dysthymia

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But though my blogs be mean, take them in good part.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m writing another edition of my blog post.  It’s not the first nor the second post I’ve done this week, so calling it my “weekly” blog post would seem somewhat inaccurate.

It’s now only two weeks until Boxing Day, so you should get out your gloves and your speed rope and your heavy bag and get yourself back in shape for the ring!

I really didn’t want to go to the office today.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written a post, except perhaps a single line such as “No blog post today”.  That would be borderline self-contradictory, but since my thoughts and words have been dealing with depression and suicidality lately, I thought if I just wrote nothing people might become concerned.

I’m probably being egotistical even to imagine such a thing.

The reason I didn’t want to go to work was because the office holiday dinner takes place tonight, and I really feel tense about it.  We’ll be going to the same restaurant we used last year, and it was overcrowded and had too much sensory overload even back then, such that I had to start drinking (alcohol) as soon as possible to keep from scratching my own skin off.

It would have been one thing if everyone there had been people with whom I felt comfortable.  There are three or so people at the office with whom I get along well enough that, if just that group and I were going somewhere, it would have been okay.  Certainly there have been many times in my life when I’ve gone out to eat (and similar) with family and/or close friends, and I enjoyed myself.  But I was younger then*, and I had more energy for acting normal, and the people who knew me well were nonjudgmental about my weirdnesses, anyway.

Most of the people at the office, though, are people with whom I wouldn’t normally hang out at any stage in my life‒no insult to them intended, there’s just no common framework.  And the two or three people with whom I think I would most have enjoyed spending time seem to have become more distant recently.  Perhaps that’s all my doing; it almost certainly is my fault.  I know I’m becoming ever less fun to be around.  So I don’t really have anyone with whom I feel I could hang out comfortably‒not in the office, probably not in the world.

It’s not that there’s no one out there who might be willing.  There are many kind people about, though sometimes that can be hard to believe.  But I am not good company‒not for anyone, probably not ever again‒and I certainly don’t deserve any kindness.  I am too weird now, and my life is a mutated, Lovecraftian monstrosity compared to what it once was.

Let’s face it, I was always just a weirdo, anyway; I was just better at pretending to be human in the past‒or if not better, I at least had more energy for it.

Now, I barely have the will to get up and get going in the morning**.  Almost everything I do is just to distract myself, to divert my attention from being aware of my own pathetic and worthless existence.  It makes me wish I had a serious drug or alcohol problem.  Then I could both have a powerful distraction and something that would potentially lead to my death in short order.  Instead, I’ve wasted years trudging through my nosferatu pseudo-life.  My books and blog posts notwithstanding, it really would have made more sense if I had died some time in 2013.  Nothing since then has been of any real use, not to anyone else, and not to me.

I’ll try to work up something remotely akin to enthusiasm for the holiday dinner tonight.  But, if I’m too stressed, I just won’t go.  I know the food will be good, though.  I’m trying to watch what I eat, but everything and everyone around me tends to want to sabotage that intention (including me) especially at this time of the year.

Maybe I should just eat and drink until I make myself really sick, and then I won’t want to do it anymore.  It would be quite nice not to be a person who eats as an escape, as his only reliable source of distraction.  I feel much more clear-headed when I don’t eat, and I know I am much sharper.

How nice it would be not to be such a pathetic glutton.  But I do miss my sister’s holiday cookies.  And I mean to eat whatever I feel like eating this evening‒whether I go to the office dinner or not.

Maybe I’ll get botulism, or a bad case of Hepatitis A that turns fulminant or something.  Keep your fingers crossed!

TTFN

*Such is the nature of the past.

**Though I still cannot sleep even close to as much as I would need to be healthy.

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When will the system crash?

Well, it’s another Monday‒the second one in December of 2024*‒and I decided I’d write a little Monday morning blog post.

I’m writing this on my phone today.  I wrote last Thursday’s blog post on my miniature laptop computer, and it got too long and only a few people apparently read it‒or, well, only a few people went to the page.  I can’t tell if they’ve actually read the thing.  The only real way to tell if someone reads something is if they make a comment that clearly responds to the substance of the post.

It’s rather appalling how rarely people read at all anymore.  The odds of someone both liking and actually sharing any of my blog posts are absolutely miniscule.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, since I wrote an actual song called “Like and Share” about some evils of the social media landscape.  But the evils I was decrying really focused around the people who curate their online presence to seem as though they and their lives are “perfect” while having who knows how many skeletons in their closets, and the other people who, through comparing themselves to the false images of people online, come to hate themselves and their own lives.

