dysthymia

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Don’t regress if it’s just going to make you mean

Well, here we are again, starting another frikking work week.  It seems like only seven or eight days ago that we did this last time.  I don’t think there’s any more good that can be said about this occasion than on any of the previous occasions.  In some ways it is worse, for it merely continues the fruitless, pointless process it entails, without any clear increase in wisdom or knowledge or well-being.

There’s certainly been no gain in happiness‒for me, personally, or for the world at large.  Though probably there are some individuals who are better off this week than they were last week, by any criteria one might reasonably choose.  Gaussian curves tend to have outliers, after all; that’s the nature of the normal distribution.

Of course, there are negative outliers as well, down at the other end of the curve.  I feel for them.  Hopefully, their place in the lower percentiles is a fluke, a local, transient variation not produced by any particular process but merely by statistical fluctuations.  If so, they will almost certainly experience regression toward the mean next week:  when an exceptional occurrence in an iterated or longer term process is followed, almost always, by more average outcomes in whichever direction brings it toward the mean* of the curve.

That’s good.  It would be a shame if there were some process making it such that some individuals were persistently prone to be in the lower tail of the curve.

Of course, though I used the subjunctive just now, it’s not really a contrafactual situation; there really are plenty of people whose situation is such that each week for them tends to be worse in general than the weeks of the vast majority of other people.

This is almost certainly not by their own conscious choice.  It’s not easy to imagine a realistic situation in which someone deliberately chooses to be consistently worse off than most of their fellows.  Unconscious or subconscious urges, on the other hand, can lead to such things (presumably), as can bad habits that have taken hold.

Don’t look down on people who are stuck in bad habits that are clearly doing them harm.  The nervous system is built around habits, and does not change them lightly.  They are how people are able to do most of the things that they do.

If you had to decide de novo, without the grace of habits, what to do on any given occasion or in any given situation, odds are good that you would exhaust yourself rapidly, and you would screw things up at least as often as not.  There are good reasons why “System 1” takes care of most situations for most people**.

“System 2” requires much more time and effort and literal energy than “System 1” does.  And the brain already uses about 20% of a typical human’s calories.  So there, you see:  data centers have always been very energy-intensive, and they always will be.  There are good, sound thermodynamic and information theoretic reasons for this.

Okay, well, anyway, this has been a bizarre digression or series thereof.  It’s weird, and probably not terribly interesting to most people.  Such is the stuff of my thoughts; I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone.

Speaking of the stuff of my thoughts, I did a brief-ish audio recording yesterday afternoon, which I posted quite a bit later in the day.  I don’t know if it’s interesting or even coherent; I did not edit it for content, just sound quality and pause length.  You can listen to it if you want (obviously) and feel free to give me feedback on whether or not it is coherent.

Meanwhile, I hope that each and every one of you reading this feels better than I do right now.  If I could know that, I think it would make me feel slightly better.

*By mean, I mean (ha) the arithmetic mean, or what might be called the average in common parlance:  you add up the values of every “entry” and then divide by the number of entries.  This is not to be confused with the median, which is the value halfway from the worst to the best (or whatever) of a given particular listed and ordered data set.  It’s an important distinction, because confusing the two leads to some fairly common mental errors.  For instance, while by mathematical definition it is impossible for more than half of all comers to be above the median, it is entirely possible, if atypical, for more than half of people to be above average.  This just requires those who are below average to be significantly more below the average than the others are above it.  For instance, if you gave a test to 100 people, and 90 of them scored 50%, while 10 of them scored 0%, the mean would be 45, and so most people would be above the mean.

**There may be some evidence that people with ASD, for instance, tend to use System 2 far more often for far more things than neurotypicals do.  This may be part of why autistic people, even level 1 ones (which I am not, apparently, at least according to my official diagnosis), are so often just mentally exhausted, even by things that “ought” to be straightforward.

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Yet another pointless discursion

Well, as I warned you would probably happen, here I am, writing a blog post on Saturday (August 15th, 2026 AD/CE), because I am going to work today.  I feel barely awake, to be honest. Nevertheless, as I said, here I am, smartphone in hands, thumbing out the words to yet another pointless discursion, one which I have headlined “Yet another pointless discursion”.  Go ahead, see for yourself.

I’m really pretty foggy and groggy right now, so I don’t know how good or interesting this is going to be.  I mean, I guess I could say that every day, of course, but it feels more acute at this moment.  It’s a bit weird to have a strong, sharp feeling of not knowing something, and of not being able to know it.  It feels like some sort of epistemological contortionism.  Which is itself a rather strange notion.

Of course, I don’t know what to write about today, or rather, “I don’t know about what to write”.  I feel that fact quite acutely at this moment, as well.  Still, it’s a work day, and one on which I am indeed going to work, so I guess I should fulfill my duty as I perceive it.

It’s not as though it would make any significant impact if I didn’t write anything, though.  I know of only a handful of people who consistently read and “like” my work.  Even those who don’t specifically “like” it but do come to read it number only in the few dozen.

But the readership here is pretty much the only regular social interaction in which I engage nowadays, if you don’t count work-related stuff.  At work, though, I think that I am probably quite unpleasant, because I am quite uncomfortable a lot of the time, and so my personality is negatively affected.

