DREAMS

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Are you entitled to a headline?

It’s Wednesday, and I’m writing this post using my laptop computer, and here we all are again, though we are not on the Mississippi.

Actually, for all I know, some of you reading actually are on that river.  But I am not, and I don’t think I ever have been “on” it, though I think I have crossed over it at least once, on a bridge somewhere.  I’ve also had at least one dream that I can vaguely remember from long ago about driving in a car up a road that ran alongside some imaginary Mississippi (I think I was on the west side of it) but whatever it was in my dream was almost certainly not much like the real thing.  Similarly, the landscape around was also not at all like what I’m sure the real landscape along the Mississippi really is.  It was almost…compressed, and also simplified, in a way rather reminiscent of the Territories in the Stephen King/Peter Straub book The Talisman.

That was a weird digression, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s not really a big deal, though.  I have no particular agenda for today’s post, so it’s really going to be just a stream-of-my-consciousness thing.  Hopefully that won’t be too unpleasant for you.  If it is, I suppose you can console yourself with the fact that you only have to endure it for the few minutes it takes to read the post—indeed, you don’t actually have to read the whole thing, though if you’re reading these words, you’ve probably already read a substantial amount of it.

Still, least you’re not stuck inside this consciousness like I am, every waking hour.  And I have more waking hours than most people do because of my insomnia.

I had a particularly bad pain day yesterday.  I actually needed to use my bamboo walking staff to get up from my seat.  Well, I didn’t truly need to use it, I guess; I was able to do it without.  But it hurt quite a lot more to stand up without it than with it.

I’m not certain what caused this rather severe exacerbation.  Sometimes I try to do slightly different exercises or stretching or to wear different shoes and whatnot to see if they are better, and sometimes it just turns out they are worse.  On the other hand, sometimes the pain seems just to be random, or at least it’s worsened by some event or series of events that are not clear, and over which I have no apparent control.  It’s frustrating.  I keep trying, believe me; I’m still alive, after all*.  But Batman knows it’s hard to know why I try, because I see few if any potential short-term or long-term rewards.

Of course, I’m also no further along in deciding what, if anything, to do about my autism diagnosis.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe it’s enough just to know.  Supposedly there are supports and communities and so on for people with autism, but I am not good at seeking out communities at the best of times.

At least some people use this sort of situation as inspiration to make “content”, either on Instagram or on YouTube or similar.  I did do my old YouTube video “Asperger’s…or not?”  I guess I could do another one, a sort of sequel to that one, now that I have my formal diagnosis.  Unfortunately, I’m even more hideous to look at now than I was back then, so the prospect of making a video is of mixed potential at best.

In any case, I have been having a lot of trouble, largely because of the pain and my depression.  I’ve been taking the Saint John’s Wort for several weeks now, and I’m far from sure that it’s having any beneficial effects on my mood.  It all makes me want to ask “What is Saint John’s worth?”

Yes, that’s the sort of joke I think of whenever I write those words.  It’s not something I seem able to resist.  I have more of an excuse now, I suppose, but I doubt that makes it any better or more tolerable.

I don’t know what to write.  I don’t know what to do about my pain or my depression.  I don’t know what to do in general.  I’m getting lots of strong urges to hurt myself—partly just for distraction, partly to express my frustration, which I cannot seem to do in other ways, and largely because I just hate myself—and I have succumbed to them more than once recently.  That’s not a good trend.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I’ve already said more than I had to say, so the signal to noise ratio of this post is small.  But what part is the signal and what part is the noise?  I’ll give you a hint:  anything that seems whimsical and humorous and upbeat is almost certainly noise.  It’s my habitual cloak, since I know that people in general don’t want to deal with someone who is in distress.  They want to be able to convince themselves that there is nothing that needs to be done, or that there is simply nothing anyone can do.  It’s nice to be able to give those people an out.

As for the prospect of finding some out for myself, one way or another, well, I guess you can only wait and see, while I try to see if I can find any answers, whether trivial or significant.  And if nothing else changes, tomorrow I will write another blog post.

Please, please, try to have a better day than I have.