I would love it if people shared my blogs or even my songs or my books (well…the links to my books), but I guess the way one grows one’s audience and gets spread and “retweeted” and so on is by sharing politically charged content with some particular stance.  The more vituperative and divisive and snide, the more likely a thing is to be noticed and shared.  Of course, that’s not going to guarantee spread, but it seems to be an almost necessary thing.

The fact that my primary medium is writing doesn’t help.  With that in mind, I made a little vertical video yesterday, intended primarily for Instagram because “Why not?”, and I shared it there and on YouTube and Facebook and even Threads and X and Bluesky just because, again, why not?

I’m terribly frustrated.  Maybe I should take some controversial stance.  Maybe I should say outrageous and hateful things.  It wouldn’t be that hard.  I hate nearly everything in the whole stupid world.  The problem is that my hatred is equal opportunity.  I find the left and the right to be equally sub moronic, though the malady presents slightly differently in the two political directions.

Maybe I should start promoting an all-out war between neurodivergent people and the NT’s, sort of like Magneto against the humans.  Humans screw everything up.  Many if not most of the positive advances in civilization came from people who were probably “neurodivergent”.  The normies just take advantage of those advances and drive the world into the abyss.

Maybe I should start brainstorming and propounding the benefits of initiating a planet-destroying catastrophe.  I mean, it would be easy enough (in principle) to arrange for various asteroids to end up hitting the Earth; all one really needs is a space agency‒perhaps even a private one, a la SpaceX.  After that, Newtonian mechanics is enough to do the job, plus a little trial and error.

I don’t think it would be enough just to wipe out the human race or current civilization.  I’m thinking of complete sterilization.  None of the other life forms on this planet are any more benevolent or kind or positive than humans are; they’re just less competent.  Weirdly enough, humans appear to be by far the most compassionate, the kindest, the most “life-affirming” species on the planet.  All those that seem kinder or less damaging are simply less powerful.  Even things like lichen and bacteria and archaea have caused massive, even global, catastrophes in the past.

The fact that humans, of all things, are the kindest species on the planet is surely the strongest argument that can be made that life on this planet‒and perhaps all life in the universe‒is simply a huge mistake, and one that ought to be rectified.

I’m pretty sure my own life is a huge mistake, with the exception of my kids.  Certainly everything since about 2012, and possibly somewhat earlier, has been one giant error message written across the monitor of my existence.  I should just power down everything; not restart it, just shut it off and throw it in the trash.

Any thoughts?  “Like” and “share” if you feel the urge.

*Geez, that means the year is almost over again, and I’m still here, like a bad outbreak of herpes.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.

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The second of the “10th” that is the twelfth

It’s the first Monday of December in 2024‒December 2nd, specifically, meaning that the 1st fell on a Sunday, which means that there will be a Friday the 13th in this month*‒and I thought I would write a brief blog post for the day.  I don’t know if anyone was hoping for that, but it’s happening.

It’s relatively cool down here for south Florida; it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit when I left the house, which is, let’s see…(55-32) * 5/9, so 23 * 5/9, so 115/9, so just under 13 degrees Centigrade/Celsius.  That’s also about 286 Kelvin, but the Kelvin scale is a bit inconvenient for most day-to-day temperature readings.

I could’ve just looked all that up online, but I think it’s good for the mind, and for people in general, to know and remember (and apply) the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, even if only for the mental exercise.  If we turn everything over to apps and computers, then eventually no one (or at least very few people) will even remember what such things mean or where they come from, or why.

Anyway, it’s something with which to keep one’s mind occupied.

There’s not much for me to do or to say, anymore.  I’m just killing time while waiting for time to kill me, so to speak.  That’s all I see myself doing from now on.  I have no goals or hopes or dreams or anything.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids again, or that I’ll ever see any of my other family and/or friends, or that I’ll make any new friends, let alone any kind of “new family”.

I’m not cut out for meeting new people or making new friends on my own.  I never have been.  All my old friends were people I knew from school‒junior high, high school, university, medical school, residency, all that.  I’m basically alone, and I think I will be for the rest of my life‒which hopefully won’t be very long, because it’s really quite pointless and stupid, and I’m pointless and stupid, and so is the world as a whole.