I’m not snappish and irritable at baseline, not as far as I can remember.  But for many years now, I have been quite grumpy and ornery.  I still try not to be rude if I can avoid it.  But I think I fail in that endeavor far more than I used to do.

And really, while it’s good not to be rude, ceteris paribus, my energy for such things is often less than optimal.  That dearth* also seems to affect my sensitivity to sensory annoyances, especially general noise and lateness and such like.

My tinnitus doesn’t help, either.  Right now it’s blaring at what feels like maybe 90 or 100 decibels in my right ear.  My left ear has a much milder amount, often zero, but the very disparity leaves me constantly a bit off balance.  Anyway, it’s quite annoying, but it doesn’t distract from my other discomforts, it merely layers itself atop or amidst them, like some kind of sensorineural seven layer dip or something.

There’s such a thing as seven layer dip, isn’t there?  I thought there was.  I could swear I had it at some family get together in the distant past or something.

Anyway, I’m very tired and very uncomfortable, and I’m just bobbing around here like a discarded plastic bottle that once contained one of those “experimental” sodas that never caught on, floating in the brackish, contaminated wastewater canal that is what’s left of my life.  I’m so tired and I am so uncomfortable.

I really want to get out of all this, to rest or at least to escape or even just to cease.  I am doing no good, as far as I can tell, and if I am doing no good for anyone, even myself‒at least not enough to outweigh the natural harm brought about by my very existence‒then why am I doing anything?

I feel rotten‒not morally so, but literally, as if my body were decaying in a more than metaphorical sense, yet still I am conscious and able to experience the sensations of that decay.  It’s not a good thing (duh!).  I wouldn’t say it’s hellish in any usual sense; it’s not as if it were so much discomfort that all I can do is scream.  In some ways‒admittedly, very few‒that might be better, because at least if I were in howl-worthy agony, I would not feel the compulsion to bother to try to force myself to be productive in any way.

Which one is worse, a Prometheus-style agony, where one is immobile and tortured regularly in such a way that one can do naught else but shriek, or a Sisyphean type of situation, where one strains and struggles to carry out some pointless task constantly, but one is at least able to act in that task?

Oh, who cares?  It doesn’t matter, and the answer is probably not precisely the same for any two people ever in the world.  I hope you all have a good weekend.  I guess I’ll probably be back on Monday.  I don’t think I’ll do audio today.  I’m too tired. 

*Does anyone else here remember Dearth Nadir, the Muppet Show’s spoof of Darth Vader, clearly played by Gonzo because his nose was unmistakable?

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This is today’s blog post, in case you were wondering

Well, it’s the start of a new work week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.  Mine was…well, idle, I guess, if nothing else.  Certainly there were no significant activities involved in it, beyond watching various kinds of reaction videos online, because that almost feels like watching something with friends.

I’m sorry to have to say that my one slightly longer than usual night’s sleep (see last week) was indeed a fluke and a rather extreme outlier.  I wonder whether ibuprofen even had anything to do with it after all.  It could have been something I ate for all I can tell.

I’m continuing to use the ibuprofen, but I think it’s just doing its usual thing, because I certainly am not getting the response I got when I took it after ten or so days without NSAIDs.  I did get some similar feelings of fleeting but global relief of some kind since then, which makes me suspect that I really do have some chronic inflammation going on, but that’s really not very surprising.

I would have liked to do more walking this weekend, but it’s been very hot and seriously humid, so the heat index rises to well over a hundred starting quite early in the day.  Also, it was pretty sunny, and that adds to trouble, especially if one doesn’t own any non-black clothes.

I know, of course, that it’s been my decision to buy only black clothes, so one could say that it’s entirely my fault.  And that’s even accurate, if one uses the term fault in the sense of “something wrong or badly designed or badly put together” or even “a crack running through the crust or surface or structure of something”.  I’m definitely a faulty device.  That should be obvious.

But it’s not a fault about which I have the wherewithal to make a difference.  I just can’t stand to wear any colors anymore; they irritate my eyes, or some part of my sensory apparatus.  I can’t change my own bad wiring, so to speak, anymore than a computer can improve its own operating system.

I suppose, in principle, AIs may eventually be able to do so, but though I often feel like a replicant, I am not, as far as I know, actually (or virtually) artificial.  I can alter my programming only the “old fashioned way”, by which I mean, trying to learn new things and master new skills and so on.

And I have tried, and I am trying, and I will probably continue to try, to improve myself, to gain new skills, to get past my mental (and physical) issues.  But though I may have made progress‒who knows how bad I might be, otherwise‒I feel very much like an ant trying to scramble up the side of an ant-lion’s trap.

The shifting sand underneath makes the experience much like trying to go up a fast moving downward escalator.  It’s taking all the effort I’m able to muster to keep myself from going rapidly down to whatever predator or basement or whatever lies at the bottom of the course.  Or, maybe there is no bottom.  Maybe it’s possible to keep sliding down and down, forever, never making any headway at all.

It’s enough to make one want just to stop trying and even to turn around and sit down on the escalator steps and just embrace whatever is waiting below.  I certainly don’t feel any signs that I’m even getting within sight of any next level up the moving stairs, let alone finding a potential exit.

All this is a metaphor, of course, and I suspect it’s a pretty tortured one.  I apologize for that.  I try to be creative, but sometimes it doesn’t work too well, and I come out with some equivalent of purple prose.

