dysthymia

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The color of the blog doth come and go, between his purpose and his conscience

Hello and good morning.

It’s the first day of October, but I have very little to say about that other than what I’ve already said recently:  It’s my “official” favorite month, but right now that’s about as impressive as saying it’s…I don’t know, my least disliked form of terminal cancer or something along those lines.

Anyway, it’s a new month, and I guess those of you who have survived to see it can feel good about that, if that’s something you think is good (by whatever criteria you use to mean “good” regarding such things).  For my part, I’m not so sure, but if you’ve been reading this nonsense for any length of time, you probably don’t find that admission surprising.

I really feel wiped out, honestly, almost as if I’m out of breath while just sitting here and writing.  It’s not necessarily purely subjective‒my pulse ox is only about 94 to 95 percent right now, which is a tiny bit low, but it is early in the day.

What, you’re surprised that I have a personal pulse oximeter?  Don’t be.  It’s entirely predictable, given my background and how inexpensive such things have become.  Actually, I have two of them:  one at the house, one at work.

I’m somewhat weirdly hopeful, or perhaps wishful, that this slightly low oxygen saturation is the harbinger of a steady, progressive, terminal illness‒a slow-moving pneumonia or tuberculosis or lung cancer or something, even COPD.  I’m just exhausted with this living crap, and there are only a very few things that make it in any way worthwhile to me.

I’m so tired.  I just woke up‒or at least, I just got up‒about an hour ago, and I’m as tired as if it were already the end of a long, labor-intensive day.  Of course, I’ve been awake on and off for hours already, but that’s unfortunately nothing new.

I really want to be able to rest.  Of course, the famous saying is that there shall be no rest for the wicked, and perhaps I am just wicked.  But perhaps if the wicked were able to rest‒truly to rest‒they would be less prone to be wicked.  I don’t know.  I’m just spouting a bit of nonsense right now, don’t take the specifics too seriously.  I haven’t really given any thought prior to this moment about the possibility that “wickedness” can be at least partially a product of fatigue.

Of course, it does make some sense.  We know what impulse control, mainly through the actions of parts of the frontal lobes, is subject to fatigue.  We know that people are more prone to, say, break their diets or pick up cigarettes again at the end of a long, hard day.  Conscience may make cowards of us all, but conscience itself has only so much charge in its batteries.

Fortunately, the frontal lobes don’t get fatigued in isolation, so by the time one’s impulse control is lagging, one’s impulse creation is also a bit on the slow side.  The brain, like the body, is at least prone to getting tired all at roughly the same time.

I’m sorry.  Everything that crosses my mind right now is just turning into meditations on being tired.  I am tired.  I am sleepy.  I am exhausted.  I am fatigued.  I am run down.  I am worn out.

[Help!  I’m being attacked by that most dreadful, ferocious, frightening, and intimidating of dinosaurs:  Thesaurus rex.]

Ugh, I’m already running out of gas, today.  If I had a cocoon, I’d wrap up in it.  If I had a sensory deprivation chamber, I’d go lie down in it.

Actually, that last possibility sounds lovely.  I wish I had one of those.  I’ve looked around the area, but though apparently there used to be services that offered sensory deprivation chambers near where I live, none remain that are close enough to be useful to me.  It would be good, though, I think.

Some people are bothered by enclosed spaces, but it’s never been much of an issue for me.  I was quite happy to sleep in the little coffin beds in the Navy‒in fact, the night I slept in the pitch black silence in a submarine was one of the most pleasant sleeps I’ve had.  I tend to find MRIs relaxing, and when the noises come on, I pretend I’m watching a gangster movie.

Of course, context is crucial here.  I do not like being restrained or constrained by other people, and if someone tries to do such a thing to me, I am prone to do everything I can to hurt and/or kill them, and I will be very hard pressed to restrain myself.  In these cases, my frontal lobes don’t inhibit the impulses, they egg them on.