Hopefully, some day soon I’ll be able to say to you all, “this is my last ever blog post”, because it will be one of my last ever anything.  I’m so tired, and I’m stressed, and I’m in pain, and I’m depressed, and I can’t sleep for shit, and above all, I’m alone.  I’m sick of just about everything that I do, and I’m very much sick of myself.

And, frankly, the world as a whole, the universe as a whole, is just irritating and stupid and such a waste of potential.  There’s no point to any of it, and it’s not even headed in any kind of positive direction.

As Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”.  I suspect that’s just the nature of things, since passionate intensity tends to be the habit of those with a dogmatic turn of mind, and those tend to be the people who do the most damage, who commit the most destruction:  precisely the people who believe that they are right, that they know what’s morally right, and that belief gives them carte blanche to do what they claim to think is right and fumigates all their deeds from any possibility of wrongdoing (in their own heads, at least).

Dogmatic thinking tends to be profoundly dangerous and destructive.  “Certainty” kills.  That’s why I say, “Spay and neuter your dogmas.”  We don’t need or want them to spread and reproduce.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, enough for a lifetime, enough for eternity, whatever.  I hope you all have a pretty good week and month and so on, or even better than pretty good, if possible.

*If you stop and think about it, this will almost certainly be obvious, since the 2nd week of such a month will run, Sunday through Saturday on the 8th through the 14th, which means the 13th is a Friday.

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Raveling down the knitted sleeve of care

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m heading to the office‒way too early, because I still can’t get a good night’s sleep,  Even with recent interventions to try to help my pain and insomnia, it seems the sleep honeymoon phase might already be over.

I felt very much like the lone soldier in the jungle again last night, unable truly to rest and relax, primed at some pervasive level to jump up and react in case some threat developed.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a true external threat.  It might be some break in my routine, sleeping past my alarm*, realizing I had forgotten to set my alarm**, or there might be an intruder, some deliberate, secret assailant, come to attack me in my sleep***, or just a new flare-up of chronic pain developing.

It’s not a great way to start a day or to continue a life.  As I said, I had some temporary improvement not in the quantity of my sleep but in the quality thereof‒I wasn’t sleeping more, but I felt as though I was sleeping better‒for the past week plus a day or so.  This is probably why I’ve had the energy to write some blog posts this week.  But last night felt just like one of my typical, paranoid, restless, angry “sleeps” from before.  I have not stopped my new intervention, but apparently it’s no longer addressing whatever the roots of my sleep issues are.

I suppose I shouldn’t draw too sweeping a conclusion so readily.  One night is not a pattern.  But it’s such a familiar experience, and after such a short semi-respite, that it’s almost worse than never having a respite at all.

For at least 15 years (at least), I’ve spent most of my days and nights alone in the wasteland‒not literally, of course, don’t be stupid.  I just mean that I’ve had the sense of being by myself‒even when in crowded places, such as malls or prison‒and with no real recourse to anyone to help me defend against potential enemies, physical or social or “spiritual”, real or even imagined, external and internal.

To be clear, I don’t feel that the world around me is generally hostile.  In some ways, that would be easier, although considerably less stable.  If I were literally being attacked, I could literally take arms against that sea of troubles and let slip the dogs of war, imitate the action of the tiger, throw my warlike shield before my body and lay on*, fighting against assailants until they were all beaten or until I was dead‒and damned be him that first cried, “Hold, enough!”

Almost certainly, the outcome would be my destruction, but we all have that coming, anyway.  Dying in battle against actual attackers isn’t the worst death I can imagine, if I’m honest (it’s not the best one, either, don’t mistake me…I am not a Klingon or a Sontaran, and I do not embrace the philosophies).

Alas, I will probably be taken down in the end just by the progressive deterioration of my body.  It would be nice to die in a way that is heroic or at least useful, but that’s unlikely to happen.

I’m frustrated and angry about many things this morning, and I’m sick of feeling this way so much of the time.  What is the point of this?  Unlike Camus, I don’t imagine Sisyphus is happy.

It would be one thing if he had people whose company he enjoyed with whom to spend his time while he kept pushing his boulder.  Or, if he really were achieving some result, something beneficial, something that improved the world beyond himself.  But just to keep grinding away at his absurd and pointless task, with no benefit, with no entertainment, with no inherent joy in the process…why bother with that?