I think I try too hard to be clever, just as I try too hard to be funny.  I succeed a little bit, occasionally; it would be truly sad if I kept trying and always failed.  But enough people laugh at things I say that I think I have some intermittent success in the humor area.  I’ve even received compliments about some laughs in a review of my horror novel The Vagabond.

I wonder what I would be like if I were able to break the habit of trying to be funny or clever or whatever you want to call it.  Maybe that would be the equivalent of the aforementioned turning around and sitting down on the descending escalator and just watching as it brings me into whatever depths await.

I’m certainly very tired of trying.  I’m not getting anywhere‒not as far as I can tell‒and it’s just exhausting.  Maybe I need what they call a “grippy sock vacation”*.  Except I think I need more of a “dirt vacation”, which is like the proverbial dirt nap, but more welcome to the person taking it.

Okay, that’s enough out of me.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.

*I’m not liable to be able to take one of those, because I do not have any medical insurance, and I don’t expect (or intend) ever to get any.  One doesn’t build fancy battlements and protective fortifications and set up infra-red and motion-sensing alarms around a poorly maintained outhouse.

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Foundations tend to have a lot in common

Hey there, everybody.  I hereby wish you all a good Tuesday morning, by whatever criteria you might use to judge the goodness of a day of the week, which are not necessarily the ones I might use.  Different people can have quite different priorities.

Although, when you get down to it, such differences exist only in the periphery of our value judgments, and they can only become powerfully pertinent in a population the basic needs of which are by and large met.  For nearly all of us, nearly all of the fundamental requirements of a good day are going to be very similar, albeit generally unspoken (because they are so obvious, I guess).

For instance, most of us would like the day not to include any serious dangers to life and to health*.  Most people would prefer a day without serious illness, without significant pain, without acute fear.  Most of us would prefer a day on which we do not go (completely) hungry, except perhaps by deliberate choice.  Most of us would prefer to have access to adequate clean water, and to shelter from heat and cold and rain and so on.

I’m sure I could think of other things that lie at the base of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.  Up a level or so would be slightly more abstract desires that are nevertheless common to most humans.  These include being among peers that one likes, and who like one as well.  It includes, for many of us, the (unfulfilled?) desire to share one’s day with actual loved ones:  parents, siblings, children, partners, close friends, etc.

These are things that begin to be more unreliable in the modern world, despite the advances that make the basal needs less commonly thwarted.  Perhaps this is partly related to the fact that, in the ancestral world, one’s social group was very much essential to one’s basic needs.  Now that those basic needs are less frequently thwarted, it is possible for us to lose track of and allow to slip away those social connections upon which we evolved to depend.

Also, our societies no longer really have much built-in scaffolding around such needs.  This appears to be because there are few forces at work that reinforce that scaffolding, and so it slips into disrepair, to everyone’s cost.

To be clear, this is not the result of some conspiracy of evil-doing, selfish billionaires or government operatives or whatever other presumed enemy of the good one childishly imagines.  It is a result of stochastic, chaotic, complex forces in a civilization that is very far from any kind of stable equilibrium‒a civilization that has seen world-changing discoveries and innovations and ideas multiple times in nearly every decade, let alone over any person’s lifetime.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled system, but its existing patterns keep getting disrupted in multiple places, in multiple ways, all the time, and so it must recrystallize in some new, local frost-pattern‒one that will, in turn, most likely be disrupted again, and soon.  There’s way too much going on everywhere for any mere human or group of humans to have actual control over even their own personal circumstances for very long or very well.

Any external locus of goodness is going to be unreliable, not just in practice but in principle.  This is a fact that Siddhartha Gautama recognized many centuries ago, as did Lao Tzu (or whatever the proper name is), and the various stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome.  I suspect there were similar insights among thinkers in the ancient western hemisphere as well, but I don’t think we have access to good records of their specific thoughts, alas.

It’s questionable, of course, whether any internal locus of goodness can be reliable in any way, either, since we are no more the authors of our brains/minds than we are of the external world.  I can tell you plainly, and with very little fear of contradiction, that I am not the author of my mood disorder(s), and I am not the author of my ASD any more than I am of the septum pellucidum “cyst” in my brain or the hole that was in my heart.  Neither is anyone else.

Okay, that’s enough mindless philosophy**.  I doubt that I’ve said anything particularly useful or even interesting.  For that I apologize; I’m not at my best, I fear.  I mean that not just in the trivial sense, that one is surely only at one’s overall “best” on very rare occasions throughout one’s so-called life.

I am still off NSAIDs, though at least my concerns that prompted that moratorium appear to be improving.  But I am quite stiff and sore, obviously.  My sleep has, if anything, been somewhat worse than usual.  I have not read any books, fiction or otherwise, in over a week.  I also haven’t done any exercises on Brilliant dot org in well over a week.

I played guitar a little on Sunday (and sang) but considering the noise in my room, with fan and air-conditioning going, and with my cheap little practice amp, it was a bit unsatisfying.  I played my Gibson SG (special edition, I think this one is called, with three pickups and so on).  It’s nice, but I think I like the Strats and the Les Paul style guitar a bit more (though the SG is beautifully lightweight).

I often think I’d like to have a telecaster, because some of the people whom I’ve heard playing them get some quite interesting sounds.  But that’s an idle sort of notion; it’s not really important.

Anyway, that’s it for me for today, at least‒though I admit, with some regret, that I will probably be back tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.  

