dysthymia

by

This is NOT a quote from Shakespeare (as far as I know)

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so.  I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.

I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though.  It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used.  I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.

As the 11th Doctor said:  “Time travel; you can’t keep it straight in your head.”

Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote.  It’s a good song (off OK Computer).  Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.

That album really is one of the greatest albums ever.  It’s not a concept album.  Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them.  They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.

For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album.  I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.

That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs.  It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time).  Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.

I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying).  “This is the place.  Sit down.  You’re safe now.  You’ve been stuck in a lift.  We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*.  This is the place.  It won’t hurt ever again.”  And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”

I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.

On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days.  So lighten up, Squirt.”  That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation.  After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.

I’m overreading things, probably.  In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so.  It’s art, innit?  You can interpret it according to your impressions.  Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.

As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond.  The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting.  I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time.  I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube.  I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point.  I might have shared it here, though.  Yes?  No?  I’ll try to find out before I publish this.  If so, I’ll put a link:  Here.

If not, I won’t***.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer?  It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday:  to give my thumbs some rest.  That does seem to be doing at least some good.  The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.

Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today.  I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs.  I do really like them, though.  And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them.  Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.

Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda.  My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it.  I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.

I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not.  It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.

TTFN

*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”

**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file.  I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on.  You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time.  I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing.  Here it is:

by

Don’t be afraid of “scare quotes”; they are–as am I–here to “help”

It’s Friday at last, the last day of a work week that has lasted at least 12 days already (subjectively speaking).  I am not working tomorrow, so there will be no blog post made again until Monday, barring‒as must always be the case‒the unforeseen.

I will try to remember to send myself the audio files for my last two audio blogs‒or perhaps it was three‒to turn into “videos” over the weekend.  I haven’t downloaded clipchamp or whatever it is to my home computer, but it should be no more difficult to do there than it was at work.  Of course, I may not do that, so don’t make any plans that depend upon my doing it‒goodness knows what such plans might be.

I’m not sure if anyone really likes those “video” versions of my audio blogs or is just as happy with the plain audio.  I’ve noted before that storage on YouTube is functionally limitless (as opposed to WordPress) but if I’m loading them here first, anyway, that’s a moot point at best.

You may have noticed that I tend to put quotation marks around the word “video” when I refer to the above, because though technically they are indeed video files, the visual portion is just a static image.  I’m a big fan of so-called scare quotes.  I think we should use them far more often than we do.  People often arrogate terms to themselves, or use epithets against others, as a means of manipulation, as if invoking some sequence of letters or sounds causes a thing actually to be the case, and I think it’s important to point out when one is unconvinced that the term is being used properly or accurately.

Perhaps the most prominent and pointed such ill-use might be regarding “progressives” and “conservatives”.  Both groups inherited the terms from people who came before, and who perhaps more accurately embodied the general meanings of the words, but they are now simply camouflage uniforms, at least in many cases.  You can call yourself a “freedom fighter” if you want, but using that term doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist or that you’re actually interested in any legitimate form of freedom.

Of course, real conservatives and progressives being at hostile odds with one another doesn’t make much sense if one is considering the usual meanings of the terms rather than claiming them as team names in some tribal contest of primate dominance.  It makes sense to conserve those things in a society that are effective, that have been tested by time and found to be useful, but it’s just as reasonable that everyone should want to make actual progress whenever possible, to improve life and prosperity for everyone as much as is feasible.

The real, useful discussion would be about which things are working well and should be conserved, and which things require improvement and how to go about it.  There will be substantial disagreement on such questions, of course, and part of the discussion must always be how to decide what best to keep as it is and what is the most fruitful area in which to improve things

People of good will‒who do not think in terms of “us” versus “them” but in terms of usefulness and effectiveness and trying to get the best outcome for as big an “us” as possible‒can work in ways that will be beneficial by whatever measures one might want to use, keeping in mind always that all conclusions are in principle provisional and all processes and people are fallible, but that all problems are in principal soluble.

I’m not sure humans are clever enough primates to achieve such matters for long.  They seem to devolve so readily into conflicting tribes.  I guess this makes sense given the ancestral environment, with groups of only on the order of perhaps about 150 people living together.  But there’s no good excuse for not recognizing that tribal modes cannot function ideally in a setting in which 8 billion people are interacting in a massive and incredibly productive and complex economy and polity.  At higher levels of complexity, newer “rules” are going to tend to be required.