My frontal lobes don’t like being pushed around by other, entirely finite and fallible and flesh-and-blood mortals any more than the rest of me does.  Even lawful “authorities” are merely a matter of necessity, and they are certainly prone to error, like everyone else.  No one has true, inherent authority over someone else, though of necessity we can give some people power over others, because the alternatives are worse.

Anarchy is rarely an improvement over having a working government, for instance, but that doesn’t mean we should ever take our eyes off said government; it must always be held to task and kept from becoming too self-important and/or self-serving.

I will close with a quote from a Beatles song, and embed that song below, as a reminder to those who would arrogate authority to themselves:  “Can’t you see, you’re really only very small, and life goes on within you and without you.”

TTFN

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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“When the storm arrives, would you be seen with me?”

Okay, well, I will have set this up to post at about 8 am my time today, just as I did with yesterday’s post.  I have not yet looked at my stats for yesterday’s post, so I don’t know whether, so far, doing this has made any difference in my readership.

That’s fine, though, because it would be absurd to try to read any conclusions from one day of a slightly changed time of posting.  It’s not a statistically significant sample size, among other things.  So, it’s best to try it for a bit and see how it goes and only to draw conclusions after I’ve had at least a decent run of days.

I am still somewhat under the weather from yesterday, but I have to go to the office because it is payroll day, and that needs to get done.  I did leave the office at lunchtime yesterday, and when I got back to the house I knocked myself out with some benadryl and some CBD gummies with a bit of delta-9 and delta-8.  It did help me sleep, at least, though I’m sure it wasn’t an ideal sleep.  Still, beggars can’t be choosers, generally speaking, though I’m sure there are exceptions to that “rule”.

I did wake up hideously early, though, even for me, but I didn’t want to take any further sedation, because then it might affect my ability to do what I need to do today.

I forgot to take some of my vitamins and stuff yesterday evening, including the lithium supplement that I’ve been taking.  I didn’t take that this morning, either, just to see how the dearth of it will affect me, if at all.  I know, I know, I’m doing too much haphazard starting and stopping of variables, and it makes it very difficult‒as well as potentially very misleading‒to draw conclusions about what effects these interventions are having.

But I have a difficult time being patient with this stuff.  Anyway, this was an accidental skip last night; I’m just continuing it for the moment.  We’ll see whether there is any noticeable change in my mood, but it certainly didn’t revolutionize my affect by taking it, and it’s not supposed to have the same kind of delayed effect that the traditional antidepressants require.

So, yeah, with both of those things, we shall see how the outcome goes.  Or maybe we won’t, I don’t know.  There are no guarantees.  Even the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be wrong, though it is unlikely.

I’m going to try to abstain from discussing my darker moods and thoughts here for at least a little while.  I’ve begun to wonder if ruminating on them and putting them out there in writing is making them worse rather than making them any better at all.

I guess I’m doing lots of little would-be therapeutic interventions for me.  Someone has to do it, and I’m probably the one best placed to take action, though I am entangled in the outcomes, which may confound things.  Still, I’m the only one who is going to do anything for me, so there are no other options.

I am in a very real sense quite alone in my situation.  I guess that’s not new, is it?  I’ve tended to be the one who helps other people, not the one who gets helped.  That’s just the way it goes, though.  Like Chris Cornell sang, “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”  These are words of wisdom, and not just for fictional super-spies.

I still haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than one little fifteen-minute interval over the last three weeks or so.  That’s an estimate, of course.  It is mildly worrying or at least disappointing how much I am losing interest in so many things that usually have interested me.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction, nor have I studied much new physics or biology or what have you, though I have hearkened to the computer science/AI stuff a bit, because at least that is somewhat interesting and intriguing.

Well, I will endeavor to persevere and even to improve.

You all, my readers, could in principle spot changes in my mental status before I even recognize them, myself, and I do hope, as well as request, that you do that.  It would be most welcome and potentially useful.  I thank you in advance.  In the meantime, I hope you’ve been having a good week, and that you continue to do so, and indeed, that each day is an improvement over the previous one.  Why not?  It doesn’t take much improvement per day, if it is every day, for truly impressive results to accrue.