At the very least, he could try to plot his escape and enact vengeance against those who sentenced him to this fate!  It might take a long time, but it’s not as though he has anything else to do.  Even though he was made to roll his rock as a punishment, any eternal punishment would always be immoral when brought in response to any finite deed in a finite lifetime.

Of course, no one has put me in my current state.  Well, okay, the government of Florida and of Palm Beach County certainly did their parts in carrying out significant injustice in my case, and those involved are probably worthy of retribution, but it’s all really just so haphazard and so much a part of an unplanned, inefficient, and fundamentally unjust system that it’s not even easy to know where to begin.  Probably, we just need another really big asteroid, or a nearby gamma ray burst, just to wipe the slate entirely clean.

I guess we’ll all see what happens.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good weekend, whether you want to do so or not.  So there.

*Ha ha, I don’t recall whether that has ever happened to me.

 **This has happened, but almost always in the middle of the night, when I awaken, realize with a feeling of severe tension that I forgot to set my alarm, quickly make sure to set it…and then just stay awake until it goes off or until just before it goes off.

***I keep various weapons next to me, within arm’s reach, when I sleep.

****Macduff

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Fetter strong madness in a silken thread, charm ache with air and agony with blogs.

Hello and good morning.

As anyone who has read my recent posts will know, I have not been doing well, depression-wise*.  Yesterday afternoon, after sharing a “memory” on Facebook (a picture of my son from one of the last times I was with him) and explaining in the comments that the reason I hadn’t seen him was that he didn’t want to see me, I felt particularly low, and had to fight to keep from crying openly in the office.  Thankfully, it was a slow afternoon (as opposed to a very stressful morning, in which I was working on payroll among other things), or I wouldn’t have been involved with Facebook, anyway.

I was so low that I started Googling (on my phone) the lethal doses of everything from CBD gummies** to aspirin to Benadryl to a combination of fentanyl and Valium.

That latter combo, of course, is the only reliably life-threatening thing among the many that I searched, but honestly, I knew all that already.  I am a trained medical doctor, after all, and I have a long-standing interest in ways to make one’s quietus‒including, but not limited to, a bare bodkin.  I was mostly reviewing things like the mg/kg dosage needed to be more or less certain one would die.

The biggest downside of the opiate/benzodiazepine combination is that they are controlled substances.  Just try to get a prescription for the two of them without a terminal cancer diagnosis or something similar.  Go ahead, try.  If you succeed, please get in touch with me.

Of course, there are illicit sources of both classes of medicine, and I even know some people who might know where to get them.  But such people, and such illicit medicines, are supremely untrustworthy, so that’s not great.  I probably wouldn’t accept anything that wasn’t a name-brand pill, like the Valium tablets that at least used to have a big V stamped in them.

I suppose one could try to con one’s way into getting a veterinary cocktail such as might be used to euthanize a large dog or something similar.  I can do injections, obviously, even to myself.  But I am not good at conning people, and I certainly wouldn’t want to deceive a kindhearted veterinarian.  That seems very uncool.

Alas, most OTC medicines are unreliable for many reasons, including limited absorption, nausea/vomiting, and other rather unpleasant symptoms that would precede death by quite some time, and might be awful enough to cause even the most committed would-be suicide to seek relief.  It’s very hard to fight deep-seated biological survival drives, believe me.

Oh well, there are always many options, I guess, and I have the necessaries for many of them.  I even used to have some helium tanks and a nonrebreather mask, but I gave the helium to people making balloons for parties‒they didn’t have the right kind of connectors for the regulator and mask I have, and I wasn’t confident of my ability to jury-rig something.

I don’t want any of you to think I simply wallow in depression, and my chronic pain, and my horrible sleep issues, and possible neurodevelopmental difficulties.  I am constantly attempting new exercises, new habits, autosuggestion, self-hypnosis, meditation, dietary adjustments, postures, medicines, and so forth to try to help my problems.  I don’t ever stop doing all that, which is exhausting in and of itself.

It’s likewise exhausting to keep trying to act as normal as I possibly can, because I don’t like to cause other people more trouble than I absolutely must.  Also, it’s just my lifelong habit to try to act upbeat or to try to be funny, at least during direct interaction.  But it’s very tiring, and over the years, my grumpy side has definitely gained more ascendance, particularly at work.

Not that I’m an asshole at work, at least not any more than I’m just an asshole in general.  But the noise in the office and people making really unreasonable, sloppy mistakes, stress me out quite a bit, and the frustration bleeds through more than it used to.