Humans aren’t necessarily all that good at adjusting to such things, though.  I often think that it will require a new and ongoing external threat, such as a supervillain or an alien invasion, to bring humanity together in total.  I’ve often been tempted to volunteer myself for the position, since humanity really can be contemptible and infuriating to me.

It’s not that humans are worse than the other life forms on Earth; I don’t think they are.  Life in general is frequently vicious and cruel and wretched, with all living things riding the knife edge of death and extinction much, perhaps most, of the time.  Nature’s equilibria are not achieved by some beautiful, fairy tale cooperation and self-restraint between forest creatures or what have you.  Equilibria are maintained by disease and death, by starvation and predation.  Agent Smith was just wrong, dead wrong, in his assessment of life’s tendency to form such natural equilibria.  He was too generous in his assessment of non-human forms of life.

Humans, however, are more competent than other animals.  They are also the only ones even capable of seriously planning ahead to strike a flexible and ever-changing balance between conservatism and progress.  It’s that they so often fail even to try to rise above their lizard-monkey minds that is so infuriating, and they themselves are among the worst of their victims.

Sometimes I think just wiping them all out would be a kindness‒not to the rest of the living world, which is certainly no more admirable or worthy of kindness than humans, but to humans themselves.  After all, if a function in time is always negative, then integrating the area “under” the curve will always yield a negative, and a permanent regression to zero would be a gain.  Maybe the universe, or at least the Earth, would be kinder in aggregate if it were sterile.

It’s food for thought, at least, and it is tempting.  What do you all think?  I’m not asking what you feel.  I hate feelings*.  But when you are as close to dispassionate and disinterested as you can make yourself, what do you think?  Does the human race (and by reflection, life itself) require an enemy to bring out its best?  If so, does it not then “deserve” that enemy?  And if it cannot defeat that enemy, does it not “deserve” to be destroyed?

I suspect that might be the case.

*Ha ha, that’s a little joke.

by

A monotone audio blog that may or may not be monotonous in other senses

Here is the audio recording I did this morning because I didn’t feel like typing anything.  As you will hear (if you listen) I am not really feeling very upbeat, even for me.  Sorry.  I don’t know if I have anything at all interesting to say.  If I do, well…enjoy, I guess.

by

When there’s nowhere to go but up, all paths are arduous

It’s Wednesday now, in case you were wondering, and I’m once again sitting at the train station.  I’m using the smartphone to write today, because I’m carrying some equipment to the office.  I took delivery of a new bike yesterday, but I had forgotten to bring an air pump, so I couldn’t ride it to the train and then home yesterday.  Thus, I have my pump, and the U lock, and another, backup pump, with me today.  I didn’t want to carry the laptop computer in addition to all that.

It’s probably foolishly optimistic of me to get the bike, but supposedly it’s the right size for me, and the handlebars are a better type than before.  It’s a hybrid type bike‒the sort that might be expected to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins*.  I think it’s going to be okay, though I will need to get used to it.  I’ll give it a brief whirl at lunchtime today, I think, just to acclimate myself.  I won’t be riding it back to the house tonight, because I have a planned occurrence that would not work well with riding a bike.

Yesterday at work, I tried a little experiment, with my boss’s enthusiastic support.  I had heard of, and then watched the first part of, the Danish movie Another Round starring Mads Mikkelsen.  In it, a group of friends, who are teachers‒inspired by an obscure philosopher and tangentially by Ernest Hemingway‒decide to try drinking (only during the workday) to maintain a blood alcohol level of .05% and they find that, as predicted, it has some benefits for them.

Given that I’m quite upright and have a lot of social difficulties and tend to get extremely stressed out during the day, I thought it might be worth a try.  Evidently, my boss agreed and found the idea funny and interesting.  He was far more on-board than I had expected.  So, I looked up the required rate of intake, got a little medicine measuring cup, procured the required supplies, and yesterday gave it a go.

Most of the day, my boss apparently found it hard to believe I had been drinking at all.  It is only a small, if steady, amount of alcohol.  Unfortunately, it didn’t make me feel any better, and though my boss said he thought I had a slight smile or look of amusement on my face, that was an illusion.  It probably just highlights the fact that my face and my feelings do not coincide, which probably explains part of why people around me don’t know how often I am in despair.  Rather than feeling barriers coming down between me and others, I felt, if anything, more alien and separate than usual.  As I said to my boss, I felt “more autistic” than I usually do.  Maybe it’s only tension and stress that lets me pretend to be human most days, at least to myself.