I again wish you all the best of days, as measured from the base to the summit of Maslow’s pyramid.  If anyone deserves it, you do.

*Although people delude themselves about such dangers when it comes to, for instance, driving.

**“Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!”

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The good, the bad, and the ugh-ly

Ugh, again (I think I began a blog post with that word* earlier this week or some time last week, but I might be misremembering).  It’s Wednesday, and it’s just after 4 am as I start writing this, but I’ve already been awake for two or three hours.  I’m pretty tired (but not sleepy) and I’m feeling under the weather.  I mentioned that I think I have some manner of virus over the last few days, and my throat and upper lungs** feel raw.

Also, yesterday I started having some signs and symptoms that made it appear that I was either dehydrated or having kidney or liver issues, or perhaps an infection.  This was quite surprising and developed rather suddenly, and it really unnerved me because of all the NSAIDS and so on that I use.

So, I haven’t taken anything but plain Tylenol since my main dose of Naproxen yesterday morning.  I don’t know how badly this will affect my pain overall; so far I feel generally achey, and my thumbs are stiffer than before.  But given my kidney stone history, I want to be particularly careful‒at least, for me.

Again, I’m a bit under the weather (as are all non-astronauts at the moment) but I need to go to work, because we’re starting some new processes at the office, and today is also payroll day.  We’ll see how it goes after that.  I’m drinking lots of water, at least, and I haven’t done much wandering around outside in the heat and humidity, to try to avoid sweating too much.

I’m mildly nervous about what, if anything, is going to happen regarding my health in the near future, but I’m too tired to be very nervous, honestly.  I just want some rest.

At least I did play guitar some on Monday and Tuesday morning.  I rather foolishly also did some singing while playing, which has not helped my slightly sore throat, but I have a very hard time not singing when I play.

Anyway, I don’t have any science or philosophy or even psychology subjects chewing their way out of my brain this morning.  They’re in there, but maybe they’re like lazy xenomorph embryos, ones that have decided that they like the warmth and safety of where they are inside a humanoid torso, and so they’re just going to stick around.  It’s probably a bit like just chilling in a sensory deprivation tank, which seems like a nice thing to me.

Okay, that was a weird stream of thought.

Oh, here’s another weird thing:  I’m finding it really hard to find any book to read to keep my interest.  Fiction, nonfiction, books I’ve read before and books I haven’t read, it doesn’t seem to matter.  I even went to the crazy extreme of getting the book Damage after having mentioned the movie the other day.  That is not my usual genre of book.  I’ve read about five chapters (they are very short) but I don’t think I’ll continue.

The YouTube algorithm is falling down on its job as well.

Maybe I should really do a pseudo-sensory-deprivation thing and just stop reading or watching videos or anything of the sort.  I’ve done it before, of course, albeit against my will****, and it wasn’t as horrible as one might expect.  Anyway, I can generally, when my mind is quiet, replay movies and books and shows and whatnot that I know well.  That’s good, because even reading my own stories is getting lame.

Oh, well.  I’m going to call this enough for today.  I suppose I’ll write a post tomorrow, if I go to work, exclusis improvisis.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Is it a “word”, really?  I guess it’s really more of just a syllable of disgust or frustrated exhaustion.

**By which I mean “the upper portions of my lungs”, not “the highest set of what are presumably at least two sets of lungs”, because that latter one wouldn’t make sense.  I have only one*** set of lungs, like all other vertebrates of which I am aware.

***I suppose if one were really pushing it, one could argue that each lobe could be counted as a lung, in which case almost everyone would have three right lungs and two left lungs.  But that’s a rather unnatural division, or at least an asymmetrical one.

****Jail and prison, don’t you know.

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It is a far, far better thing I did than anything I did that was far, far worse

Heavy sigh.  Here we go again.

It’s Monday.  I am heading in to the office very early because I hardly slept last night and don’t feel that I could sleep.

As you probably guessed‒if you thought about it at all, which may be unlikely‒I did not work this weekend.  Instead, I finally got to hang out with my youngest, and we went to a big arcade kind of place whose name I forget, where we played a lot of crane grab style games.  Then we ate at Sbarro and wandered around the mall for a bit before seeking out a comic book store I had recently found out about.

So, all in all, it was one of the best days in more than thirteen years.

Unfortunately, it can be rather dispiriting to return to my illusory life after enjoying most of a day with my child.  Not that I’m complaining about spending that time; I most certainly am not!  But apparently this is one of those ASD* things that happens, when even very positive and uplifting interactions take a toll, especially if they involve a lot of noise and people and such.

Though I must say, in the comic book store, I felt almost instantly at home, and didn’t feel any of my usual awkwardness in asking if they had anything related to the role-playing game Gamma World.  These were my people, after all.  And it was a good comic store, not one that overly caters to “normies”.  Though I daresay all were surely welcome there.

Anyway, the usual friendless and familyless (that’s not really a word…might “afamilial” be better?  Apparently not, based on Google Docs’s reaction to it) days of my peudo-life from day to day don’t seem even as good as usual after such a day.  Also, I think I’m fighting a mild cold, which probably is something that happens fairly easily after playing games that many other people have played.

Though, come to think of it, I don’t remember that being a big deal back in the day when arcades were much more common.  At least I never remember tending to get sick after going to one.  But honestly, I did not go to them very often, so my sample size is very small.

