This is just a little announcement to everyone that there will be no blog post or audio blog today*. I just don’t feel up to doing one. There are reasons, and maybe I’ll discuss them tomorrow if I write (or say) something, but for right now, I’ll just say that I feel like being idle. I will give a minor hint at least in the categories and possibly the tags.
Thanks!
*Other than this announcement, of course, which I guess technically counts as a blog post.
I’m writing this on Monday morning, on my smartphone, on the heels of an issue relating to WordPress*. Apparently, there are people trying to leave comments on this blog on WordPress, and many of those comments are not actually appearing, which I know from experience can be very frustrating‒especially if it was a comment behind which there was any care and thought‒and which can lead commenters to wonder if they are being blocked.
Just to address that last point, I want to assure all you readers that I am not blocking comments. I don’t know if I have ever blocked any comment on this blog. If I have, it was quite a long time ago, and I don’t remember it.
The problem seems to be some manner of ongoing glitch in WordPress, one of which I think I too have been a victim on other sites. You’d think they’d try to do a bit better for long-term, paying customers, but they appear to be too busy trying to add flashy, unwanted new things to keep up with the various brain-dead social media out there, but not paying enough attention just to keeping their basic functions running as smoothly as possible.
They call their workers “happiness engineers”, which is a cheesy enough title, but at least they could take that job title seriously and try to do what they can to engineer, effectively, the happiness of their customers.
If a bridge over a gorge had been built by civil engineers as reliable as these happiness engineers (to be fair, perhaps it’s really more of a management problem), I think I would be inclined to rappel down, then swim across, and then climb up to get to the other side, rather than driving or walking. The Tay Bridge itself, subject of one of the worst disasters (and reputedly one of the worst poems) in early rail history, was not much more poorly engineered.
Or perhaps I should say “poorly executed”; again, I cannot be sure that it’s actually a problem with the happiness engineers so much as with the people making decisions at “higher” levels. All the engineers I’ve known‒and all but one of my roommates at college and many of my other friends at the time were engineers or were at least in the engineering school at Cornell‒have been people who did not like solving a problem poorly if it could be avoided.
Of course, I don’t know how many of the people at WordPress have actual engineering degrees. Presumably, there are at least some people with degrees in computer science and engineering at the company. Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t so presume. After all, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.
Anyway, I will at least put an inquiry in to WordPress about what might be happening, and it would be good if any of you who are account holders might inquire as well.
I hope you all had a decent (or better than decent) weekend. Mine was not great; I’m still not feeling too well physically, and mentally I almost never feel very well for very long at a time. I had a rather minor but personally large disappointment brought about by circumstance that I won’t get into specifically, but it reinforces the notion, which I make in my story “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, that hope is dangerous, particularly to a person who has tried to become used to and to embrace despair.
I am trying to do otherwise. I dwell on the negative a lot, here, but I do try to do otherwise. I’m damned if I know why I try; it’s probably just those stupid, mindless, biological drives and nothing more. I wish I could rewrite my base code to blunt or eliminate those urges.
But then again, if I could rewrite my base code that way, I might as well rewrite myself to be happy and healthy, right? Also, I could rewrite myself to be motivated and ambitious and charismatic, so I could become rich and powerful and immortal and eventually take over the world and even the universe! I would make everything better than it is now, I can say that with little fear of contradiction. Also, I want a unicorn pony with dragon wings that gets its sustenance by absorbing all the excess calories that I eat, so I never become overweight.
Anyway, my train will be coming soon, and I want to keep this relatively short. I just want to apologize to the people who have tried to comment but have had difficulty doing so. I hope you didn’t think I was ignoring you or that I had blocked you; I was not and had not. I couldn’t honestly say that discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me**, but it is unpleasant, and I try to avoid it. I don’t know if I’ll be writing or doing audio the rest of this week, but I will probably make my latest audio into a “video” at least. In the meantime, try to keep your spirits up.
*Isn’t it interesting how the same preposition‒“on”‒can be used with reference to time, to things being used, and to metaphorical situations? It’s interesting to me anyway. Also, of course, it can literally be used to refer to placement, as in “I’m sitting on a bench.” It could also be used for metaphorical placement, as in “I’m on top of the world”, but I have only rarely been in that state, and it’s been a very long time since the last occurrence‒the last time was 22 years ago, I think, though there were other good times somewhat more recently, at least up until about eleven years ago. After that, pretty much everything has been shit.