Sometimes that happens literally.

Anyway, more and more I’ve been just working and struggling merely to survive.  I haven’t been working anymore on Outlaw’s Mind since the last time I mentioned it here; I haven’t even been taking my little laptop back and forth with me, though I type much more quickly on it than I can on my phone.  The closest thing to any creativity I’ve done recently is as follows:

On Tuesday morning, something I read (I don’t recall what) made me think of infrasound and low-pitched noises that are reputed*** to be able to instill a sense of fear or dread in people.  There was some indication that a 7 Hertz noise would be troubling in some way‒I don’t recall how‒but one needs a serious sub-woofer to be able to generate such a pitch at all, let alone with useful volume.

However, the low range of the human audible threshold starts around 40 Hertz, so I thought I would do something at least mildly interesting.  I pulled up Audacity and generated two tones:  one at 47 Hertz and one at, I think, 73 Hertz, and merged them.  I chose those frequencies because, since they are both prime numbers, their waveforms would not tend to overlap very much, and so their constructive/destructive interference would tend to be relatively chaotic, producing a pleasing (so to speak) deep and unsteady rumble.

Then, I recorded myself doing an impromptu recitation of Hamlet’s soliloquy****, which (of course) I know from memory.  I first lowered the pitch of that recording a bit, but not using the optional maximum quality pitch change (I didn’t want it to sound normal) after filtering out background noise and even breath sounds*****.

Then, I copied that track and shifted its pitch a step and a half, then copied that and did the same again.  This produced three simultaneous recordings of the same thing, but with pitches at intervals that make it into a constant diminished chord (that’s where the third and fifth tones of a major triad are each reduced by a half step, making an eerie, haunting, somewhat dissonant chord).

Then I combined those three vocal tracks into one, put a bit of reverb on it, lowered the pitch again until it was at least close to that of my background tones, and combined them all after trying to adjust the balance to make sure that the vocal stuff was not quite clearly present against the background sound.

I then turned it into an MP3 file and put it on loop on the big TV we use as our room sales board, starting it once people came in, and only very slowly increasing the volume from too low to hear to just audible.

One coworker noticed it, and she kept trying to figure out what it was saying, or if anything was being said at all.  I explained what I had done, to her and to my “main” coworker, who also sort of heard the noise and looked puzzled.  They both thought it was odd but funny, but it was apparently also mildly irritating (almost the point of it, really), so once they said that, I stopped the playback.

I’ll embed the audio file here, below, in case you want to listen.  Feel free to use it to annoy or unnerve other people, if you wish.

And that’s it, that’s all I have for now, from the most creative to the most wishfully self-destructive (not in that order).  I hope each and every one of you is feeling better than I feel.  On any given day, at any given time, I think my odds of that being the case are good.  If I were able to bet even money on it even once an hour, I think I’d pretty quickly have an excellent return on investment.  Though, that might improve my mood and so alter the expected payoff rate of my investment…damn those economic feedback loops.

TTFN

*Though my depression, if considered as an entity with a “life” of its own, is thriving, thank you very much.

**There more or less is no practical lethal dose, it seems.  The sugar in a gummy would probably kill you before the CBD would.

***Almost certainly untruthfully.

****The most famous one, “To be or not to be…”

*****Removing these throughout a recording has a curious way of deadening it, and it’s rather unpleasant if you’re trying to produce something that sounds good, so was ideal for my pseudo-purposes.

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Monday morning, heading down

I already started writing this once, but it seems that Google Drive didn’t save what I had written, even though I had titled it and checked it.  This has not happened to me before, as far as I can recall, but it seems to be par for the course for me right now.  So, I’m starting over, though I’m not going to try to recreate the beginning of my previously initiated blog post.  It was just a bit of nonsense, anyway.

I’m really not doing well, though I seem to have a difficult-to-break habit of acting as normally as I can when interacting with other people‒I don’t want to cause problems or trouble for the people who care about me.  But I’m not doing well, even for me.  My depression is terrible (or I suppose one could say it’s very good and impressive as depression goes), made worse by the changing of the seasons and the clocks.  My chronic pain is as bad as ever and somewhat worse than usual.  My overall health is poor.

I’ve had more than one person from back where I grew up, including family members, tell me I should take a break and come to visit them, but when I try to consider it, I cannot see myself being able to work out the logistics of such a thing.  My “executive function” is at its lowest ebb.