*Whether or not that’s a good thing is a question on which I am far from clear.

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…since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble blogger is mad.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.  That’s why I did the whole “hello and good morning” thing.  I started doing that, not thinking much about it, when I first started my weekly blog as a would-be promotion for my fiction.  Then, when I started doing posts every workday, I still made it a point to use that phrase on Thursdays.  That’s the kind of odd person I am:  I keep traditions and habits that absolutely no one cares about, because really, nothing I do is actually consequential to anyone, including me.

I seriously think I may just stop doing this now.  In fact, yesterday, my tentative plan was to come on today and do a post with the title “I’m not doing this anymore”, and with content consisting of “It’s just a waste of my time and that of anyone who reads it.  Oh, well.  Whatever. Never mind.”  And that was going to be that.

But I figured maybe I would give a slightly more polite sendoff, so here it is.  Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.  I can’t readily make or maintain any commitments right now‒except, it seems, for the commitment to use some version of “Hello and good morning” on any Thursday blog post, for what that’s worth.

All sorts of little ideas and thoughts come into my head about what I want to do.  I want to learn more quantum mechanics and relativity.  I want to start to learn Russian, or learn more Japanese, or bone up on my Spanish.  I want to start “audio book” recordings for Son of Man.  I want to make video recordings of me playing and singing various songs, like Ashes to Ashes, The Man Who Sold the World, or One Headlight, or Nothing Compares 2 U, or any of a number of other songs I can play and sing reasonably well.  I want to get a new acoustic guitar.

I want to finish my started and planned works of fiction. I want to draw.  I want to paint.

I want to try to get an “official” diagnosis of ASD (or not).

I want to wipe out the whole human race and all other life on Earth.

(None of these things is likely to happen.)

More than anything else, I want…well, I don’t know how to put it but that I want to be able to rest.  But I can’t seem to do it, not unless I’m deathly ill.  I’ve already been awake today since 1 am‒no slipping in and out of a doze this time‒and that was after only maybe two and a half hours of sleep.  I’m so tired.  But I’m not sleepy.

TTFN

P.S. – The picture above is an original work.

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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Song from my dream

I had a bit of a “yesterday” moment‒yesterday morning, appropriately enough‒in that I awakened from a sort of dream in which I heard a song or a tune playing, and it seemed familiar and clear, but I wasn’t sure what it was.  When I awakened, I still couldn’t place the tune, but I wanted to check it out and see if I could find out if it was something I had heard before or if my sleeping mind had made it up.

I first tried to sort of hum the tune into the voice recorder, but my voice is still hoarse.  So for the interim I pulled up an online virtual keyboard to work out the notes and write them down, then later, when it was late enough, got to the real keyboard and worked out the chords that went with it.

It’s a short little thing, only 16 bars long, in ¾ time, but I think it sounds kind of nice.  If anyone recognizes it, please let me know.

Thanks.

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And this weak and idle blog, no more yielding but a dream

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, as I suspect you will already know, so I’m writing my old-style weekly blog post again.

Of course, I’ve been writing little, brief snippet reports on a daily basis to keep you all updated about how my writing is going.  Or, like yesterday, I wrote one to let you know that I didn’t write fiction at all because I got almost no sleep, which is bad even for me.  I just felt awful.

I left work as soon as I was finished getting things set for the payroll and sent out to the company, and I went back to the house and took two diphenhydramine (that’s the generic of Benadryl®).  It did help me sleep a little in the afternoon, and then I woke up and got some food and relaxed a bit before taking another diphenhydramine before lying down for bed.  I don’t know how truly effective my sleep was; the general consensus is that sedated sleep is not a good substitute for natural sleep, but it almost has to be better than essentially no sleep.

I had some odd dreams, or at least I had one odd dream, during the afternoon or night.  This is unusual mainly in that I almost never have any dreams that I remember nowadays.  This one was some manner of nature documentary about ocean-going predators, particularly “killer whales” AKA “Orcas” and—this is a weird part—large, oceangoing crocodiles.