**For one thing, that very phrase contradicts itself, since it’s speaking about how ugly one finds discourtesy.
It’s Wednesday morning again, and here I am, reverting to habit, writing a blog post (this time on my smartphone) because I frankly can’t seem to think of anything better to do with my time.
Well…I could sleep. That would be a better use of my time. Except I can’t sleep. Even on weekends, the only way I get myself to sleep through the night is to take two Benadryl™ before I lie down. But that’s not really effective, restorative sleep, and though I stay in “bed” later, I can tell the next day that I’m not really rested. Or maybe that’s just residual effects of the antihistamine, I don’t know.
The best thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression‒which didn’t work overall, and gave me bad side-effects‒was that it made me not just able to go to sleep at night, but to actually feel good going to bed and going to sleep, to enjoy the process. I had never experienced that before, nor have I since. But, as I said, there were other side-effects that made it quite bad.
Also, it made me gain weight, which would be particularly bad now, because I’m already heavier than I’ve ever been. That’s what can happen when one’s only reliable pleasure comes from eating, and when one also eats as a sort of “stimming” and soothing thing to try to ease a constant sense of anhedonia and stress and dysphoria. And it’s not as though I could simply “embrace” my body size, because it comes with worsening pain and other unpleasant consequences.
Unfortunately, I don’t get immediate worsening of pain when I eat. It’s delayed. If it were immediate, I would probably develop a habitual avoidance, and that would be great. I try to remind myself, when my ankles and knees and back and hips are hurting a lot, that this is caused, at least partly, by eating too much, but that auto-suggestion doesn’t seem quite to work.
I’m pretty sure that I would eat less if I slept better. Chronic sleep loss tends to affect one’s regulatory and stress hormones, and can stimulate appetite (especially for carbohydrates) in many people. I appear to be one of these people.
I wonder if I could figure out a way to cause myself pain while eating‒maybe I could put a clothespin on the end of my pinky when I eat, every time I eat. I don’t know if you all remember, but having a clothespin clamped on your fingernail hurts quite a lot, and hurts even more (albeit briefly) when you take it off and circulation returns*.
If I could arrange something like that to happen whenever I eat, that would be useful. I did have a TENS unit that never helped my chronic pain, but some of its higher settings could be quite uncomfortable. I suppose it might be useful to train myself, though it would require setting it up and activating it every time I ate. Also, I’m almost sure that I threw it away in frustration because it didn’t work.
It would be really useful if I could somehow trigger nausea any time I ate, as in the style of aversion training seen in A Clockwork Orange. I suppose I could try to force myself to eat eggplant with every meal…but no, I don’t think I could. It’s very hard to force oneself to eat things that make one feel sick. That’s the whole point of this line of thought. I guess I could look for some syrup of ipecac. I’ve never used that, but I think they used to use it to make people throw up if they’d eaten something poisonous or the like. It might be worth a try. I think I’ll send myself a reminder to look it up on Amazon.
The train just arrived. I must say, Tri-Rail seems to have deteriorated slightly since changing their schedules, but maybe they’re just in the middle of making adjustments. I try to give other people and organizations the benefit of the doubt when I can. The Principle of Charity is one that I think would be very useful for society as a whole, or at least for humans: the idea of trying to see what people say and do from the best possible light you can, instead of reflexively assuming the worst, of getting judgmental and self-righteous and assuming anything you find even slightly uncomfortable is a personal attack on you, precisely because you feel uncomfortable.
If I took that attitude, I could definitely see myself trying to destroy the world or even the universe, because a lot of reality bothers me a lot of the time. Fortunately, I know that my feelings are my problem and my responsibility, not anyone else’s.
Not that I don’t fantasize about global and even universal destruction when I’m feeling particularly pan-antipathic. I imagine working to perfect technology to adjust the course of asteroids. I could even sneakily get government funding to do so, but then I could actually use the technology to steer near-Earth objects toward the Earth rather than away from it. Some good asteroid hits might be extinction-level events, and a comet impact (of sufficient size) could wipe out nearly all life on Earth.
I say “nearly” because some microbes are remarkably resilient.
Of course, if one could study the possibility of vacuum decay‒causing, for instance, the cosmological constant or the Higgs Field to quantum tunnel to a lower energy level‒that would produce a wavefront process that would obliterate all forms of matter, a wavefront that would expand at the speed of light and wipe out everything.
Well…it wouldn’t literally wipe out everything, actually. First off, it would leave behind whatever cosmos is entailed in the new Higgs (or other field) set-point. And, of course, beyond our cosmic horizon, there are bits of reality that are moving away from us‒carried by the expansion of spacetime itself‒at faster than the speed of light. So the vacuum decay wave would never reach them. But it would obliterate everything in the observable universe, and that might be heartwarming enough.