I suspect I am often low-grade inoculated by very small doses of many pathogenic viruses because (among other stims) I bite my nails almost constantly.  I used to bite them more, and even picked at the skin around the base of my thumbnails until it peeled off a long way; my thumbs would sometimes bleed from the picking and get quite inflamed and irritated.  Occasionally, that still happens, but I am able to resist picking at the skin so much.  I have other things that I can do with my fidgeting fingers that are less painful.

Anyway, the nail biting may help prime my immune system against a lot of things.  I occasionally wonder whether it’s a trait or tendency that has been‒or can be‒selected for by evolution.  If it does happen to give one’s immune system a leg up, it would make sense for those with the tendency to have selective advantages.

This may also relate to the tendency of very small children to put a lot of things in their mouths.  I don’t mean to suggest that habit developed because it was good for exposing the immune system to very small doses of things.  I suspect it has more to do with the mouth being highly sensitive and having multiple modalities and more dexterity at an early age than the hands, and so it is a useful primary means of exploring much of the world for an infant.

Still, I think the immune priming is a useful side-effect.  Also, the modern tendency for people to be hyper-fastidious about not allowing their young children to touch things and taste things and expose themselves to tiny amounts of pathogens probably contributes to the surge in (hitherto almost unheard-of) allergies to rather ordinary things in the latter few decades.

I’m going to draw to a close now, because I’m having trouble focusing on my screen.  I don’t think it’s anything related to a sudden worsening of my vision, and I am wearing reading glasses.  It’s more as if my ciliary muscles are just tired, and they don’t want to do the work to make my lenses (the ones in my eyes) focus.

It is what it is.  Hopefully they will recover a bit of their endurance soon.  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day and week as you possibly can (which, as I’ve pointed out previously, you will, because whatever happens, once it has happened, is immutable, and was inevitable, and so you have the best‒and worst‒days you could have, every single day).

Dickens wasn’t just playing around with words in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, I guess.  No, he was writing floridly because he got paid by the word.  But that’s another story.

*I will indulge in a little sophomoric (and accidental) humor here:  because the S and the D are so close together, especially on the smartphone, I at first wrote “one of those ASS things”.

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Work, pain, fear, compassion…let’s call the whole week off

Well, it’s Friday, and this will be the last blog post of this week, exclusis improvisis.  By which I mean, I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, and I will not work tomorrow.  I suspect even if I were threatened with rather severe consequences‒which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen‒I would not work.

After all, I have lost most of what mattered to me already, and though some things (people), important things, have indeed come back, and are cherished, I know that I can either survive whatever might be used to threaten me, or that I am not too frightened of death in such circumstances.

As the line from the famous movie (and book) Damage goes, “Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.”

Of course, that does depend on the type of damage and the nature of the person in question, but still, it is a valid point.  Indeed, as all of you who read this regularly may know, my biggest question is not “How can I survive?” or “Can I survive?” but rather, “Should I survive, and why?”  I’ll avoid getting into the whole Myth of Sisyphus discussion, since I think I’ve done it nearly to death, but I suspect you get the point.

I don’t mean to imply by the above that I think I am immune to threat and pain and torture and so on.  That would be quite unrealistic.  If nothing else, my experience with a kidney stone made clear the fact that, despite chronic pain for roughly a quarter of a century, it is entirely possible to visit upon me further pain so severe that I literally can think of nothing else but trying to get help and to stop it.

Actually, despite those 25ish years, it’s not as though my chronic pain isn’t gripping and debilitating in and of itself.  There are many days in which a lot of my time in the office is spent trying to do my work while writhing and contorting, trying to stretch, banging on my thighs with my fists to try to loosen their tension, sometimes even deliberately hurting myself (sometimes in ways that would frighten other people, I suspect, and that can involve very sharp things and/or very hot things) to distract from the other pain.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve encountered no convincing counterargument so far, but pain is not evolved for one to be able simply to ignore it.  And while I am admittedly rather weird and atypical, and often have felt that I was not the same species as the people around me, I am by no means a different enough organism not to share such a fundamental characteristic.  Pain‒at least, the capacity for it‒is a necessity for long-term survival.  And fear, as the 12th Doctor pointed out, is a superpower.

Of course, we must be careful to distinguish true and useful fear from pathological fear states.  As Gavin deBecker points out in The Gift of Fear, if your fear is of something real, you will be able to discern its cause eventually, and it will be fairly focused and reasonably specific:  a particular person makes you feel uncomfortable, something about a particular car or driver seems erratic or reckless, that sort of thing.  Whereas just general anxiety is often vague and nonspecific.

I know of people who felt afraid to take a bath after they saw Jaws!  Now that doesn’t make much sense.  If your bathtub is big enough and deep enough to have a great white shark in it, then you’re probably ultra-wealthy and the shark is your pet.  Probably you keep it well-fed on captured British Secret Service agents, so it is unlikely to bother you.

Anyway, what was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, not working and being unsusceptible to most ordinary threats.

Certainly, it would be rather ridiculous for someone to say they would ruin my future prospects, that they would put a black mark on my resume or some such.  How hilarious.  A major point on my current CV would be “Three years, Florida State Prison, West Unit, working as an inmate in the Education Department”.  I’m already not competitive for many positions I would have the skill to fill, just as I would no longer be allowed into many nations I would like to visit.