As far as I know, there are no deep-water crocodiles, but the ones featured in my dream seemed more like mosasaurs, anyway.  They were big and vicious, and there was “footage” of them attacking various large creatures in the ocean, but I couldn’t ever recognize the prey of either predator.  Also, there was a voiceover, but I think it was my voice.  Odd.

There was never really any scariness to it, because there were never really any human victims, but it’s a peculiar subject about which to have a dream.  If MLK ever had a dream like that, I don’t think he made a speech about it.

It’s curious enough for me to have a dream that I recall, nowadays, even if the dream is boringly strange (though not, I think, strangely boring).  I hope it means that I got a decent amount of sleep.  Certainly, I feel better this morning than I did yesterday morning, but that’s a very low bar to clear—it’s certainly too low to limbo.  It’s a bit like being more handsome than one of the zombies in Dawn of the Dead (although I’m not sure the latter is literally true of me).

I’ve not written on Extra Body since Tuesday, but that’s okay.  I made pretty good progress on it the previous two writing days.  As I’ve said, it’s basically reached novella length, more or less, as do many, if not most, of my “short stories”.

I don’t seem to have a knack for writing truly short tales.

I think my shortest story is Solitaire, which I wrote in one night, and which is also probably by far the darkest story I’ve ever written.  Really, if any of my works should come with some manner of “trigger warning”, that’s the one.  I was in a good mood when I wrote it—which I did in a spiral-bound, half-sized notebook I had with me.  It was just an idea that popped into my head because, at the time, I tended to play a lot of solitaire (with real cards).  I’m sure I’ve written about all this here before, so I’ll try not to rehash it.

I probably would tend to write shorter stories if I used such notebooks nowadays, but the base of my thumbs really gets sore when I try to write too much by hand.  Anyway, to be fair to me, I wrote Paradox City by hand, after writing both Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision by hand, and none of those stories are short.  The latter two are novels, and the “short story”, Paradox City, was about sixty pages long, hand-written, if memory serves.  It would arguably count as a novella itself, as would Hole for a Heart, I For One Welcome Our New Computer Overlords, and certainly In the Shade.

I was thinking maybe I should publish this latest story not just in Kindle format—which is what I tend to do with my “short” stories—but also in a small paperback form.  I’m not sure if the price would make it prohibitive, but there’s no real shame in paperback novellas.  Of Mice and Men (about 30,000 words long) was a paperback in the form in which I read it originally (twice in one day) when I was in junior high or my first year of high school.

Also, each “chapter” of The Green Mile was published as an individual paperback when it first came out, and those were shorter than most of my short stories.  Mind you, that was Stephen King, so there was a ready market for the books, and there were no e-books back then, let alone for Steinbeck, so I may be giving poorly chosen examples.

I think I’ve said that I have the notion of writing HELIOS as a sort of serial light novel, in the style of Japanese light novels.  Each volume would be longer than one of my short stories, of course, but I can try to keep them from getting prohibitively long.

Then again, if I’m going to write a series, I’m committing myself to a fairly long time writing the same story.  On the other hand, Mark Red is also supposed to be a series—there are at least two sequels to it in my head.  But no one has expressed any real interest in those, nor really in the first story, to be honest, so I haven’t gotten back to it.

I would love to get some feedback from any of the readers of my blog, especially if they have read any of my books, about what they would do if they were me (other than try to reverse whatever curse had made such a thing happen to them).  Please, leave a comment below.

In other news, I’ve continued to work on the calculus course on Brilliant dot org, which is perhaps not the ideal way to review calculus, but isn’t at all bad, either, now that I’m doing it on my smartphone.  I’m thinking of doing some other courses—maybe some reviews of basic physics, and of course, eventually, linear algebra and differential geometry to prepare me for greater study of GR—because taking more than one course at a time is the way one does things in university.

I haven’t really been reading any other new books for the moment.  As before, I’ve had a hard time getting into any new fiction, which is depressing, but it’s a fact to which I’ve become resigned for the time being.  Maybe if I weren’t working full time, I would find that easier; I don’t know.