Vacuum decay, though, may not even be a physical possibility‒it’s not a consensus prediction, though there are reasons to think it might be possible‒according to the best models we have of cosmic history, the Higgs field did settle out in a non-zero state after the electroweak era, and if inflationary cosmology is correct, then the “inflaton” field similarly decayed.
Still, we also have no idea how (or if) such a decay could be triggered. There is no apparent risk of initiating it through highly energetic physics, because there are constant, extremely high energy processes happening in the cosmos, and everything we can see is all still there, as are we.
Oh, and contrary to the X-Men comics’ Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga, unfortunately, a “neutron galaxy” would not be “The End of All That Is”. If such a “neutron galaxy” were to “appear” in the middle of the Milky Way, that would be bad for us, though its effects would take a while, since even gravity doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light. But effectively, a “neutron” galaxy would be no more cosmically devastating than a supermassive black hole with the mass of a hundred billion suns or so. That’s a big black hole, bigger than any we’ve seen (and probably too big to be expected to exist at the current age of the cosmos), and as with any black hole, if you get too close it can be bad news**, but from a distance its effects would be no more harmful than an ordinary galaxy of equivalent mass.
Oh, well, I’ll have to keep brainstorming ways to destroy the world or humanity at least. Maybe biology is the way to go‒it might be possible to genetically engineer something like the Blob or the Chicken Heart that Ate the World. Or one could deliberately make an AI that has the terminal goal to turn everything into paperclips, not by accident but on purpose. That would be humorously ironic. Or one could just make an AI nanobot, Von Neumann probe-style thing that literally had the sole programming to replicate itself as much and as fast as possible, using every available resource.
I’ve written before about how such a thing could even instantiate a new kind of galaxy-level natural selection.
I wonder what would happen if I tried to crowd-source a project to end all life in the universe, maybe with a “GoFundMe” page…
Anyway, my station is coming up, so I’ll draw my insane musings to a close for now. I don’t know if I’ll write anything tomorrow.
*Don’t worry, this was not something anyone else ever did to me. This was something with which I experimented on myself, because while it was painful, it was quite fascinating that the pain got worse when I first took the clothespin off.
**Although, with one that big, you could probably traverse the event horizon without tidal forces killing you‒at least not just yet‒by spaghettification, so it might at least allow for some interesting final experiences.
Here’s some new audio in which I discuss–well, audio, and also health and my lack of desire for it, and then some relatively minor complaints I have with the Tri-rail system/stations/train.
And here is an embedded “video” version of my last audio blog from 1-5-2024. Apparently I discussed Clipchamp and something about astrophysics or some such, I don’t recall. Let me know, please.
Thank you.
I’m writing this brief rant because of a recurring irritation.
If a video is offered to you by YouTube, and you are quite sure that you’re not interested in watching it–perhaps the subject matter or the title or the thumbnail make it clear that it’s not something you wish to view–you have the option of clicking on the little three-vertical-dot thing and selecting “Not interested”. Part of why you might want to do this is to train the YouTube algorithm so that it avoids similar videos in the future.
Once you say you’re not interested, YouTube promptly removes the video, leaving the following:
It’s nice to have the “Undo” option, since that lets you change your mind or correct your mistake if you didn’t mean to select “Not interested”.
However, if you click on “Tell us why”, perhaps hoping to give the YouTube algorithm more and clearer information, you get:
These have been the sole options for as long as I have been aware of this function on YouTube. But this combination does not make sense! The first option is at least okay as a reason. Perhaps you’ve already watched the video and just aren’t interested–ever–in watching it again. However, simply telling YouTube you’re “Not interested” should accomplish everything that choice could provide. And the second box is pretty thoroughly illogical in light of the first box. If you haven’t already watched the video, how can you know that you don’t like it?
It’s maddening. It caters to the judgmentalism and purulent self-righteousness that feels as though it is infecting society ever more as each day passes. Also, these are simply not very useful choices. It would be nice to able to say that the subject matter is not of interest, or that you don’t like the particular creator, or that the thumbnail looks off-putting, or that you fear the video will make you angry, or whatever. The ability to give some feedback beyond just not being interested would be useful. These choices, however, are essentially without value, or very close to being that way.