Still, I may try it one more day (today) just to be sure.  I don’t know.  Maybe I won’t.  I don’t think it’s my fate ever to feel normal.  As I think I’ve written before, the only two times in my life when I’ve felt “normal” internally were when I was given Valium for medical procedures‒once for getting my wisdom teeth removed, once for my heart catheterization when I was 18.  I remember both experiences fondly, which in itself is not exactly normal, is it?

Okay, this is bizarre:  they announced, starting a while back, that the northbound train‒my train‒would be boarding on the opposite track than it usually does.  That’s not so strange; it happens from time to time due to maintenance and the like.  However, just a few moments ago, the security people got word that the southbound train is also switching sides.  So, the two trains just swapped tracks, and I don’t see what that could accomplish other than perhaps carrying out a psychological experiment upon riders, and making some people miss their trains.  I’m sure there’s a comedy of errors behind that set of events.

Switching gears again, last night was my second night without using nasal steroids.  That, I think, is probably already having some beneficial effects‒I had energy to walk halfway back to the house from the train last night, though maybe that was due to the other experiment.  But I feel like I’m not holding onto fluid as much and whatnot, and my physical energy is better, so maybe that’s another benefit.  Anyway, I’m using Sinex™ and Astepro™  for allergies, the latter of which smells and tastes even worse than fluticasone.

I don’t know why I’m doing all these things.  Maybe I just feel like I’m supposed to do them.  But why would I bother with attempted self-improvement?  What is there to gain?  I think it’s just a mental habit.

At least there are amusing things to note in the technology of blog writing, to shift topics another time.  Case in point:  in the previous paragraph, in the second from last sentence, I had initially written “What is there…” but apparently my phone’s local autocorrect had changed “there” to “their”, perhaps because many people are prone to write things such as “What is their problem?”  But, of course, after the sentence was finished, Google Docs’** autocorrect rightly highlighted it as needing to be changed back to the way I had written it in the first place.  It’s the battle of the auto-corrects!  And so, artificial stupidity begins to approach a level reminiscent of human stupidity.

On that note, I’m calling it finished for today.  Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to call it finished for everything soon, though I would like to make it through to this evening, at least…which, knowing me, may make it more likely that I will not do so.  (That’s, of course, a bullshit characterization of reality born of selective memory and confirmation bias, as when people remember only those occasions when it rains after they forgot their umbrella.  It’s a tough illusion to avoid, though.)

Please try to have a good day.  You could be excused for not thinking so, but believe it or not, I always try.

*That’s a 9th (modern) series Doctor Who reference for any fellow Whovians out there.

**It’s a bit unclear to me whether this should really be “Google Docs’” or” Google Docs’s”.  Of course, when putting a possessive on a plural, one merely uses the apostrophe, but if a word to which the possessive is being applied simply ends in an “s”, as in the case of names and titles and the like (e.g., Davis’s), one adds an apostrophe and then an “s”.  But, although “Docs” is a plural in form here, it’s also part of the name of the program, and it is to that name‒and not to any collection of more than one Doc***‒that I was applying the possessive.  So, which form is most appropriate according to standard usage?  Hmm.

***Of course, there can really be only one true Doc…“and that I am he, let me a little show it, even in this:  that I was constant Cimber should be banished, and constant do remain to keep him so.”****

****Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1, quoted off the top of my head.  Huzzah for me.

by

Laptop computers and steroids in noses; rough economics and thoughts on typos-es; multiple footnotes with time travel zings; these are a few of…well, you know the rest

After yesterday’s brief discussion about the pitfalls of using the smartphone to write my blog posts, I decided to do this one on my laptop computer, so I brought it back with me at the end of the day.  So far, so good:  my typing speed is definitely faster, and though there are certainly mistakes being made (and, yes, by me…obviously), they are relatively easy**** and quick to correct, and are of a much more typical kind than the ones I make on the phone.

Mostly, these mistakes are the products of trying to type too fast and so not completely pressing down on some of the keys as I go along.  Occasionally, my brain finishes the wrong word once I start typing, because it’s used to typing that other word much more often than some word that begins with many of the same letters.

Shifting topics abruptly:  Last night, for the first time in several months, I did not take any nasal steroids at all.  I’ve been using them to treat my allergic rhinitis, and they seem to have helped some of the symptoms thereof, but unfortunately, I suspect—because I have been using the maximum dose for quite a while—that I’ve begun to have systemic corticosteroid effects, among which are weight gain, glucose intolerance, weakening of various tissues, and so on.