I am, actually, far more susceptible to cajolery and appeals to kindness, or rather “niceness”, than to threats.  I guess it’s because I want to try to be a good person, a kind person, a compassionate person*, despite my tendency toward darkness of various kinds.

It’s an area of insecurity and conflict on my part, because there’s always part of me saying, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.”  And I am not always sure, especially when my pain and my depression and my sense of otherness are at their peaks, that it would not be preferable.

But when I am clearest and calmest, I recognize that compassion and at least attempted kindness are better.  They not only may help other people, but they tend to be better for one’s own sense of well-being.  It’s an almost archetypal win-win scenario.

I guess that’s probably a good and somewhat positive place to end this post and this blog week.  I hope you all have a nice day and a good weekend and a good beginning of next week.  I will probably be back on Monday‒again, exclusis improvisis**.

*These are not three different people.  I’m not trying to be like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor.

**Yes, I am trying to apply that expression frequently to see if I can get it into (relatively) common use.  So, please, do feel free to use it when it’s appropriate, and tell people what it means.  And, what they heck, tell ‘em where you first encountered it.

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Is this blog good for MY mental health?

For the first time in quite a while, I’m using my mini lapcom to write this blog post.  The main reason for doing this is that my thumbs have really been bugging me lately.  Also, as I’ve often said, it feels more natural to type on the lapcom than on the smartphone, at least so far.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I have been typing far longer than I’ve been using a smartphone; indeed, I’ve been typing far, far longer than smartphones have existed.

How do you like them, Apple™?

Who knows, maybe someday I might get to the point where typing on the phone is at least as natural as on the lapcom.  I suppose if I wrote an entire book on one, that probably would make quite a bit of progress toward making it feel more natural.  But it isn’t as natural, and I don’t think it’s likely ever to be, at least for something like typing, because the scale is wrong; it’s too small*.  And of necessity, it either doesn’t have as many available functions as the desktop programs, or they are more difficult to access with any decent speed.

Okay, enough of that topic and/or subject.

I have, as you may know, been having somewhat worse than usual trouble lately with my chronic mood disorder(s).  I’ve been trying various personal interventions (nothing pharmacological at the moment), because it’s getting fairly bad and potentially very dangerous (to me).  Regarding those personal attempts, though, one thing I’ve noticed over time is a kind of internal barrier to certain specific interventions, and it’s kind of puzzling and a bit disturbing.

A long time ago—when our own galaxy was far, far away from where it is now**—I read a lot of various kinds of self-help and psychology books, trying to figure out, among other things, why I was so weird and how to get along despite that fact and such like.  In them, I learned about autosuggestion.  I also learned about a famous case of a proponent thereof who was ridiculed for encouraging people to try repeating to themselves on a few occasions throughout the day:  “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Now, I’ve always thought that sounded quite interesting and potentially beneficial, especially since I tend to ruminate on and repeat things in my head anyway, and if I could make it something useful, then I might as well do so.  So, I applied it.

I never applied it in its original form, though.  I used to give myself messages about my mind getting stronger every day, or my will getting stronger, or my power (whatever that meant) growing, or me getting smarter, or me getting stronger in all senses of that word, those sorts of things.  But somehow, I always balked at telling myself that I was getting “better”.

I have tried doing the auto-suggestion thing again lately in various forms.  I think it at least gives me some mental focus, and at times at least makes me feel that maybe I’m getting stronger, or my will is improving, or whatever.  It’s a little silly but not without merit.  However, when I try to do the “better and better” version, it’s as if someone had cast one of those “langlock” jinxes on my mental tongue, and the phrase doesn’t want to come out.

It’s similar to the resistance I have to telling myself that “I love my life and I love myself”.

Interestingly, I was able to do that one while in prison, which feels sort of ironic, since I wasn’t loving life then.  But I knew that my situation was temporary—more so than life itself is, even—and I was able to keep looking forward to getting out and being part of my children’s lives again***.  Having something in the future toward which to look really helps keep your spirits up, or at least your fortitude.

I sometimes wonder if I fear getting better—not morally, I don’t think I have any issue with that.  But I do worry that some aspects of my personality could be quite harmful if I were to think too highly of myself.  I also have real internal revulsion (bordering on literal nausea) toward the idea of being delusional, especially about my own abilities and nature.

I guess it wouldn’t be too big a stretch to say that I fear it.  So many of the ills that I see in the world—current, past, and potentially in the future—are born of people who are too sure of themselves, too convinced they are right, too sure that they are exceptional, too convinced they know “better”.  I would hate to fall into such a banal and pathetic personality trap.  It’s all very silly, probably.  It might even make some of you laugh, or roll your eyes, or throw your hands up at my melodrama.

I suppose if I had anyone around with whom I could just talk about these things, I wouldn’t bother sharing them here on my blog.  They are, after all, quite personal.  But if I don’t share any of the thoughts I have, they are merely evanescent fluff inside my head that will never have any contact with other, external ideas, but merely have autologous impacts.  Of course, everything is like that (as far as we can tell), but I’d like to have some beneficial local impact on myself, at least.

And who knows, it may be possible, in the fullness of time, for the descendants of humanity, or similar beings, to break free of the nature of the transient and vanishing, and become, like the virtual particles near the event horizon of a black hole, real particles, things that endure indefinitely, and actually gain some degree of control over not only their own future but that of the universe itself.