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“Sometimes I think I’d like to watch it burn.”

Umm…I don’t have any idea what to write this morning, this work-week beginning, this dawn of yet another iteration of zero.  But I guess that hasn’t ever stopped me before, though it feels more prominent now than I remember it feeling in the past.

But such feelings are unreliable guides to the past and present actual state of reality.  This is not to say that they are absolutely untrue and misleading; if that were the case, not only would everyone have picked up on it long ago, but it would have been weeded out of the gene pool.  A perfectly unreliable memory is no better than no memory at all.

On the other hand, it’s not evolutionarily sensible to have a perfect memory, either, largely because the information required to store perfectly all the things that have happened to you, and to which your senses had access, would very rapidly exceed your “hard drive” space.  No, your nervous system must sift out the useful information and discard the useless, or the not salient or pertinent, as much as possible, because the brain, though tremendously useful, is extremely energy intensive.

Human brains burn about 20 percent of the daily calories burned by a person.  Yes, that’s true even of people you consider morons.  The most ignorant person around still has a version of the best operating system available in the known universe (at least for the moment).  How much smarter is the least intelligent but functioning human compared to the smartest nematode…or even the smartest house cat?

Oh, who cares?  I don’t know why I go on about this nonsense.  It’s not as though people are actually interested.  I’m hemorrhaging readers steadily, it seems.  I’m not exactly sure why.

Maybe it’s because my insomnia and early awakening are getting steadily worse, and so I’m posting my posts earlier and earlier.  Maybe if I delayed them, like I do with the audio posts, more people would notice them.  What do you think?  Should I try that?  Would it bother you if my posts went up at, say 8 am versus whenever I finish them?  Would it matter?  Do you think there is a better time for them?

I don’t really expect it to make a difference.  No one notices when I’m not around, so to speak.  I’ve been banned from Meta platforms for some time now, and the only people who have touched base were the few people who did so anyway.  There are quite a few people whom I would consider friends, and who could get in contact with me, but they don’t.

I’m not saying that they ought to check on me.  It’s not their responsibility.  But I suspect at least a part of the whole thing is that, once I am not even peripherally in their lives, people don’t really notice.  If anything, I suspect that they probably feel a slight lightness, a sense of greater vivacity, some decreased sense of dreariness about life, the universe, and everything.

Certainly I have not heard anyone complain about the fact that I’m not around.  No one says they miss me, that their lives are emptier without me nearby.  No, most people either don’t notice (at least superficially) or just experience relief.

Even the four dollar coins* I keep for helping me make certain decisions are not on my side (not that they would be, since they are coins, not people).  Late last week‒I think it was Saturday, but it might have been Friday‒when I was feeling particularly low, I asked if I should just kill myself.  I spun the four coins and, on the first try, I got four heads.

Heads is the side I use to mean “yes”.

So, yeah, even the ladies (2 Susan B. Anthonies and 2 Sacagaweas) don’t seem to think having me around is worth much.  Of course, they are just coins.  I know there is no actual thought or judgment there, let alone attachment or agency.  It’s just sort of perversely funny to me.

Whatever.  I’m tired of this, and everything is getting less and less consequential.  I think, unless someone voices clear and convincing objections in the comments today, I will set up tomorrow’s post to come out at 8 eastern time, at least roughly.

Or maybe I just won’t post anything.  It’s not as though doing this is helping my mental health (obviously), and I doubt that I’m contributing anything to the world of ideas.  Even if I had some deep and interesting insight, it would go essentially nowhere and reach almost no one.

Oh, again, who cares?  Thanks for reading today.  I hope you have a good week, a good remainder of the month, a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives‒just in case you never hear from me again.

*By which I mean four one-dollar coins, not $4 coins.

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Meet the new year, same as the old year

L’shana tovah!  It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so for those of you who celebrate it, I hope you have a good one.