I’m basically out of gas and coasting along until I crash into or go over the edge of something.  Or perhaps it would be better to think that I’m an airplane out of fuel, not a car‒gliding along as best I can and trying to see if there’s any way for me to make a landing.  But I cannot apply any power.  I can only go along with the air currents through which I am steadily descending.

Also, I’m mortified at the thought of anyone who used to know the person I used to be seeing me as I am now.  It reminds me of the stories of Syd Barrett coming to visit the band members of Pink Floyd in the studio after having to leave the band because of his mental health issues and them not even recognizing him.  Having seen the various photos, I can understand their confusion, and I can also imagine how horrifying it must have been for him to realize how much he had changed and how he did not belong with them anymore; that he was not the person he used to be.

So many of the lyrics in the greatest Pink Floyd albums refer to Barrett’s oh-so-changed nature, from Brain Damage‒ “and if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear / you shout and no one seems to hear / and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon” ‒to Shine On You Crazy Diamond‒ “remember when you were young? / you shone like the sun… / …now there’s a look in your eye / like black holes in the sky” ‒and, of course, Wish You Were Here.

Anyway, I feel like I’m a warped mockery of the person I used to be, like one of the creatures twisted by the Illearth Stone in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to land safely on my own, but I cannot bear the thought of trying to ask someone to help me, especially someone who used to know me.  I’m ashamed of me.

I’ve also been ill lately, as regular readers will know.  I missed work again on Friday, and‒of course‒the office did tremendous sales that day.  I fight to avoid superstition, since I don’t think there’s any sort of magical process happening, but I do think it plausible that my presence has a psychological effect on the other people in the office, dampening their spirits.

I feel sickly and sweaty.  The AC unit in my room at the house seems to be malfunctioning, but having it repaired or replaced would involve having other people come into my living space, such as it is, and that’s a repulsive thought.

Also, the washing machine doesn’t seem to be working right.  It washes, but I don’t think it rinsed properly yesterday, nor did it spin and drain properly.  You would think at least that would mean that my clothes should smell of detergent, which is not so bad, and at first that seemed to be the case.  Now, though, at the office early in the morning, I feel like I smell of cat urine, or something does.  I haven’t yet been able to locate the source, though.

Anyway, I’m just worn out, and I see no future of any kind for myself, other than the obvious and inevitable one.  I find myself wishing for something like tuberculosis (like that other infamous “Doc”, Doc Holliday), or even cancer, just so that I could have some inescapable deterioration that could not be denied, but that might afford me a chance to say goodbye to people I love.

I don’t think that’s likely to happen, though.  My version of cancer is the disease in my head, frankly‒or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the disease that is my head.  Depression has a rate of premature mortality that is higher than that of many cancers.

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  Sorry to be a bummer on a Monday morning, but then, I’m a bummer every morning, really, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. 

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It might be the pate of a politician, which this blog now o’erreaches

Hello and good morning, o dedicated reader(s).

I honestly don’t feel very much like writing today‒I feel extremely low even for me, very gloomy, very pain-riddled and dysthymic, my mood made worse by the diminishing daytime in the northern hemisphere‒but since I did my little throw-away non-blog last Thursday, I figured I might as well do something today.  I don’t know if anyone truly looks forward to my blogs‒it’s hard to imagine someone’s day being worse because they didn’t get any input from my thoughts‒but just in case someone does, I will write.  Or, rather, I am writing.

I don’t want anyone to think that my depression is unusually bad due to political events, and certainly not for anything parochial, provincial, local in time and space.  Cat forbid!

I’m sure that people throughout history have thought that whatever local politics was happening just then, at that moment, was Earth-shattering and of monumental importance.  But, of course, as Ozymandius reminds us, all the great people and events of the past, all the presidents and emperors and warlords and whatnots, are but headless, trunkless, disintegrating statues in a featureless desert.

Actually, most of them are never even that.  During the Cold War, admittedly, especially the latter part during maximum arms race and belligerence between the US and the USSR, it was possible for politics to engender the destruction of much of civilization (and I truly didn’t think the odds were good that we would avoid thermonuclear war for very long*) but even then the moment-to-moment politics was almost incidental.