This would explain at least some of my physical travails.  Corticosteroids can, of course, have mental effects as well—the brain being a physical organ, after all—but these are more subtle and difficult to recognize, let alone ascertain.  It is, alas, not likely that stopping the fluticasone will have a significant effect on my depression.  That is something with which I’ve dealt* since I was a teenager, and probably is at least partly a consequence of my apparent ASD.  If someone wants, I can get into how I think that happens in my particular case, but otherwise, I won’t discuss it, at least for now.

I still haven’t done the “videos” for my last two audio blogs; I’m sorry if anyone is waiting with figuratively bated breath.  On the other hand, this means that, for the moment, those audio blogs are exclusively available for people who follow my blog directly.  That’s almost like the Patreon rewards people offer to their patrons, but I don’t use Patreon, so I don’t even charge you for them.  Aren’t you lucky?

I sometimes think that maybe I should sign up for Patreon—as a creator, I mean.  I do follow two creators on Patreon, so in that sense, I’m already signed up.  And, of course, episodically, Patreon tries to encourage me to start using it for my content.  I mean, they would, wouldn’t they?  It’s how they make their money.

Not that I hold that against them; I don’t.  We all have to make a living one way or another, and since none of us animals (or fungi) photosynthesize—even coral polyps need algal cells living within them for that kind of thing—we’re forced to scrape our continued existence out of the various resources and means and skills and whatnot in the world around us, which includes all the other people.  Economics is really a branch of both biology and thermodynamics.

It was easy enough for John Lennon to sing of imagining no possessions, but I wonder if even he could, sitting at his white grand piano in his very fancy place, with his rock star money***.  I don’t think he really imagined a plausible  world in which there were no possessions.  Hunter-gatherer societies might be the closest realistic version of such a thing, but I strongly suspect they were not the sort of society about which John was singing.  They certain do not entail any “brotherhood of man”, especially if other tribes were encountered—see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Soon, my train will come—though it’s running ten minutes late, it seems.  The auto announcement is calling it a southbound train, even though it’s northbound; at least it has the track correct.  This error has been going on for several days now, at least.  I’m guessing it’s a software problem, perhaps due to some virus.  If it were a simple mistake, I imagine they could have fixed it by now; I don’t think they’re that incompetent.  Also, the Wi-Fi on all the trains seems to be hosed, lately, as do at least some of the position signals for the Tri-rail tracker app.

I’ll wrap this up for now.  By all means, give me feedback if you’re interested.  And “thank you” to those who already do so.  I’ll try to work on those “videos” I mentioned, but I make no promises.  Have a good day, if you can.

*That is an example of a word my brain often accidentally mixes with another.  When I start typing d-e-a-l-t, although my system finishes the intended word, it also seems to call up the subroutine that spells the word “death”, and so, frequently—maybe half the time—I add an “h” to the end of the word, producing “dealth”.  It’s odd**, but mildly interesting.

**And I often write “off” when I intend to write “odd”.  Indeed, I did it just now.  This typo, however, is at least partly due to the fact that “d” and “f” are adjacent on the keyboard.

***Don’t get me wrong; I revere John Lennon.  All the money he ever could have had in any reasonable version of reality could never have adequately compensated him for the beauty and joy he and his bandmates brought to the world.

****I only caught this typo on the edit, not while I was writing the first draft:  I had initially typed this word as “east”, an error at least partly due again to the position of the letters.  I left it as footnote four—with four asterisks—even though it will now be the first footnote in the linear reading of the blog post, because its content and subject matter make it, still, the logical fourth one.  Is this an analogy for time travel stories?  Perhaps.  Maybe I’ll write about that some other time*****.

*****Or maybe I already have.

by

Monday, Monday, heavy as a ton day (why is there no Qunday?)

It’s another Monday morning at the train station, and I’m waiting for my morning train.  I don’t feel much like writing today. but I don’t feel like passing my time doing nothing, either.  Similarly, I really don’t have any wish to go to the office, but I likewise have no desire to stay at the house.  I have very little desire for anything.

I have not yet turned either of my two previous “audio blogs” into “video audio blogs” yet.  Perhaps I’ll do that today.  Probably not.