If anyone out there wants to buy the movie options for any of my stories, and by doing so give me enough money on which to live for a while so I can write “full time” and so on, I’m open to the possibility!  Ha ha.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now.  I don’t want to go on and on and on and on like I did last Thursday.  I think that post was too daunting for most readers to bother trying to work all the way through it.  So I’ll leave this post for now, with just a “Happy First Thursday of May of 2024”.  Please try to take good care of yourselves and of those you love.  And try to be charitable, even toward those with whom you have profound disagreements.  Most arguments are ephemeral, and they are almost all about ephemeral things (even if they feel deeply important in the moment), so it’s foolish to sour your days and the culture at large with hostility and vindictiveness.

Maybe I really did get a decent amount of sleep!

TTFN

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Chaos surfing and the omni-curious mind

It’s Saturday morning and‒as I warned you‒I am writing a blog post today.

I just experienced a tiny little frisson of déjà vu, which is always interesting when it happens.  It involved that seemingly obvious, curious sensation that I could remember dreaming about the process of writing this particular blog post, in the location in which I’m writing it, at some time in the past.  Of course, I have no reason to suspect that precognitive dreams are actual things, except occasionally, by coincidence, due to the large number of dreams that happen and the brain’s capacity to model/predict its world with decent accuracy due to the regularities therein.  But déjà vu is still an interesting and sometimes enjoyable experience.

In case you haven’t noticed, mine is very much a stream-of-consciousness kind of blog.  I sometimes wish I were writing something more useful or informative or thought-provoking.  Then I could imagine I was contributing to the world in some way.  I have a wide range of knowledge on lots of topics‒science in general, some physics and cosmology, biology and medicine, some mathematics, a tiny bit of computers, and of course some philosophy (and psychology).

I sometimes regret not having explored philosophy more at an earlier age.  There was a philosophy class in my high school; it was one of my favorite classes, and the teacher was great, but I avoided philosophy in college deliberately.  I had little understanding of how good and useful it‒as well as pure mathematics, not solely for use in physics‒is in improving one’s ability to think about all subjects.

At its “worst” it’s at least analogous to doing calisthenics to get stronger and more fit.  One doesn’t do push ups in order to become a world champion at push ups‒usually‒and one doesn’t do push ups because one expects to become a professional pusher up and to make one’s living that way.  As far as I know, there is no such profession.  One does it to keep one’s body fit so it is more capable of responding to any of a functionally limitless number of specific challenges throughout life.  So it is with the mind, but the mind is far more capable of growth and strengthening than even the greatest athlete’s body has ever been.

I get so frustrated when I hear people whining about, say, the fact that they never use the Pythagorean Theorem in their daily lives, or haven’t used algebra since they left school.  My first reaction when I hear such moans is to think, “If that’s true, then too bad for you; you’re missing out.”

But I also find it noteworthy that most people don’t complain of the fact that they’ve never played kickball or tag or used their sandlot baseball skills in their later life.  Similarly, very few people get jobs playing video games‒there is a vanishingly small few who make at least temporary livings playing video games competitively, but that’s not a reliable long-term strategy for almost anyone.  Such skills are, for the most part, far less useful than those of algebra and calculus‒though I understand that there is some evidence that playing video games can make people better drivers by improving their alertness and response times.

Breadth and depth of knowledge are ends in themselves; they are their own reward, one might say.  When one learns something new, one makes oneself “larger” without taking anything away from anyone else*.  Information can be shared without loss, and one can contain whole universes‒real and/or imaginary‒in one’s mind.  It’s remarkable.

But also, knowledge, even of esoterica, is of practical, basic value.  Insights gained from having studied epistemology or Boolean logic may become useful, unexpectedly, in a business negotiation or a plumbing emergency.  Who knows?  The world is too complex for one to be able to predict the specifics of local events very far ahead of time‒and even the precise knowledge of that fact is based on an originally obscure branch of mathematics and information theory, and was formally born of the use of a “primitive” computer weather simulation.