The Cold War and its existential dangers lasted through numerous presidents and premiers, the former of various political parties‒Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Nixon (R), Ford (R), Carter (D), Reagan (R), all the way up to George H. W. Bush (R).  And, of course, on the other side, we had Stalin (C), Khrushchev (C), Brezhnev (C), Chernenko et al (C), and Gorbachev (C).  One might imagine that Bush, Sr. and Gorbachev would be truly celebrated historical figures, given their leadership positions at the end of the Cold War, but I don’t see a lot of evidence thereof.

Now, political stupidity** has, of course, caused havoc locally on many an occasion.  More people were killed thanks to the ideological idiocy of Stalin and Mao, for instance, than were killed in wars in the 20th century, despite the immensity of those wars.

But, of course, nearly all the people who died in and around the first world war at least (and most of those alive during the second) would have been dead by now, anyway.  And certainly, everyone who died unnecessarily during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars would definitely be dead by now, whatever might have happened.  And all the people slaughtered by the hordes of Genghis Khan would be dead now, no matter what.  And certainly anyone killed due to the mismanagement of even the worst of the Caesars would be dead now‒as dead as Julius Caesar, as they say.  And the people of Greece and Macedon and “Asia Minor” and Egypt and Persia and all those other areas would be dead now whether Alexander the Great had conquered his known world or not.

I recall a column that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (back when it used to be worthy of his writing) called “Remember the 6 billion” (roughly the population of the world at that time).  His point was that, within the following 120 years at most, every single person then alive would die…and for the most part it would go entirely unnoticed, because new people are constantly sporulating to take the place of the ones that fall by the wayside.

The “Great Men” (and women) of history are mostly just names and caricatures; they have no effect on the long term structure of civilization.  We recall that Alexander was a brilliant military leader‒an artist in that realm, perhaps‒but his contributions to that field have no major bearing on modern life.

The ideas of Archimedes, for instance, have had much more durable effects, but that’s because they are discoveries about the nature of the universe, of reality and its underlying rules or tendencies, and so they are, in a sense, universal and universally discoverable by any intelligent civilization anywhere in the cosmos.  Ditto for Galileo and Newton, for Maxwell and Einstein and Schrodinger and Planck and their compatriots.

Not that we should not celebrate those achievements and discoveries, but they are in some senses nonspecific to any individual.  Even the work of Darwin, which may seem both specific (har!) and provincial, since it refers to life on Earth, is probably at least as universal as the work of Newton or Dirac or even Emmy Noether.  Natural selection applies to numerous things even within the higher orders of civilization‒languages, political systems, forms of transportation, the durability and character of bureaucracies, etc.  A form of it may apply to the formation of planetary systems and the potential origin of life therein, and even to the possible bubble universes of the hypothetical inflationary multiverse (or more specifically in Lee Smolin’s speculative notion of universe natural selection through black hole related cosmogenesis).

But politics‒well, it’s provincial in pretty much every way.  Can you imagine any truly alien race caring who got elected president or which party ran the poorer campaign, why one did better or the other worse?  Go canvas the dolphins for their opinions, or the octopuses, or the corvids, or ask a beehive or a termite mound or an ant colony.  Try to get them to give flying fuck at a tiny little that’s ass*** about the minutiae of human politics.

No, my depression, like my pain, is endogenous, or at least it is not trivially reactive.  It is always with me, a truly dark passenger (who often takes the wheel).  It’s probably a product of my atypical, alien neurology, but of course, I’m not anything like as alien as a cephalopod or hymenopteran or a cetacean.  I’m just humanlike enough to exist in the uncanny valley:  weird enough to be unsettling, but not weird enough to be interesting or cute or “beautiful” because of it.

So go ahead, catastrophize or hyper-celebrate about the latest political farce, not recognizing that a lot of what went wrong on all sides was that very tendency to demonize, to catastrophize, to overreact and to be self-righteous.

There is a saying that came into prominence sometime in my teens to twenties (I don’t recall the first time I heard it).  I initially found it irritating just because it was such a “new thing”, but I think its message has endured and even grown in value:  get over yourself.

Everyone needs to take this admonition to heart.  We are all just virtual particles, not-quite-really-real bosons that can carry some degree of information or “force” when there are enough of us around, but which all ultimately pop back out of existence before our presence can even really be noticed by any outside observer.

That’s okay.  It had better be okay, because it’s not optional****.  And if that state of the world, that nature of reality, is unnerving to you, don’t mind it too much.  It won’t trouble you for very long.  No one here gets out alive.