When I’m being somewhat fanciful, I imagine myself contributing to such progress, and even being able to see it to its fruition.

See what I mean by getting egotistical?  I fear that tendency toward grandiosity, because it can be toxic all by itself, and because it is a frequent hallmark of more serious mental illness.  I’m more than a little afraid of that, because I often feel that manic magma of grandiosity rising up inside my mind.  I think it would be all too easy for me to lose my grip on myself entirely.  My mind, such as it is, is pretty much all that I have going for me; I’d rather not lose it if I can help it.

But the more time I spend on my own, the more likely it feels that it’s going to happen.  And I am not enthusiastic about it.

*That’s what she said.  Ha.  Ha.

**On a cosmic scale that doesn’t really mean anything, but time has passed, and the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the local group, and so on are all moving.  From a cosmic scale they don’t seem to change much, but if you zoom in, even the surface of the Earth moves at nearly a thousand miles per hour (depending on your latitude) in its daily rotation alone.  Here’s The Galaxy Song to put it into context.

***It turns out that was overly optimistic and did not come to pass, but there was no good way for me to know this at the time.

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Warning: Reading this blog may be hazardous to your mental health

Well, it’s Monday yet again, though I don’t know why it bothers, and it’s the beginning of yet another thoroughly pointless work week.

Okay, I suppose one can honestly say that it’s not pointless at the local level; people need to work to be able to pay rent, buy food, get medicine as needed and so on so they can survive.  But that, of course, just kicks the can of meaning farther down the empty dirt road of reality, since why they should survive‒why they should want to survive‒is a debatable question.

There are empirical answers to that question, of course, but ultimately, it probably gets down to the brute fact that this shit just is.  There’s no sign of any kind of meaning beyond what people invent for themselves in their own (individual and/or collective) heads.

And that would be just fine, too, as far as meaning goes, if people could just own the fact that it is all artificial, it is invented‒any (and all) of our senses of meaning and purpose, any of the stories we tell ourselves and each other about the telos of reality.  But people have this irritating tendency to start to believe their just-so stories, no matter how absurd, because they would rather delude themselves than face the possibility that everything is‒on the deepest and largest scales‒meaningless.

I suppose it’s related to the recognized fact that the best way to convince someone that you’re telling the truth about something is actually to believe that you are telling the truth, even if you are not.  If you believe something, no matter how absurd, you are likely to convince others that you believe, and that might make it more likely that they believe you.  Of such bootstrapped fictions are cultures and civilizations made, at least initially.

By the way, my plans for meeting up with my youngest this weekend fell through at the last minute, so to speak, thanks to a prior engagement with a friend (theirs, not mine) who came in from out of town, and about which meetup they had forgotten.  These things do happen, of course.  I could hardly blame anyone for preferring to spend time with someone else rather than with me.  Not that I think this was the situation!  I’ve no real doubt that the conflict was true and real and regretted.  But even if it were not, although it would make me sad, it’s not something for which I could blame anyone.

Well, I guess I can blame myself.  After all, it is surely because of what and who I am that people don’t really like to be around me much, and don’t like to stay around me longer than they are required to do.  If I knew that there were some precise and specific, alterable attributes in me that were responsible for this, I would probably try to change those attributes.  But it’s probably the gestalt of me that is the problem.  I simply am that which I am, and this portion of my four dimensional structure seems to tend to repel other such four dimensional beings.

Even if I could fix myself, and with relative ease, I might not.  I don’t honestly feel that I deserve to be fixed.

I could, of course, fall back on the true words of Will Munny from Unforgiven and say:

But, while I can recognize that fact in my frontal lobes and other parts of my neocortex, unfortunately my basal ganglia hate me, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.  They have tremendous neuropsychological inertia, and I don’t even know where to get a grip to try to move them.  But I sense that pushing them in just some random direction is more likely to make things worse than better.  I’ve gone into that general reasoning before, and I’ve encountered nothing to change my conviction on that count.

You know, it occurs to me that I should probably have some kind of disclaimer on my blog in general*, to the effect that people shouldn’t read this blog unless they have a pretty strong sense of self-worth and so on, and that people who have mental health issues should definitely not read it.  I fear that a person who is vulnerable might be inadvertently convinced to do themselves harm after reading my work.

Possibly I think too highly of my lowliness, but I’ve long since recognized that my inherent nature veers toward destruction.

So, yeah, I guess you can warn anyone who expresses an interest‒if such a being exists‒that if they so much as doubt their courage, they should not try to enter this particular Cave of Caerbannog, for death awaits them all here with nasty, big, pointy words.

Oh, and finally, let’s just take a moment to mark and to celebrate the Apollo 11 Moon landing, which took place 57 years ago today.  If you are one of the people who claims to think that humans did not land on the moon, well…I won’t tell you that you should end yourself and thereby raise the overall intelligence of the world by a small but measurable amount; that would be uncharitable.  But I do suggest that you please either get a vasectomy or a tubal ligation, because if there is any genetic component to such stupidity, we don’t want it to propagate forward in time.  Let’s put a bit of chlorine into the gene pool.

Otherwise, have a good day.

*I have put one in today’s headline, at least.