You cannot fundamentally alter the chaotic nature of reality.  You cannot effectively steer the chaos‒but you can learn to surf on it.  And the more you know and the greater the breadth of your mental skills, the more likely you are to be able to catch the right waves and ride them to someplace you’d like to be.

Anyway, back to what I was saying earlier:  I sometimes imagine myself doing a more informative or exploratory blog, a discussion of sorts, albeit one-sided.  When I leave it to my stream of consciousness, my blog is often depressing (or at least it’s often depressed).  But I don’t know what people might like to read my thinking about; I have a great deal of difficulty understanding what other people find interesting or engaging, let alone why.  So, if anyone has any general subjects they’d like me to explore, whether truly broad or regarding current events or science news or anything within my relative wheelhouse**, feel free to let me know in the comments…or, I suppose, via Facebook or Twitter.  I don’t like to encourage such things, but these “social media” can be entertaining and even useful in certain rarefied situations.

In the meantime, have a good weekend if you’re able to do so.

*Apart from the tiny, tiny increase in overall universal entropy that all learning entails.  But that’s going to happen anyway, and the entropy created by a lifetime of astonishing erudition is unnoticeably small next to, say, that produced every day simply by the Earth absorbing sunlight, warming up, and releasing higher-entropy heat back out into the cosmos.

**My wheelhouse walls are made of rice paper, so I can easily knock them down and expand that chamber as desired.  I dream of my wheelhouse eventually being as large as the cosmic horizon‒or even larger!  Why not?

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“…out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old…”

It’s Tuesday, the “two day” of January of 2024 AD and the “two day” of the year.  That little, rather forced play on words is about as much good as I can say about the day.

I’m at the train station, soon to be headed in to the office for the day, but I did not go in yesterday, though the office was open.  If I had been feeling healthy, I suppose I might have gone in even though I resented the fact that the office was open.  I’m weird that way.  It’s not as though I had anything better to do with my time, had I been feeling healthy.

But, of course, I felt sick, still, albeit not nearly as bad as I did on Friday or even Saturday, or even Sunday.  By that progression, you may be able to deduce that my physical health was gradually improving, and though I am not fully back to usual (let alone optimal) health, I did at least get some rest.  There were quite a few annoyances related to the other people in the house, who had a huge New Year family get-together of some some kind, and were up waaaay past midnight, including some young children who were‒as sleep deprived children tend to be‒evidently quite grumpy and vociferous.

As for my mental health, well, despite my brief rest, it’s still rotten.  I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to imagine that it would have improved.  I got enough rest that I even had a few dreams this morning, which is unusual‒I almost never have any remembered dreams‒but they were just weird, irritating dreams involving a B-list Hollywood star about whom I know almost nothing.  I have no idea how that person infiltrated my subconscious.

The holidays are over now, of course, and even though I had no cause for celebration in the first place, there is still a bit of melancholy involved in their passing.  There’s nothing even nominally to celebrate for months to come, frankly, and precious little cause for major joy in the world.  But of course, my main problems are internal; my hardware and software are dysfunctional.

I sometimes may give the impression that I’m some form of purely philosophical pro-mortalist or nihilist, that my sense of the pointlessness and worthlessness of my life are simply reasoned conclusions, arrived at logically, quite convincing.  That probably makes some people feel that there really is no point in trying to do or say anything to change my outlook.  I make impressive sounding arguments in favor of nihilism and despair and pointlessness at times.  But that’s really just the left side of my brain acting as an attorney, arguing the case and providing “justifications” for the products of my dysfunctional mood and sensory and motivational systems.

It’s all sophistry.  My depression‒as with any other, preexisting neurodevelopmental and possible neurohormonal issues I have‒is a disease, a malfunction; my dysthymia is in a way a real disability, at least by some definitions.  These diseases are killing me, and it’s not a good death, nor even a mediocre or middling death.  It’s a bad, slow, drawn-out, miserable, torturous death.  Just consider the fact that I often wish I would develop cancer, because that would probably be a better way to die; certainly there would be more support and sympathy involved.  And I’m a medical doctor.  I’ve treated many people who have cancer, and I’ve lost loved ones to cancer; I know what it is and what it entails.

