on weekends when we’re open has a family crisis, and it’s a serious one, so he won’t be coming in, and that means the rest probably wouldn’t find it worthwhile.  If that situation changes, I might write a post, but I doubt it.  The boss himself suggested we won’t be working tomorrow, so there’s a pretty strong inclination in that direction.

I hope to be doing something rather enjoyable at the office after work this evening, but I won’t get into it now.  It’s nothing most of you would probably care about, and many of you might not find it interesting, but I’m looking forward to it.  Hopefully it all goes well.

I did not read any Principles of Neural Science yesterday, nor indeed any of my other science books.  I’m afraid my stomach (or, really, my whole GI tract) was giving me quite a bit of trouble during the day, and so I didn’t really do anything that required any significant focus or imagination.  I hope to read something today—my GI tract appears to be responding to my attempts at remediation—but we shall see.

The GI tract has its own, dedicated sub-nervous system, which by some measures is reputedly at least as sophisticated as a cat’s brain, and mine is pretty clearly about as stubborn and willful as any cat.  I guess I don’t have much right to complain, since I am also rather stubborn and willful, and in some senses catlike*; I’ve got little leg to stand on for complaining.

Let’s see, let’s see, what else should I write about…or, rather, about what else should I write?  I’m really not sure.  I’m trying very hard not to share too many too negative thoughts here, but it’s hard, since that’s a lot of my thoughts.  It also hasn’t seemed to do anything to improve the circulation of this blog.  I have returned to the old numbers of typical daily readers—roughly a few dozen—and if anything the number seems to have shrunk slightly.  I don’t really know what to make of it.

It would be nice to have a wider audience, and especially one that was widening, but I am not good at self-promotion.  It makes me feel very uncomfortable.  That’s largely because of poor self-esteem, I guess.  Or maybe it’s just social anxiety/awkwardness, or just a general sense of rudeness, or ASD, I don’t know for sure.

It would be nice if more people read my blog, though, or listened to my music, or read my books.  I would really love to have people enjoy my creations, and maybe even have a few of them tell me so and tell me what they liked about them—especially the books, of course.

Maybe my work will become popular after I die.  I guess I’ll never know whether that happens, but it’s something onto which I can hold to console myself when next to no one reads anything I write, especially fiction, or listens to my music, or whatever.

I’m at least still trying to keep my posts somewhat short, setting my target now for 701 words as I have for the last week or so.  Indeed, I’m getting pretty close to that number now, already.  I don’t know whether my readers are grateful for the slightly shorter posts, or if they dislike them, or if they are thoroughly indifferent.

I frequently wrestle with just giving up the whole process as a bad bet.  Writing this blog never did seem to improve the sales of my books, which was the whole reason I first started doing it.  It certainly hasn’t helped my mental illnesses; or if it has, I don’t even want to consider what they would have been like without it.

And it certainly hasn’t made my life into anything anyone sane would want to have.  I don’t think even Hill House would want it, and it’s not sane**.  Hell, I’m not entirely sane, myself—whatever that means—and I don’t really want my life, either.

Oh, well, there’s probably nothing I can do.  Maybe I should just stop trying.  I wish I were able simply to give up and let go.  Maybe someday soon I will be so able.  That would be a relief, certainly for me, and maybe for all of you.

I guess it doesn’t really much matter to anyone but me, though, certainly in the relatively long term.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day and a very good weekend and a very good week after that, and so on and on.

*Not my agility, though.  That’s not horrible, but it’s far from catlike.  And my dexterity leaves even more to be desired, unless I’m paying close attention.  My default state seems to leave me rather disconnected from my body in certain senses, and that tends to lead to a bit of clumsiness.

**So said Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, and she has authority.

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Unless you work with leather, awl is vanity

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m writing this on my smartphone again today.  Though writing on my lapcom was definitely better and more fun, I just didn’t have the will to bring it with me at the end of the day.

I had a bad day depression-wise yesterday, and I feel that it had a somewhat contagious effect on the office, though I tried to keep it to myself.  The trouble is, I guess the general negative feeling and my near-catatonia can be felt, in a way, by the others in the office.