It’s Saturday, also, of course, and I am going in to the office.  I can hardly claim to feel slighted to be working on Rosh Hashanah, since if I were actually observant, I would never be working on any Saturday, since that is Shabbat.  I would be hypocritical to try to claim the day off by some form of religious right.

It is also rather sad and frustrating that I just have no one with whom to celebrate this and other important days.  Tomorrow is another very important day, and of course next weekend begins Yom Kippur, which is the so-called highest of the holy days.

Anyway, all that’s neither here nor there.  It has nothing to do with me other than memories.  I can’t even share well-wishes with people on Facebook as I used to do, thanks to my weird expulsion from Meta’s sites.

But it’s not as though anyone has a right to Facebook.  Not even the people who created it have a right to it.  It can all be taken from them at any moment by the whims of fate, and sooner or later, it all will be taken from them, just as everything else will be taken from everyone else as well.

Again, happy new year.

Each day is the beginning of a new year depending on one’s point of view.  And every second is the beginning of a new day, and so on.  Likewise, each day is the end of a year, and each second is the end of a day.

And each moment is the end of some noteworthy number of lives.  Every day is the last day some parent out there will lift and carry their child.  Every day is the last day some parent will ever see their child, and every day is the last day some child will see their parent.

Every moment is, for someone out there, the last moment they will spend with the person they love the most.

This is not even counting the suffering, the fear, and the deaths of non-human animals and other forms of life.

So, yeah.  Happy, happy.  Joy, joy.

Sorry, I know I’m being perhaps even more of a downer than usual.  It’s what I’m best at, I suspect.  I should charge for my services; after all, like the Joker said, if you’re good at something you should never do it for free.

I don’t know if there’s actually a market for what I’m selling, though.  I’m down to about a dozen or fewer regular readers here, and it’s not as though anyone’s sharing my posts or calling them to the attention of friends as being entertaining or insightful.  That’s not surprising.

I am quite creative in many ways, but those ways all tend toward the dark and horrible.  Way back when I was writing the first science fiction/fantasy* novel I ever completed, some of the best parts in it were the “horror” elements, which just crept in as I wrote the type of story I liked to write.

I seem mainly to be a source of darkness in the world‒though I’ve been part of bringing some wonderful things into the world as well.  I’ve even done my share of good deeds, and possibly more than my share.  That’s pretty much over now, though.

Of course, darkness doesn’t require me to bring it into existence.  It makes no difference to the universe if one declares oneself, say, an Agent of Chaos or of Entropy.  That’s about as sensible as someone claiming to be an agent of gravity or of the electromagnetic force.

Real things, fundamental things, don’t require human (or other) agents to carry them out.  They simply are, they happen, there is no avoiding them.  They happen with or without anyone even knowing they happen.  This is one of the things that should make everyone suspicious of every religion, really:  why would real omnipotent force require agents?

So yeah, like I said, every moment is laden with loss and suffering and death, and ironically, this will only ever end if and when everyone and everything is dead.

Happy New Year.

*Yes, it counted as science fiction and fantasy.  That was one of the points of it:  it told of an ultra-high tech, space faring civilization that also used “magic”.

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Painfully to pore upon a blog to seek the light of truth

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you might be able to tell by my traditional, Thursday-associated “Hello and good morning” style opening.  But, of course, if you’re new to this blog‒I wonder if there are any new people reading this blog today‒then you might not know.

But I’ve been writing a Thursday-based blog for at least 10 years, I think, in case anyone wants to go back and check it out.  It then expanded into an “every workday” blog after my last fiction publication, which I think was my collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Though my last novel ended up being Unanimity Book 1 and Unanimity Book 2.

I have written a novella since then (Extra Body) that’s published here, and I’ve made beginnings on Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which are also available here as far as they’ve gone.

But for the most part, I’ve just been doing this blog.  I initially imagined it to be a kind of promotional entity, intended to help people hear about my books.  As far as I can tell, it utterly failed at that purpose, but whataya gonna do?