If anyone out there works at (or with) the people at YouTube responsible for improving such things, could you please bring this matter to their attention? I’m already depressed and stressed out and near my wit’s end, seeking videos to improve my outlook or least to distract me from despair (if such a thing is possible). Such idiocy from a company that ought to be on the cutting edge of technology, and perhaps even of logic (which is supposed to be the purview of computer scientists and engineers and programmers and the like) is deeply disappointing and profoundly depressing. It also pisses me off, which just makes me feel more depressed, since I feel I spend almost all my time stressed and angry, and I hate that about myself.
Here endeth the rant.
I think I’m going to take a break from writing these blog posts, and I may quit doing them entirely.
They aren’t doing me any good‒they’re certainly not encouraging anyone to buy my books or to listen to my music. They also aren’t functioning successfully as any sort of therapy, which was a large part of my hope.
Of course, it’s possible that my mental health would have been even worse if I hadn’t been doing this blog, but it couldn’t have been that much worse‒almost by definition‒and maybe I would have reached a catastrophic failure at some point sooner than it’s going to happen now, and at least I wouldn’t have had to suffer through the extra time I have in this branch of reality.
And finally, not least, this blog certainly isn’t working as any kind of cry for help for me, though I’ve tried to use it that way. Perhaps there’s just too much of a “bystander effect” for this to function effectively in that mode.
I’m pretty sure these posts are not doing any good for anyone out there in the world. There are people who are entertained by them sometimes, of course, and they tell me so, and I appreciate that. But that’s not a strong enough motivation to keep going. My apologies; I do not intend to denigrate you in any way, my readers. It’s just that my strength is running out, and I feel horrible, physically and mentally.
I’ve been doing this blog at least partly as a habit, continuing the morning writing I did for years when working on my fiction. I’m not writing fiction anymore. It just feels too futile.
I don’t think my stories are bad. I think some of them are pretty darn good. But only a handful of people will ever read any of them, and though many people will say that one does art mainly for oneself‒and at some level, that is definitely true‒one also really wants to be appreciated. Likewise for music.
I mean, yes, Van Gogh painted many paintings in his lifetime, though he only sold one…but then again, he did cut off his ear and end up killing himself, too (I knew he was a genius).
Anyway, although even Stephen King writes because he must‒so he says, and I don’t doubt him‒I don’t think he would have written nearly as many books if no one were buying them. It just gets discouraging after a while.
I may do some little audio snippets here and there and share them on this blog. Sometimes those can be rewarding, and they’re usually brief, and as long as I keep the editing to a minimum, they’re not too much effort. I have a few little rants I’d like to go on sometime soon. So those will probably appear here, if I end up doing them. But otherwise, I don’t see the point in much else.
I honestly don’t want to go to work anymore. Of course, today is payroll day, so I’m going, because people would be left in the lurch if I didn’t. But it’s not rewarding, except in the obvious and banal way. I mean, there are people at the office with whom I get along, but as has been the case most of my adult life, people mainly spend time with me because I’m useful.
I am useful, in many ways. And it is nice to be useful. But it has its limits. Even at work, I try to get across to people how much distress I’m in, without being too melodramatic, but nobody seems really to take me seriously.
I guess that’s one of the drawbacks of having a dark and odd sense of humor and also having difficulty expressing one’s emotions. Even if you talk about trying to stretch the pain out of your back by using a noose‒as I did yesterday, which was a particularly painful day‒people don’t seem to realize that really, suicide seems more and more attractive all the time.
I can’t easily participate in the comments anymore on a website I’ve followed for a long time, and I don’t think the host likes me, anyway, though I admire and like him and have enjoyed following his website, and recommend it readily. To be fair, I am weird, and I am dark, and I tend to bring people down. Does the fact that I get on some people’s nerves surprise anyone?
So, yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be writing any more blog posts for a while, and I may not write any ever again. And, again, I may put audio stuff up here‒and I may turn some or all of them into “videos” as well, and put those on YouTube‒but I don’t have a planned schedule for those things right now, so we’ll have to see what happens.
Anyway, I’m feeling queasy/nauseated (and probably nauseous, but that’s for you all to judge) right now, and my train will be here soon. Try to have a good day, and a good year, and a good rest of your lives. Somebody ought to do it, and it’s not likely to be me.
It’s Tuesday, the “two day” of January of 2024 AD and the “two day” of the year. That little, rather forced play on words is about as much good as I can say about the day.
I’m at the train station, soon to be headed in to the office for the day, but I did not go in yesterday, though the office was open. If I had been feeling healthy, I suppose I might have gone in even though I resented the fact that the office was open. I’m weird that way. It’s not as though I had anything better to do with my time, had I been feeling healthy.