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Movie and comic book villains, some songs, weekend plans, and a slightly improving mood

Well, it’s Friday at long last, the end of the “official”* work week.  My mood is at least somewhat better than it has been previously this week; starting midmorning yesterday, my mood increased and I even became somewhat playful and a bit silly.  This was, hopefully, thanks to certain interventions I have undertaken, and not just because of some low-grade cycling of my mood.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of bipolar disorder; certainly no therapist has even mentioned considering that as one of my issues.  Then again, none of them (to my recollection and knowledge) considered the possibility of undiagnosed ASD.  But I have, apparently, done quite a good job at masking over time.  Or so I believe.

Anyway, I’m not going to be working tomorrow after all (my improved mood long preceded my learning this fact).  In fact, I’m going to be getting together with my youngest to have a late Father’s Day outing.  That also came about hours and hours after my mood had improved, and after I had learned I would not be working.

That’s about as good as my life gets, and has gotten, in nearly a decade and a half, but it is quite good.  The only thing that might be better would be if my son were also coming, but I cannot get my hopes up about such things.  He does as he must.

I’ve lately taken to rubbing Aspercream™ with lidocaine all over the MCP joints and the interphalangeal joints of my thumbs, and it seems to be doing at least a little to ease the pain of my arthropathy therein.  This helped make me willing at least to try to play guitar (and sing) a little bit yesterday.  I was still a bit stiff, but it wasn’t too bad.  Mind you, I didn’t do anything particularly fancy; the Bach piece I’ve mentioned was the most challenging part of the session.

I have a whole repertoire of songs I can sing and for which I can play chords from memory.  It’s not a big playlist, but it’s there.  Ironically, it doesn’t include any of my songs, which I would have to relearn at this point!  That’s kind of sad, really.  But it is a weird thing that I’ve noticed, that once I’ve made and shared a video (or even just audio) of me doing a song, I tend to stop playing it at all.  It’s quite strange, at least to me.  Have any of you encountered anything like this?

This shouldn’t be confused with the general anhedonia I’ve been experiencing lately (not for the first time); that makes me not really interested in playing anything.  I also have not been able to find anything that I can keep reading for more than 10 or, at most, 20 minutes before getting bored of it**.

I’m trying to read something different now, so I downloaded some Star Trek and Star Wars novels from Kindle Unlimited, and we’ll see how they go.  Currently, I’m reading the novelization of Into Darkness, which I think was an underrated movie.  Did it play fast and loose with certain aspects of important characters from TOS?  Absolutely!  Even so, the surprise was fun, and the casting, I thought, was very good, as were the performances.

The book is by Alan Dean Foster, who is one of the most reliable science fiction authors out there.  He has written quite a few of the best novelizations of science fiction movies.

I also downloaded the novelization of The Wrath of Khan, one of my favorite movies.  I’ve read the book before (by Vonda McIntyre, who is at least as good, if not as prolific, as Foster), a long time ago, and it was good, so hopefully I’ll enjoy it again.

On a somewhat related note, as a very big fan of Doctor Doom, I am rather nervous about how he will be portrayed in the upcoming MCU movies.  He has been badly written so far in the movies that have featured him, though I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was well cast and did what he could with the role.

But I’ve long said that if anyone wants to know how to portray Doom onscreen, there is a nearly perfect performance on which to model one’s acting, and that was Ricardo Montalban as Khan, especially in the movie (though the original Trek episode Space Seed is also great).  Khan is a lot like Doom, though he has a more sentimental, romantic aspect to his character (it’s the death of his wife that leads to his wrath in the movie, after all).  Still, the charisma, the brilliance, the arrogance (and, alas, the overconfidence and the tendency to be consumed by vendetta) match the best-written aspects of Doctor Doom’s character.

To be fair to Khan, he is kinder to his subordinates than Doom sometimes tends to be.  This, I think, is one of Doom’s biggest flaws.  Then again, I suspect Doom is “on the spectrum”, so he doesn’t necessarily really get how to manage people at a personal level, though as a national leader he is unsurpassed.

I know, I know, I’m being fanciful, but I really do love these characters.  They are bad guys, certainly, but they are not really evil, or at least not psychopathically selfish and shallow the way, say, Voldemort is.  I’ve said before, Doom and Batman are in many ways very similar characters.  Both have similar tragic backstories and are obsessively driven, implacable, indeed all but unstoppable, and neither of them has actual super powers (contrary to what was represented in the first two Fantastic Four movies).

I wish Julian McMahon had a chance to play a well-written Doctor Doom, because I thought he was an excellent casting choice (and I’m pretty sure Ricardo Montalban was not available).

Okay, I’ll draw things to a close for the day and for the week.  As a parting “bonus”, I’ll embed below some old audio files (NOT high quality recordings – lots of clipping and some flubs and occasional pitchiness) of songs I have recorded me practicing and singing, just for fun, in case you’re interested.

I hope you all have a nice Friday and a good weekend.  There’s a big sporting event on Sunday, I think; if you like those kinds of things, why not take that in?

Sore dewa.

Nothing Compares 2U – originally by Prince

Karma Police – Radiohead

Just the Way You Are – Billy Joel

Here, There, and Everywhere – the Beatles

Here Comes the Sun – the Beatles

Desperado – Eagles

Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead

Julia – the Beatles

*I’m not sure what exact office might be involved in that determination, but whataya gonna do?

**Though I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot Org lately, focusing for the moment on vectors and working into matrices and related stuff, with an eye toward General Relativity.