TTFN

*We still haven’t avoided it for very long.  It’s only been a danger for about, what, 70 years?  Really, it’s a little less than that since we’ve had truly civilization-ending amounts of sufficiently powerful nuclear weapons.  So, since I’m just now 55 years old, the threat of global thermonuclear war is only about a decade-ish older than I am.  It could almost be thought of as my eldest sibling.

**Redundant?

***I would not put it past dolphins to try such a thing.

****It’s a bit like free will:  You either have it or you don’t, but you don’t have any choice in the matter.

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The Day of the Moon and Guy Fawkes Eve

It’s Monday morning‒the first Monday in November.  It’s also my mother’s birthday, though since she’s no longer with us here, I doubt that she celebrates it any more.  Nevertheless, it’s still worth celebrating.  The world is a better place, I think, for having had my mother in it.  True, she did give birth to me, but you can’t hold that against her too much; nobody’s perfect, and the positive things she did (including my brother and sister) outweigh the negatives, both literally and figuratively.

I felt really horrible last week, physically and mentally (and not just because of my ongoing acute viral illness).  That’s part of why I just did my little sarcastic, blah-heavy blog post.  I had no interest in doing anything more.  What, indeed, would have been the point?  I doubt that I have anything useful or entertaining to say, even today.

Of course, the big election is tomorrow, but honestly, that whole shit show is thoroughly contemptible at nearly every level, and it’s hard to feel good about it in any way.  Of course, one of the presidential candidates is clearly the ethically superior person, but neither is particularly impressive.  I look back with real nostalgia on the Romney-Obama election.

Oh, well.  It’s probably appropriate that it’s Guy Fawkes Day tomorrow.  Penny for the Guy?  Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot.  Let’s set this thing alight.

I have been rereading (and even editing) Outlaw’s Mind after removing the opening scene, thus making it into a story without that constraining ending.  I think it’s a good story; better and more involved than I would have expected when I started it, with a tone that reminds me, oddly, of Stephen King’s Revival, though I’m not at all sure why.

It seems very unlikely that I will finish it, though.  I would need to find some new lease on life, somehow, and right now my life credit score is abysmal, and the only existence I seem able to afford is metaphorically even more dreary and gross than the room in which I spend my evenings and weekends.  I live alone in a single, cluttered, old place, but my mental and “spiritual” existence makes the physical location seem like an all-inclusive paradise vacation with one’s closest and dearest friends and family.

It’s all I deserve, really.  I don’t want you to think I pity myself.  I mean, I guess in a way I do, but it’s a contemptuous sort of self-pity, a kind of “look at that pathetic, pitiful, putrid excuse for a person” feeling.

I really could use some help‒some serious help, some professional help, probably some emergency help.  But I know that I don’t deserve any help, I’m not worthy of help, I don’t merit any help.  It would almost certainly be a waste of resources.

I’ve also had a huge back and leg pain flare-up this weekend, of the cause of which I’m far from certain.  It has, however, made this last weekend almost anti-restful, even though I had Saturday off.

I did nothing to celebrate Halloween this year, despite the fact that it’s generally my favorite holiday.  Then again, I did nothing to celebrate my birthday, either.  As I said in a post on Facebook, I have no interest in anything.  Everything is uninteresting.  I would just like to stop being in pain, to stop feeling like I have to keep pushing forward, to keep moving and doing, just because that’s what one is “supposed” to do.

I can see, more and more, that the current shape of my life is the shape of the rest of my life.  This is the landscape of my continued existence:  doing an okay job that doesn’t involve my medical or scientific skills, working with people with whom I can’t really have conversations about anything that interests me, leaving work to commute to a dreary old room where I try (and fail) to get a decent night’s sleep, then spend the weekend basically doing nothing because there’s nothing interesting to do, and if there were, I would be too tired and in too much pain to do it.

This is all some of why I didn’t really write a post last Thursday.  I don’t know if I will write one this week.  But no matter what, one of these days (and it probably won’t be very long) there will just stop being any blog posts from me, and none of you will ever hear from me again.  And your lives will probably be somewhat happier because of that.

Most people seem to be happier when I’m not around.  Most things tend to go better.

Meanwhile, I can only try to distract myself from my chronic pain by inflicting other, more immediate pain upon myself.  Nothing else does an adequate job, but even so, it’s not really enough.

That’s it for today, I guess

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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.