But, of course, I felt sick, still, albeit not nearly as bad as I did on Friday or even Saturday, or even Sunday. By that progression, you may be able to deduce that my physical health was gradually improving, and though I am not fully back to usual (let alone optimal) health, I did at least get some rest. There were quite a few annoyances related to the other people in the house, who had a huge New Year family get-together of some some kind, and were up waaaay past midnight, including some young children who were‒as sleep deprived children tend to be‒evidently quite grumpy and vociferous.
As for my mental health, well, despite my brief rest, it’s still rotten. I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to imagine that it would have improved. I got enough rest that I even had a few dreams this morning, which is unusual‒I almost never have any remembered dreams‒but they were just weird, irritating dreams involving a B-list Hollywood star about whom I know almost nothing. I have no idea how that person infiltrated my subconscious.
The holidays are over now, of course, and even though I had no cause for celebration in the first place, there is still a bit of melancholy involved in their passing. There’s nothing even nominally to celebrate for months to come, frankly, and precious little cause for major joy in the world. But of course, my main problems are internal; my hardware and software are dysfunctional.
I sometimes may give the impression that I’m some form of purely philosophical pro-mortalist or nihilist, that my sense of the pointlessness and worthlessness of my life are simply reasoned conclusions, arrived at logically, quite convincing. That probably makes some people feel that there really is no point in trying to do or say anything to change my outlook. I make impressive sounding arguments in favor of nihilism and despair and pointlessness at times. But that’s really just the left side of my brain acting as an attorney, arguing the case and providing “justifications” for the products of my dysfunctional mood and sensory and motivational systems.
It’s all sophistry. My depression‒as with any other, preexisting neurodevelopmental and possible neurohormonal issues I have‒is a disease, a malfunction; my dysthymia is in a way a real disability, at least by some definitions. These diseases are killing me, and it’s not a good death, nor even a mediocre or middling death. It’s a bad, slow, drawn-out, miserable, torturous death. Just consider the fact that I often wish I would develop cancer, because that would probably be a better way to die; certainly there would be more support and sympathy involved. And I’m a medical doctor. I’ve treated many people who have cancer, and I’ve lost loved ones to cancer; I know what it is and what it entails.
I’m trying to say that I really could use actual help. I’m not able to do self-care well at all. I’m very smart and creative and capable in some ways, but I cannot save myself nor even take very good care of myself, not with only myself as my motivation. I find the upkeep involved in having and using a bicycle daunting and awful, let alone other ordinary tasks of personal and general maintenance.
I am eroding and decaying and rotting, both metaphorically and literally, in various ways.
I do not want to feel depressed. I do not like being depressed‒that would be frankly contradictory‒and I do not like feeling horrible anxiety and hostility and confusion. I do not like not having anyone with whom to do anything. I don’t like hating my own presence and company. I would like to like myself and to like my life and to feel that I deserved something, anything, good to happen to me.
Robert Sapolsky has pointed out that one cannot simply will oneself to have a stronger will. Similarly, one cannot simply stop being depressed by choosing to be optimistic and to love oneself. One cannot simply choose to be able to integrate into the human world effortlessly and seamlessly when one simply does not feel human.
One cannot eliminate anxiety just by saying that there’s nothing to fear. And, of course, one cannot simply choose not to be in pain, if one is in pain. Nature does not select for that capability. If one could simply deactivate one’s pain and one’s fear, then one would probably do so; pain and fear are, by nature, unpleasant. But then one would not flee danger or avoid injury.
Anyway, that’s my New Year’s message about me, I guess: I’m depressed and despairing, not by choice, and I cannot simply snap out of it, nor can I save my life on my own. And I don’t know of anyone else out there who has the wherewithal to help me, so I don’t expect my life to be saved. I expect it to be lost, and soon; frankly, I expected it to be gone, already. I’m amazed and rather appalled that I’m still alive to write this. I don’t consider it an accomplishment.
Oh, yeah, by the way: Happy New Year.
Well, I’m writing a post today, again, for some unknown and unholy reason, and I’m doing it on my smartphone, because I did not bring my laptop computer back to the house with me last night. I was not up to carrying it.
I’m writing in the back of an Uber that’s bringing me to the gas station near the office, because I am feeling quite under the weather and do not want to face any train travel today. I spiked a fever overnight‒not a huge one, but my pulse really raced for a bit there (about 136 at rest). I don’t have much in the way of specific symptoms, other than a general achiness and malaise that is different from the general elevated pain I’ve been having lately. Also, I feel just a slight sense of breathlessness. It’s not literally difficulty breathing, but just a feeling as if I were exerting myself even while sitting still. My pulse ox is fine*.