I’m trying to say that I really could use actual help.  I’m not able to do self-care well at all.  I’m very smart and creative and capable in some ways, but I cannot save myself nor even take very good care of myself, not with only myself as my motivation.  I find the upkeep involved in having and using a bicycle daunting and awful, let alone other ordinary tasks of personal and general maintenance.

I am eroding and decaying and rotting, both metaphorically and literally, in various ways.

I do not want to feel depressed.  I do not like being depressed‒that would be frankly contradictory‒and I do not like feeling horrible anxiety and hostility and confusion.  I do not like not having anyone with whom to do anything.  I don’t like hating my own presence and company.  I would like to like myself and to like my life and to feel that I deserved something, anything, good to happen to me.

Robert Sapolsky has pointed out that one cannot simply will oneself to have a stronger will.  Similarly, one cannot simply stop being depressed by choosing to be optimistic and to love oneself.  One cannot simply choose to be able to integrate into the human world effortlessly and seamlessly when one simply does not feel human.

One cannot eliminate anxiety just by saying that there’s nothing to fear.  And, of course, one cannot simply choose not to be in pain, if one is in pain.  Nature does not select for that capability.  If one could simply deactivate one’s pain and one’s fear, then one would probably do so; pain and fear are, by nature, unpleasant.  But then one would not flee danger or avoid injury.

Anyway, that’s my New Year’s message about me, I guess:  I’m depressed and despairing, not by choice, and I cannot simply snap out of it, nor can I save my life on my own.  And I don’t know of anyone else out there who has the wherewithal to help me, so I don’t expect my life to be saved.  I expect it to be lost, and soon; frankly, I expected it to be gone, already.  I’m amazed and rather appalled that I’m still alive to write this.  I don’t consider it an accomplishment.

Oh, yeah, by the way:  Happy New Year.

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Dreams of appreciation for one’s works in the past, present, and future

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the Tri-Rail station, waiting for the first train of the day.  I’m writing this on my cell phone, though I came within a jackrabbit’s breadth* of bringing my mini laptop back with me yesterday afternoon.  I even packed it in my backpack.  But then I decided that its added weight might give me trouble, since I was planning to walk back to the house from the train station.  I also had planned to bring one or two other things that might add to the usual weight of the backpack.

It turns out, though, that not only was I too tired/lazy to walk, but I also forgot to bring the few things for which I had foregone bringing the laptop.  So, that was entirely pointless, and now, here I am “typing” on my “smartphone”, waiting for the train to bring me most of the way to the office on a Saturday during what is technically a holiday weekend (in the US).  And, of course, I’ll go in on Monday more or less at the same time, since on Monday, the Tri-Rail will be operating on a Sunday schedule (which is also a Saturday schedule), since most sensible people will take the day off.  I mean, it’s Labor Day.

If there were ever proof needed that we have failed to protect the rights and well-being of workers in general, it’s the fact that most businesses and services are open on Labor Day.  Even many white collar workers probably work on Labor Day (though many lawyers may not, since courts and other government facilities are closed).

I used to feel pretty good about going to a rather meaningless job, because the whole point‒as I deliberately decided and told myself‒was simply to keep myself alive while I wrote my books.  But I’ve stopped writing my books now.  I never really wrote them for anyone but myself, of course, but it does eventually get discouraging when no one but family actually reads them (to a good first approximation, anyway, though there are one or two exceptions).

I don’t tend to be the sort of person who craves popularity for its own sake, but it really would be nice if more people read and enjoyed my stories.  I guess maybe I should share them all again on social media, perhaps for the last time, and maybe I’ll share my songs (my original ones, I mean) while I’m at it.  Why not?  One last desperate grab at passing driftwood seems like an appropriate act for a drowning man.

Heck, if I thought anyone would listen, I’d try to read more of The Chasm and the Collision out loud and post it up to YouTube.  I have the first nine or so chapters up there, and a couple of my short stories.  But I don’t think anyone (but I) has listened to them.  They have fewer “views” even than some of the videos of my original songs or even the covers I’ve done.