Anyway, enough about that.  I’m trying to avoid talking about the dysthymia/depression stuff and its associated thoughts and emotions.  It just serves to bum other people out, it doesn’t seem to help me in and of itself.  It certainly hasn’t led to anyone coming and rescuing me, despite my past open cries for help.  People are far more likely to come to me asking for help with their own issues than to try to help me.

That’s probably my own doing, really.  I mean, I’m a doctor (though I am no longer allowed by the esteemed and wise and intelligent government of Florida to practice medicine).  I’ve always tried to be of benefit, to earn my continued existence and to earn other people’s affection and/or company by being useful.

The trouble with that is that people will tend to drop you like a ninety pound cockroach once you’re no longer useful, or if you become inconvenient.  And yet, in contrast, many selfish dotards‒like the present dotard-in-chief‒will garner loyal followers who get abused and lied to and taken advantage of in every nasty way, only to respond with a (metaphorical), “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

Humans are so very stupid, but plainly, so am I.

I should be working tomorrow, so I will write another post then, assuming nothing catastrophic (or dogastrophic) happens between now and then.  Does that statement entail a promise or is it a threat?  That’s very much up to the person receiving the message, but as for my intention, it’s just to inform you.

Oh, hey, maybe some of you might know the answer to my following bit of curiosity.  During the latter part of last week, my blog abruptly spiked in readership, peaking at more than 10 times my usual number of visits and views.  This is still nothing about which to write home*, but it’s quite startling.  Now, it’s sliding back to more normal numbers, which I guess is just regression to the mean, but I am basically curious as to why so many new people (apparently) came to read my blog at the end of last week and into the very early part of this one.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but when I saw that initial little spike begin and then persist and increase for a few days, I wondered whether maybe I had suddenly found a bigger audience, and maybe my writing situation was going to change thereby.  Obviously, though, that’s not what happened.  That’s fine; I didn’t really expect it to be that way, I just had a little frisson of “ooh, what if…”

I did get an “official” check mark on Twitter not long ago, just to try to improve my reach, and I wonder if that had anything to do with my brief readership bump.  I was about to get the same “official check mark” through the Meta based platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) as well, but I am going to wait a bit just because of the added expense.  I don’t know why, exactly, since I have nothing better to do, and I honestly like Threads better than the website formerly known as Twitter, and more people whom I actually know are on Facebook.

Oh, well, it’s not the first time I’ve been unable to explain my actions in a purely rational way.  That’s par for the universe, though; there are always causes, for everything, but there are only very rarely reasons.  Telos is a human-invented concept, like justice, like money, and like so many other things people take so seriously.

I guess I can’t complain too much about people taking justice seriously.  While there are unending struggles to determine just what justice is‒I always say that true justice must be based on compassion, for how can you possibly judge someone’s actions without knowing as much about what led to them as possible‒it’s hard to make a good, honest case that justice is unimportant, at least within human civilization.

[Weird aside:  the thought just popped into my head that someone should write an anti-Wuthering Heights story and call it Withering Depths.  I don’t know why I thought that; I’ve never even read Wuthering Heights nor seen any production of it other than the semaphore version by Monty Python’s Flying Circus.]

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  If any of you accidentally boosted my readership last week, I would just like to say “Thank you.”  So here it is:  Thank you.

May I have another?

*I don’t have a home to which to write, anyway, nor anyone to whom to send such a homeward-bound missive should I write one.

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Wee are the champignons, but I still won’t eat them

First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.”  So, here goes:

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.

My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said.  My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly.  I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.

Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is).  I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.

Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.

I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much.  That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.

Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**.  I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.

Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be.  His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).

My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had.  So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.

They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course.  If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous.  Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out.  Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.

It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.

Let’s see now, what else is going on?  Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them.  From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course.  But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.

Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place.  But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.

Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are).  Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.

I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***.  Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

With that, I will call this blog post to a close today.  I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell).  I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.

*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”.  This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent.  It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18.  It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.

***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.