You may wonder why I am going to the office at all, if I am sick, and you are not foolish to wonder this. Unfortunately, my coworker who shares some of my roles was out yesterday because his wife and baby are both sick, so I had to pick up the slack, such as it is, despite exacerbations of chronic pain and being suicidally depressed. And I don’t know if he’s going to be out again, today, but by the time I find out, it will be too late for me to get to the office on time from where I “live”.
I feel just a little bit queasy, now, also. It’s not like I’m in danger of throwing up, as far as I can tell. It’s just a bit unpleasant.
No matter what, I swear I am not going to switch and fill in tomorrow, even if my coworker cannot make it. The boss will just have to figure something out. Or he’ll have to close the office.
Sorry, I know this is all boring. I don’t know what you’re hoping for from me, but this is probably not it.
Oh, I took delivery yesterday of a four part book collection compiled from the writers of the Less Wrong website. Collectively, the set is called The Engines of Cognition, and their individual titles are:
Trust
Modularity
Incentives
Failure
In the inside front of each book, on the first page, there is a little quote from some famous thinker, such as Richard Feynman. This is particularly fun because, in the first volume, the quote is uncredited, but I knew right away Who had said it. The quote was, “If I always told you the truth, I wouldn’t need you to trust me.”
That quote is from the 11th Doctor, in series 5, episode 5, “Flesh and Stone”. I think it’s cool that the luminaries from Less Wrong chose a Doctor Who quote for the inside of this book. There’s a bit of a spoiler associated with the quote in the show, so I won’t get into it any further. Maybe some of you will eventually want to watch Doctor Who, and I wouldn’t want to mess you up with spoilers‒though that’s always a potential part of any time travel adventure, I guess.
Here’s a related thought: I don’t understand why more of the companions in Doctor Who don’t ask to learn about the science of the TARDIS and the Time Lords in general. The TARDIS is “bigger on the inside”’ thanks to “dimensional engineering” but how is that actually accomplished? How does time travel work? If the past can be rewritten, what does that say about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics? If the past can be changed and have within-universe consequences, just rewriting reality, then why (and how) are there parallel, nearly identical universes, such as the one to which Rose was sent?
I know, the writers have no idea of the answers to such questions. But why aren’t the characters curious about them?
Anyway, that’s enough of that. I’ll just close by mentioning something related to health insurance. My sister said (in a comment on Facebook instead of here‒I’m not sure why) that she would very kindly help me with filling out forms. Unfortunately, the forms aren’t my issue, really. It’s the actual starting of the process, the picking up of the phone and the calling of the insurance broker. That’s the main barrier, partly due to social anxiety‒though that feels like too mild a term‒and partly just my resistance to taking care of my health. I mean, think about it: how hard would you work to help protect the worst person you know, your least favorite person in the world?
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. But I would like to remind people that I prefer it if they leave comments here rather than on Facebook or other social media. For one thing, it apparently helps boost my blog via whatever the WordPress algorithm is. And I don’t really need my personal Facebook page boosted.
I suppose it matters very little. Maybe this illness I’m fighting now will end up killing me, and everything else will be moot. 🙂
I doubt it. It just feels like an ordinary virus. But who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky. And, as part of that, maybe all of you who read my blog out of kindness and/or obligation, will get lucky and not have to do so anymore. It would be appropriate for it to happen on the weekend of New Year’s.
Fingers crossed!
*Of course I have my own pulse oximeter.
Hello and good morning and all the rest of that stupid bullshit.
I’m writing a blog post today—obviously—which means I’m going in to the office today, which means that, unfortunately, I am still alive. I cannot give you any good reasons for these facts. They simply are the case.
There are explanations, of course, as there are for all things, but they entail nothing more than the mindless churning of physical and, at the next level biological, and, at the next level psychological forces that happen more or less on their own. They carry a certain metaphorical inertia; to divert them requires a deliberate application of some manner of force. But since they are not literal, straightforward cases of inertia, it’s not always easy to tell just what the proper application of what “forces” should be to cause them to change their direction into one which one might prefer.
I’m at the train station now, waiting for the 2nd train of the day. I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise. It let up ever-so-slightly in the afternoon to evening, thanks to lots of Aspirin and Tylenol and Icy-Hot and all that stuff, but it still felt as though I had recently tried to do some fairly serious acrobatics without stretching and had not only failed, but had fallen hard on barely-padded ground. I still feel stiff and sore. Also, the bases of my thumbs ache severely; for that reason, among others, I’m typing this on my laptop computer rather than my cell phone.