Then I decided to try to turn the blog into a sort of mental health thing (for me, not for my readers‒it cannot be good for my readers’ mental health), a kind of talk therapy, to try to help with my ongoing dysthymia and depression.

Well, it’s difficult to assess an intervention’s effectiveness without being able to know how things would be without that intervention, but if this is me with a successful method of intervention, I shudder to imagine what I would be like without it.  Possibly, I would be dead, but that’s really not such a bad thought, to be fair.

I’ve had a few very bad days of pain lately, which is not unusual, but it is frustrating.  For a few days before this, my pain abated a bit, to just a sort of low, background thing, and when that happens, I start to feel stupidly optimistic for a time.  Of course, so far, that optimism has been profoundly misplaced, but what do you want from something as stupid as optimism?

The pain really doesn’t help things, though.  It’s been going on for nearly a quarter of a century so far, and that’s too long for my taste (in case you wondered).  In a few years, I will have reached the halfway point, i.e., I will have been in chronic pain for half my life.  From there, the fraction just gets bigger.  Indeed, if I were to live forever, the limit of the fraction of my life in which I’ve been in chronic pain would be 1.

That’s a pretty horrible thought.

So, yeah, that hasn’t helped with my mental health either.  It’s difficult to know what my mental health would have been like without chronic pain; it’s possible it could have been worse.  But there are decent reasons to doubt that to be the likely case.

Insomnia doesn’t help, either.  I will say one thing about Paxil, for all that it wasn’t great for my depression:  it made me enjoy sleeping, even though it didn’t make a big impact on how long I slept.  I have never really enjoyed sleep, either before or since.  I am not one who eagerly anticipates getting into bed and drifting off.

I know there are people who do seem to enjoy it, quite apart from its necessary function.  Not I.  My need to sleep, as with so many other things, is one purely of necessity; I need to rest, if I can.  And I certainly long for the feeling of actually having adequately rested, though I don’t know if I will ever experience that again.

Anyway, I’m tired‒from lack of sleep, from pain, from depression, presumably from ASD, from being alone with only my own miserable and annoying self all the time, from the fact that the world is so stupid and so pointless*, from general social awkwardness, from innumerable things.  And I have no apparent capacity to do anything creative now, which used to be one of my saving graces.  I haven’t even played guitar (or sang) for weeks now, if I recall correctly.  The black Strat just leans against my desk in the office, gathering dust.

Oh, well.  Like I said (or asked), whataya gonna do?  Although, there is always something I can do, but people don’t like it when I talk about that.  It makes them uncomfortable.  It doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable enough to act, but they don’t like it, and it doesn’t seem to do me any good except to make me feel slightly more hopeless, as well as somewhat guilty for bothering other people with my issues.

Anyway, it’s not like I can blame anyone for not wanting to have anything to do with a creature like me.

Enough.  This is idiotic, like so much else in the universe.  I hope you’re all doing well.

TTFN

*But especially the “stupid” part.  Pointlessness is tolerable, and it can even be rather freeing, but everyone and everything is just so idiotic.  I do not exclude myself from that judgement.

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“…the emptiest of feelings…”

Ugh, boy, wow, do I feel wiped out this morning, which seems mildly peculiar after a night’s sleep, however inadequate.  I didn’t have the energy to do my usual morning pull-ups today, even, and that’s rare.  Well, I say “usual”, but I actually alternate:  on even days I do pull-ups in the morning, on odd days I do dips, and on Sundays and on those Saturdays on which I don’t work, I do neither.

<sarcasm> Isn’t that exciting to learn?  I know that I can barely contain myself; I can’t imagine how it must be for all of you! </sarcasm>

Anyway, I don’t know why I am so enervated this morning.  I mean, I slept an entirely inadequate amount, but that’s not atypical or unusual for me.

Yesterday was even a decent day as far as it went.  We only worked a half day at the office, but sales were nevertheless pretty good.  Then afterward, I had a discord call with my youngest and we watched two excellent episodes of Doctor Who.  This is their first time watching, and it’s nice to be able to introduce someone to the show, especially one of my two favorite people ever.  The show is being quite well-received.  This is not a surprise.