Again, I do these things mainly for myself, not to pursue some dream of fame and fortune.  Nevertheless, one does sometimes sputter to a halt when one is not merely alone in day to day life but receives no significant interest in one’s best, most creative products.  It may be a fine thing to “dance like nobody’s watching”, but it’s less great to write like nobody’s reading, especially when it’s almost literally the case that no one is reading.  Ditto for writing and/or playing music.

If I were a painter, after a while, it would become discouraging to keep painting if no one wants any of the works.  I can completely sympathize with Van Gogh for shooting himself.  And while I am glad he did a lot of painting before that‒I think his pictures are often deeply beautiful and unique‒I recognize that the fact that he is revered now is of absolutely no benefit to the man as he lived his life.  There is no Doctor Who, “Vincent and the Doctor”, episode in real life to give a past figure‒Van Gogh, Herman Melville, whatever other famous-after-death artist one might consider‒a chance to know that, though unappreciated in life, the artist would eventually be recognized as someone who did something that would bring joy to many people.  For a real person, there is only what happens during one’s life.

Getting famous only after death is almost a form of tragic irony.  It’s not common, though.  I think it’s more common for one to be relatively successful and famous in one’s lifetime and then be forgotten than the other way around.  But many truly great creative artists‒Shakespeare, Picasso, Dickens, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Steinbeck, Tolkien‒were revered in their time and are still revered now.

I don’t quite know what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe just that there is no long-term point.  Or, maybe it’s a variant of the Woody Allen joke that he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality through not dying.

But I don’t think it’s pointless to be respected (for one’s work) after death; I think it’s actually kind of wonderful to think that future generations might love and admire one’s work.  But it would be especially beneficial if they had also done so during one’s lifetime‒some of them, anyway.

The future admiration of the world is probably just as ephemeral as is such admiration during one’s lifetime‒since, compared to infinity, any finite amount of time, no matter how large, is vanishingly, unnoticeably tiny, and is always unreasonably close to the beginning of any counting of time‒but it is almost certainly the case that being honestly appreciated for one’s work during one’s life is a wonderful thing, all else being equal.

I don’t know how I got on that subject; perhaps I’ll figure it out when I read and edit this before posting it.  Whatever the case, I hope it was mildly entertaining for you.  Feel free to follow the links to my books or to my Amazon author page, or to my YouTube “topic” page where my original music is, or to my personal YouTube list if you want to hear my “covers” and a few raw originals, if all that seems as if it might be somewhat interesting to you.  And please try to have a good weekend, holiday or no holiday.

Thank you.

*Get it?

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A surreal golf dream to launch Saint Patrick’s Day

Happy Friday and Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!  I’m working tomorrow, but that’s okay.  I feel less weary today than I did yesterday.  I went back to the house last night, and the walk back from the train was not as tiring as it had been before, after a night’s and morning’s physical rest.

I may even have a beer—perhaps a Guinness—this evening, in celebration of the day, though regrettably I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy any corned beef and cabbage, and I indeed regret not being able to have the red potatoes that often come with that meal.  But, be that as it must.

Not surprisingly, I slept pretty deeply last night, though not as long as my body would have liked to sleep.  In fact, I was awakened by my alarm, which is an infrequent occurrence.  I was, what’s more, disturbed in the midst of a dream, and that happens rarely indeed.  I don’t recall the last time I had a dream that I remembered, though neuroscience suggests that I must have some dreams most every night.

It was a strange dream (though that’s perhaps redundant).  It involved a peculiar game of golf that went through a mysterious forest along a narrow path, with low but rather steep hills surrounding a thin, mostly straight main trail, which were part of the apparent “fairway”.  There were many small trees, which were nevertheless quite “shady”, though much of the game seemed to take place at night.  I don’t think I was present in the dream as myself per se, but was if anything a spectator.  It seemed almost like a set, as if for an elaborate play, though there seemed to be open, starry sky overhead.