I don’t have much else to report, and I certainly have nothing positive to relay to you. As my pain eased slightly yesterday, my mood improved slightly, but it was never very good, and it’s now nearly as low as it was yesterday morning.
I’m also a bit nauseated. That’s probably partly because of the excessive use of analgesics over the last 24 hours, even beyond my ordinary intake.
I really feel horrible, and I don’t know what to do. I feel no sense of any future other than one of stress and pain and further alienation, or alternatively, of being a burden to people I have no right to bother. I wish, I wish I had the strength of will just to stop eating and waste away until I die. That wouldn’t be so bad. After a while without food, once one gets into deep ketosis, there is little or no real pain, just lassitude. And I have lassitude anyway, so I don’t think it would be all that much worse.
But it’s very difficult just to say “no” to food when it is available; billions of years of evolution has sifted things so that not eating when food is available is quite difficult. I’m probably going to have to find some other way.
I’ve looked into things like hemlock—it seems like it might be nice and “classical” to go the way of Socrates—but although some descriptions of his death involve acceptance and serenity and the like, it seems they are highly fictionalized, which should come as no surprise. Apparently, actual death caused by hemlock poisoning is quite uncomfortable, and associated with nausea and cramping and neurological symptoms of various kinds that might lead one to seek “help”.
Likewise, unripe ackee fruit—which grows in abundance around the house in which I live—is associated with quite uncomfortable symptoms and is not even close to universally fatal. And again, the urge to try to relieve one’s symptoms might lead to one aborting the whole project.
Of course, asphyxiation via inhaling pure nitrogen or pure helium (for instance) is actually quite benign, since it is not associated with any feeling of suffocation—especially if one has a non-rebreather mask, so one does not retain carbon dioxide, which is the actual source of the feeling of not being able to breathe, and is indeed the primary driver of respiration. I have two non-rebreather masks, and tubing, and even a regulator valve, but though I ordered helium tanks, I couldn’t figure out how to hook up the party-type helium tank output valve with the tubing and respirator mask—so I let people use the helium for balloons.
Also, one really needs a decent space and privacy for something like that, and one needs to make sure one’s mask doesn’t slip as one loses consciousness. If that happens, one could live but have hypoxemic brain injury.
I’ve looked into ordering nitrogen tanks, but you can’t just get them delivered already filled; you have to go to some welding supply place or similar to get the nitrogen, and it’s hard to cart a nitrogen tank around when one does not have a vehicle. There are similar problems with liquid nitrogen. You can order a crucible (or whatever the term is) in which to carry it from Amazon (as you can the gas tanks) but to get the liquid you need to go to restaurant supply places or medical supply places or similar. And, again, it’s hard to carry such things around without a vehicle.
Of course, there’s always simple use of blades—the proverbial bare bodkin—but though I am not afraid of cutting myself, to cause life-threatening bleeding thereby is not easy, and it is also supremely messy, leaving behind a horrible spectacle for some poor slob to find. It’s likewise not entirely reliable and requires privacy. I could lay down in my shower with water running and do it, but then my “housemates” and the landlord would eventually have to deal with the situation—at the latest by the time I started smelling—and that would be inconsiderate and traumatic.
When I think of the people I’ve known in recent years who have died of overdoses of narcotics—usually heroin—I again find myself wishing I had a drug problem. But I don’t like opiates, though I was prescribed them for a few years for my chronic pain. They didn’t work as well as I would hope, and the side-effects were annoying and unpleasant. Of course, a goodly dose of an opiate plus a goodly dose of a benzodiazepine has a goodly chance of shutting down one’s respiratory drive, but as with asphyxiation above, that can sometimes just lead to brain damage.
My brain is dysfunctional enough.
A good fall from a high building (or mountain or cliff or bridge) is pretty reliable, of course, if one can muster the courage to throw oneself off. However, there aren’t very many buildings or similar near me that are aesthetically high enough, and I don’t really have access to any of them, anyway. Also, again, it leads to one making a mess for innocent passersby, and I would rather not do that.
There’s always the prospect of just swimming out into the Atlantic, which is truly close at hand, until exhaustion leads inevitably to drowning. There’s not much mess that way, and most of what there is might be cleaned up by ocean life. If I were more comfortable in the water, that might be a good option, and I still do consider it. But it requires real determination, and I am not all that strong a swimmer. I mean, I’m a good enough swimmer to swim out far enough to drown, but there’s enough stupid animal fear built into this operating system that I worry I wouldn’t be able to force my way through it.