Of course, I went back to the house later than I would have if I had not watched the Doctor, but not as late as usual.  Then I went to bed pretty sensibly.  That doesn’t translate into a good night’s sleep‒not by a long way‒but I did what was within my power.

It’s not as though I can do anything that’s not within my power.

So, yeah, I don’t know why I feel so beat this morning.  I don’t feel like I am coming down with some infectious illness (unfortunately), and I don’t have the symptoms that would go along with some rather severe medical process that could cause acutely worsening fatigue, like a GI bleed or something.  There’s no faintness/lightheadedness, no rapid heart beat, nothing of that sort.  I also have no new pains that I have so far noticed, and as far as I can tell I am not jaundiced, so my liver is probably okay.

Well, whatever.  The point is I feel a lot like crap.  But, unfortunately, I don’t feel sick enough not to go to work (or to write this blog post).  And I am not allowed to take breaks of any kind unless I am legitimately incapacitated.

“Not allowed” you ask?  Not allowed by whom?

By me’m, is the answer, albeit a deliberately ungrammatical one.  I cannot seem to let myself stop trying to do shit unless I am actually ill enough that I cannot really do anything.

I have been like this for as long as I can remember.  Even back in my early grade school days, I remember fantasizing about getting seriously hurt so that I would be able just to lie about and rest for a bit.  Honestly.

When I had open heart surgery‒it was August 7th or 8th, 1988, 2 weeks before I was to go back to university‒it was quite unpleasant of course, and quite painful.  Indeed, I remember that my first thought upon beginning to regain consciousness was more or less “damn it, I survived”.

It’s not great when you’re 18 (or probably any other age) to get your chest sawed open and your blood artificially circulated and oxygenated for a while, then to wake up restrained and intubated and cortically blind (I didn’t put that last thing together completely until quite some time later).

But it was, nevertheless, freeing.  I didn’t feel the need always to be doing something, to be accomplishing something, because I couldn’t.  That was kind of amazing, and it felt so at the time.

I wasn’t even afraid when I was going to get my heart surgery (or the catheterization before that).  It’s not that I was brave; it was nothing like that.  I was just too intrigued by the whole process, which was admittedly pretty cool and amazing, and I was almost unconsciously looking forward to having everything taken out of my hands for a while, whether I liked it or not.

Of course, in a sense, everything is always mostly out of our hands.  Our own agency, such as it is, is something we don’t choose, and we don’t choose our nature and our “specs”* and our talents and capacities.  Even our will is something that starts as it is without our input, as does the universe itself.  The best you can do is try to surf on the chaos.

But I’ve always felt the need to do something whenever I’m conscious and able to act.  Even if the “something” is a fun thing, or just a distracting thing, there’s always a pressure to do it, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember.  And it’s just a relief to have it taken off line temporarily, to have it rendered moot for a while.

When I had my heart surgery, I knew that it might kill me.  I certainly knew it intellectually, just as I also knew that the odds were very small‒roughly one in a thousand according to the statistics my cardiologist had shared with me.  Even back then, I had a good enough intuitive grasp of probability and statistics to know that, though immensely higher than the chance of winning the lottery, these were odds about which it was not worth worrying.

But I also just wasn’t horrified by the prospect of dying.  Even then I didn’t really believe in any kind of afterlife.  And I experienced (or, rather, I did not experience) more or less as complete a simulacrum of death as it was possible to undergo, one far more closely approximating it than mere dreamless sleep:  deep general anesthesia including hypothermia and cardioplegia, and the non-pulsatile cerebral blood flow that heart-lung bypass entailed.

If I had died on the operating table, there would have been no experiential transition for me.  That’s rather fascinating.

Anyway, sorry to bother you with my fantasies about, and my missed opportunities for, a painless death (or just for the chance to rest because there was nothing I could do).  Maybe I’ll feel better by tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll feel deader by tomorrow.  I could even be wetter by tomorrow, this being Florida.