I do sometimes (as I’ve noted before) get irked by the terrible waste of storage space necessary for audio and especially for video, given that written language is such a storage-efficient means of communication once mastered*.  Also, one doesn’t need a microphone or a camera if one chooses to write.  I suppose it may be easier to convey emotions in some sense through audio and video, but I don’t seem to be very good at conveying my emotions in any format, even in person; hell, I often don’t recognize them, myself.

I admit that writing on my phone, as I am doing now, is not nearly as satisfying as doing so on my laptop computer; it is also slower.  Additionally, I make far more typos, since the keys are so small, and the autocorrect is often wildly and stupidly incorrect in its suggestions.  Using the phone likewise exacerbates whatever arthropathy I have at the base of my thumbs.  But I’m always in pain, anyway, so that doesn’t matter very much.

I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I ought to get a new bicycle (a mountain bike style one) to try once again to do my morning and evening train station runs on the bike.  I never did fix the previous one’s front tire, but that was partly because riding it hurt my back.  In fact, I put that one out for the large trash pickup day last week, and it was gone within an hour.  This is something that makes me glad.  I hope whoever picked it up makes good use of it.

I’ve had mountain bikes before and they didn’t seem to hurt my back.  Maybe that style of bike would just work better for me.  Plus, they come in a wide range of prices.  The thing that keeps bringing it back up in my mind is that it would give me greater mobility in more reasonable time than walking gives me.  But bikes are frustrating because they require maintenance, and I’m not great with that sort of thing.  I can readily enough do the work once I start it‒it’s nothing terribly arcane, after all.  But I simply have no motivation to do so.

In unrelated news, I got a calculus problem and solution review book that was free through Kindle unlimited last week, and on Saturday I worked through the problems in the first chapter.  There weren’t very many, and they were pretty easy‒it is chapter one‒but it was also rather unsatisfying to do problems though a Kindle book on a Samsung tablet (I used pencil and paper to do the problems); I just find a physical text more satisfying, probably because that’s the way I did such things throughout my life before.  I don’t know if I’ll do any more of them, though.

Everything seems almost completely dreary and uninteresting, and I feel rotten to the core‒by which I don’t mean that I feel sick**, but that I feel that I am a horrible, horrible person, who tends to bring pain and heartache to the people closest to him, to those about whom he cares the most.  And so, because of that, I am alone.  Which really sucks, but is at least appropriate.

On the way back from work on Saturday, I stopped in at the Yellow Green Farmers Market, which I’ve been meaning to visit, and it was indeed all that I expected:  a lovely place full of stalls and stands and local musicians, just the sort of thing I would really have loved if I had someone with whom to share the experience.  By myself, although it was interesting, it was also rather hollow and depressing.  I didn’t stay for long, and I didn’t buy anything.

I’ve gradually come to realize that things like movies and TV shows and farmers markets and malls and so on are all things that, at least partly, I’ve enjoyed because they let me connect with other people.  I don’t know how to connect directly, but even work and school and reading were and are conduits through which I could actually have friends and be able to interact because there was something about which to interact.  Without such conduits, I seem to tend to involute and wither away.

Even now, once I’ve watched an episode of Doctor Who, which is the only new show I’ve enjoyed since The Big Bang Theory (though that got boring after a few seasons), what I like to do after is just watch other people’s “reaction videos” to Doctor Who episodes.  It’s almost like having friends with whom you’re sharing an interest in something, except there’s no actual back and forth.

Anyway, that’s enough about nothing.  I’m already tired and I’ve just barely started on the way to the office.  Every day is more pointless than the previous one, if such a thing is possible.  The most interesting thing that I’ve done lately is that yesterday I made a makeshift “flame-squirter” as I call it.  It’s pretty neat, but it’s not as intimidating to raccoons as you might expect, and I’m not ready actually to use it on them.  They would probably make a really annoying amount of noise.  And then, of course, they might join the Guardians of the Galaxy or something, I don’t know.  Anyway, the cats I try to feed are hanging around less often these days‒maybe they’re finding food that they prefer somewhere else, and seeing me is certainly not a good enough reason to come to the yard.  If I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn’t even see myself.  So, let the raccoons eat a bit.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*This despite the fact that the English language is a quite redundant code.  For instance, you will almost never see a “q” that is not immediately followed by a “u”.  When it does happen, you will probably be inclined to notice it, precisely because it is so rare, and so, a q without a u is probably even less common than you imagine it is.

**Apart from in the head.  I feel quite sick in the head, honestly, but I haven’t been able to find any way to treat that.

by

…sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds…

It’s Friday, but I work tomorrow, so the fact that it’s the last regular workday of the week means little to me.  I hope all of you (or y’all) are looking forward to the weekend.