I really don’t know what to do, or what I should do. I’m still brainstorming ideas. Meanwhile, I’ve really got loads of physical pain…but the psychological pain is worse. The former wears down and eradicates one’s resistance to the latter, and the latter makes it difficult to keep a useful attitude about the former. And I have so much trouble sleeping. I’m really very tired all the time.
TTFN
It’s early morning and I’m waiting at the train station again.
It’s also relatively cool out, and it looks like it’s going to be so for most of the rest of the week, if the forecast is correct. I should probably have walked to the train today, but even though I woke up hours ago, I just didn’t feel up to walking. Actually, I didn’t feel up to much of anything at all, and I still don’t.
I almost just stayed at the house today, even though it’s payroll day, because I didn’t want to get up and move. I’m really feeling that each and every thing I do or can do is utterly pointless, even taken from the scale of an evanescent mammalian lifetime.
Our boss apparently intends for the office to be open on New Year’s Day, but I am not going to be there. I think it’s bullshit to make people try to work after New Year’s Eve and also to expect to sell anything. In past years on those occasions when we have worked on January 1st, we barely made any business, and a good percentage of it was canceled.
I have no interest, and I have no motivation, to do anything at all, and certainly not to come in to the office on New Year’s Day. Other people had their three-day weekends last weekend, and their family holidays, and you can bet dollars to donuts that most of them will not be coming to work next Monday, anyway.
Of course, it’s not as though I have anything better to do with my time by staying at the house; that’s one of the reasons I’m going to the office today. I have nothing better to do.
I have nothing.
I had been looking forward to the 60th Anniversary and the Christmas Doctor Who specials, but now they are done. They were good, and I’m glad I watched them. But the regular season isn’t starting until May, apparently, and I’m sorry, I can’t wait around for that. Five months is way too long.
I am tempted not to go to the office the rest of this week, or next Monday…or ever again, really. I’m tempted not to go anywhere ever again. What’s the point? There’s nothing to which I look forward. Life is just a series of discomforts‒many of them not at all minor.
My whole body has been hurting more than usual lately, despite aspirin and Tylenol and naproxen and icy hot and a massager and ankle and knee braces. My back, especially, has felt as if the spine is becoming completely disconnected at its base and I am about to split in half. And I’m getting some new form of sacro-iliac/coccygeal inflammation/arthropathy, too, the source of which I do not know.
I wish I could go into a coma. I wish I could simply sleep. No more. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
I’m tired, and I feel horrible (and horrifying, come to think of it). I hate my life. There’s no point to it, and it gives me very little in the way of positive things. Even thinking of my kids‒the best part of my life, ever‒just makes me miss them. Since yesterday morning, I feel that I’ve just been fighting back tears most of the time. It’s pathetic and disgusting.
I really do often wish I had some kind of drug problem (other than OTC analgesics, ha ha), but even alcohol gets unpleasant really quickly. I bought a few bottles of wine for the holiday weekend and ended up pouring out as much as I drank, or more. It doesn’t even do a good job of blunting my anxiety and tension, let alone making me feel good.
I don’t really want to see 2024. I have no optimism about the year, and if anything, I feel that more and more of the little, stupid aspects of my life are falling apart all the time. I’m just a net detriment to the world‒not that it deserves anything better, but still, I don’t enjoy that fact and process, and I don’t want to keep feeling the guilt and shame of my life.
I don’t know what to do. I’m useless, even to myself. I hate this world, I hate the social and political state of things (see yesterday’s post), I hate my body for its chronic pain, and I hate myself above all else.
I think I’m pretty close to being done, here. I hope you all are having a more pleasant holiday season/experience than I am. Tomorrow is Thursday, so if I do a post, it will probably be in my old “traditional” format. If I don’t, you’ll know that I decided not to go in to work. If I don’t ever do any more posts, I guess that will become evident after a while. Though, of course, as with the halting problem in computation, you could never truly know that I was never ever going to release another blog post until you had waited until the end of time.
You could pretty sure, though‒sure enough to bet your life on, after not very long. You could even bet my life, but that’s not worth much, so it’s not much of a bet. It’s also a bit too self-referential and potentially paradoxical, given the subject matter.
Anyway, I’m sorry. I know this isn’t pleasant, and you all deserve better. But, it’s in my nature to disappoint and to bring people down, so that’s what I’m doing. Have a good day if you can, nevertheless.
Robert Elessar 