I hope all of you are feeling and doing better than I.  I mean, come on, it’s not a very high bar to clear.

*By which I mean “specifications”, as of a machine or process, not “spectacles”.

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It’s serious Labor just to get through each Day

Good day to you all.  It’s Monday, the 7th of September, and for those in the USA, it is Labor Day.  That’s sort of the government holiday antipode of Memorial Day.  The latter marks the unofficial beginning of summer, and the former marks the unofficial end of summer.  In south Florida, I can fairly and reasonably say about the supposed end of summer, “Would that it were.”

That’s because the weather in autumn‒late autumn, anyway‒is much more pleasant than it is in summer here.  This is a large part of the reason for the “snow bird” phenomenon:  people who live up north during the warmer half (roughly) of the year and then come down to Florida during the cooler half of the year.

I say “cooler” in the meteorological, thermodynamic sense, not the social sense.  Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, there are not many cool people per capita in Florida.  It just doesn’t tend to fit the regional identity in any sense; “The Florida Man” is not celebrated for his coolness.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is:  I am probably only barely below the mean level of coolness in Florida, at least based on the usual criteria of greater society.  Even well-known people from Florida are rarely noted for being cool.

Not that it really matters, of course.  Coolness is an epiphenomenon that accreted like pipe scale on the surface of primate dominance and reproductive hierarchical behavior patterns; that’s all fairly obvious looking at humans from the outside as it were.  But it all becomes self-referential after a while, building on and/or reacting in support of or opposition to prior standards of “coolness”, until it’s long since become a sort of autoerotic death spiral, a precursor to AI slop.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes appreciate cool things and people; I just recognize “coolness” as entirely parochial.  What octopuses think is cool and what spiders think is cool and what albatrosses think is cool are going to be very different from each other and from what humans think is cool*.

Speaking of coolness, I went to the movie theater (by myself) this weekend to see the new Spider-Man movie.  The movie was certainly reasonably cool as far as it went; I thought it was well made and well acted and fun and so on.  It was at a theater that has a full bar, which is also pretty cool, so while I waited I had a Jack and Coke (to help with some social anxiety).  It was tasty, but it made me need to use the restroom four times before the movie started.  That was annoying.  But I rarely drink alcohol, anyway, so it’s an effect I need not dread.

The popcorn was pretty good, I guess, and so on, and the seats were comfy, but by the end of the movie I just felt more alone than I had before, despite coming out and joining the throng (then going into Target for some cat food and then to Walgreens for some sparkling water before ordering an Uber back to the house).

It was an expensive day, though.  The concessions were even more expensive than the ticket (and that’s not counting the Jack and Coke).  And the Uber to and from the theater was not cheap, either.  So, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that very often.  I may not do it ever again, maybe not even for Doomsday.

Though, when it comes to money, it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement.  I don’t expect to retire.  As of right now, I just expect to keep moving until I fall apart and then just basically die.  I mean, in the end that’s what everyone does, but my situation is likely to have less bric-a-brac cluttering up the works than many.

Honestly, I wish I could skip to the end a lot of the time.  Which I guess I can, of course, but it requires gumption and willpower to do it, and I am generally low on spoons, as the metaphor goes nowadays; I’m not sure how that figure of speech became prominent, nor why, but it feels somehow apropos.

Many things that I am doing to try to improve my willpower and my mental reserves and so on are at least partly to try to build the will to overcome my instinctive but annoying resistance to self-destruction.  I’m getting there, I think.  I’m making progress.  Maybe I’ll get there soon.

Honestly, I don’t really even mind that much if I don’t get to see Avengers: Doomsday.  I’m just sick of all of this shit.

I hope you all are doing better than I am.

*Of course, the thought processes as such are likely only to be very roughly analogous to what humans think about coolness, especially for non-social species.  There may also be overlap; I imagine many humans might think certain examples of flying skill shown by an albatross are very cool, and so might another albatross.

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the blog of him that makes it

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.