Then, of course, an even more absurd turn of events happened, and the final shot of the golf round before the dream was interrupted landed in a changed landscape that seemed to be the interior of some impossibly huge mega-store, spread wider and higher than any real store could surely be.  It reminded me of a Meijer’s Thrifty Acres, a superstore that I think still exists up north, and that was always much more wholesome than any Walmart has ever seemed to me.

The latter stores always feel dismal somehow, rife with disorder and despair, ill-tended and bleak, with shelves rising not into displays of plenteous goods that signify prosperity, but with stereotypical discount items, things of poor quality and bare usability.  I say that only as an impression, not an actual review of the goods available in the store.  In fact, the best dress shoes I’ve ever owned I got at a Walmart for $10; the $120 Ecco shoes I was replacing with them had caused me terrible foot and back pain.  Also, the arts and crafts sections of Walmart has often surprised me with the quality (and low expense) of the materials you could buy there.  I’ve found good quality acrylic and watercolor painting supplies at Walmart for remarkable prices in the past!

Meijer’s, though, has always felt almost like a wonderland, with almost anything a person might wish to buy all under a vast, high roof that seemed too spacious to be a structure made by humans, but appeared rather like a miniature version of the sky itself, unlike the dreary overhead of gray, bare structures seen in most Walmarts.

I like Target stores, also; they tend to feel cheerier and to have higher quality stuff than Walmart (except their groceries) and they have some arts supplies that Walmart doesn’t, including a few nice options for alcohol-based colored markers.  But they remind me too much of shopping trips with my children (and with their mother), and I avoid going into them; they make me feel very sad.  I have similar trouble with Publix, and even with Walgreen’s drug stores, though I still prefer the latter to CVS, which always seems cold and detached and uncaring.

These are weird impressions to have, I’m sure, regarding chains of retails stores, but as I’ve always admitted, I’m a weird person.

Speaking of weirdness, the last shot of the dream golf match—by the apparent protagonist of the dream, who I think was a woman, though I can’t be sure*—landed on what appeared to be a checkout counter, with nondescript impulse items, a conveyer belt, and a cash-register.  The hero (or, if you prefer, heroine) got up on the counter-top, ready to hit the ball with a truly absurd, wide and fat and tall wedge club that looked almost as if it had been crafted from a snow shovel.  She was a lefty, if memory serves.

And then, I was awakened, literally, by the sound of a rooster crowing.  My morning alarm call is the Beatles song Good Morning, Good Morning, which—appropriately—starts with a cock calling out the start of the day.

Such was the start of my day, today.  I rose and showered and walked to the train while listening to The Fellowship of the Ring, from the end of the Council of Elrond until just after the fellowship is driven back by snow in the Redhorn Gate and by the cruelty of Caradhras.

It’s a brilliant story to listen to while walking, as I think I’ve written before.  One can almost feel that one is on a great adventure oneself, a quest of deep and heroic import, even though I’ve read the book so often that I can frequently recite it along with the recoding even as I walk.  And certainly, the style of the writing (and thus the reading or listening) influences the style of my own writing, as might be evident from this post.

Well, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a nice day, and enjoy a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration if you celebrate it.  It’s Friday, so if you like, you can even have some beer (green beer, if you must, though I think that’s perhaps a bit silly), and a lovely, appropriate meal, ideally with family and/or friends.

I’ll be writing a post tomorrow morning, barring the truly unforeseen, so, you’ll be “hearing” from me then.

saint patrick day

*I guess this isn’t surprising.  LPGA golf has always been more interesting to me than PGA golf—I’m not sure why.  It’s not just because the ladies are nicer to look at for me, as a man, than the men are.  I feel there’s less ego and snootiness among the ladies.  Lydia Ko is one of my favorite sports figures of any field, gender, time, or whatever.  She’s as enjoyable to see play—as are her competitors—as ever was Tiger Woods in his prime (though his first Masters win was amazing!), or even Michael Jordan playing basketball with the Chicago Bulls.  I’ll admit, however, that few sporting events were better than seeing the Pistons live, playing—for instance, given that this is St Patrick’s Day—the Celtics, back when they played in the Silverdome, and tickets were obtainable and reasonably priced.