Thanks for the kind words about my taking the day off from doing any writing or speaking yesterday.  I had a weird Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning, so I was not really up to trying to write anything other than my note about how I wasn’t going to write anything.

I felt a strange surge of somewhat reckless energy on Wednesday afternoon‒possibly because I had finished payroll, possibly for some other reason‒and decided that it might be neat to try to walk all the way back from the office to the house.  It’s 30 miles, so I didn’t expect to be able to make it the whole distance, but I figured I’d get as far as I could and then Uber the rest of the way.  I really meant to do it.

Then, late in the afternoon, my sort of subacute-bordering-on-chronic lower GI discomfort came to a head, and I had to use the head several times in quick succession.  I realized that this would not be a good time to attempt my feat of endurance; I had no wish to be “caught short” on the streets of south Florida…or in some poor Uber driver’s car, for that matter.

So, instead, I waited at the office even after everyone left‒the train also not being a good place for GI emergencies‒and took some Imodium.  By the time everything settled, it was quite late, and so I just slept at the office.

Oddly enough, I slept better there than I usually do, and I half hoped that I might feel pretty good for the day.  That didn’t really pan out, and as you know, I didn’t even feel enough energy to write a post or do a voice recording.  I know I had already said that I’m not sure I’m going to continue this blog at all, but since I have been tending at least to post something on these days, I figured it would be polite to give notice.

It all just seems quite futile, though.  Of course it seems futile.  Everything seems‒and it may turn out to be feels‒that it will undoubtedly looks‒futile.  I don’t see any point in my continued life whatsoever.  I still haven’t gotten or even seriously investigated health insurance, partly because of the very severe tension and anxiety I have about initiating the process, but also because of my lack of desire to protect my health.

I really didn’t expect to be alive to see this year‒I didn’t plan to be alive, anyway.  Several times in the relatively recent past, I made plans to enact the end of my life, but one thing after another has gotten in the way.

I suspect there will be people who will say that I let things get in the way because I didn’t really want to die, and of course, at some level that was true.  I didn’t so much want to die as I wanted to be dead, but since there’s no quantum tunneling-style option, the one has to lead to the other.

I’ve often pointed out that the biological drive to survive can be absurd but is doggedly persistent, and it is very difficult to overcome via conscious thought.  I’ve tried.  I threw away a bunch of things I owned, I gave away some other things, and just in general attempted to put my house in order, so to speak.  I even wrote a draft of a will, of sorts, which I’ve updated a few times since.  But many things got in the way, not least the simple wish not to make things too inconvenient for other people.

And there’s the fact that, as I noted earlier, rather than say “I want to die”, it makes more sense to say “I want to be dead.”  If I had an “off” switch that could just be flipped, that might be the best thing.  But, of course, that’s not how biological organisms tend to operate, and the process of dying tends to be extremely unpleasant, for good, sound, biological reasons.

Sometimes I think if I could just get actual, restful sleep, that might be enough.  The last restful night of sleep I remember happened in the mid-1990s, and I remember it because it was such an outlier.  I was not used to waking up and feeling refreshed and rested and alive.  It was glorious.

Sleep clearly serves some important biological function; probably it serves more than one.  What it does is clearly complex, but I sometimes imagine it as a kind of automated pipe-scrubbing system in some intricate network of steam-punk machinery.  Every day, the system goes into idle, and the pipe-scrubbing/exhaust clearing system goes to work.  But my auto-maintenance, pipe-clearing system is faulty.  It doesn’t ever completely clear out the day’s accumulated debris and grime.

When the system is relatively new‒when one is young‒it’s possible for things to work relatively well, even if all the grime of a given day is never quite cleared away.  But the grime accumulates, the system accrues varying levels of obstruction, its auto-repair doesn’t work as well as it should, and gradually, over time, everything builds up, pipes get leaky, some junctions and connections get severely constricted and some fail altogether, and it gets harder and harder for the system to continue to function well.

People think I’m fairly smart; just imagine how clever I might be if I could just get a decent night’s sleep once in a while.

Probably the lack of sleep contributes to my chronic pain‒and then, of course, the chronic pain contributes to my sleep problems, which is not a paradox, but is actually an almost predictable occurrence in such spontaneously self-assembling, complex adaptive systems with all sorts of internal feedback systems and self interaction and all that.

“For want of a horseshoe nail, the kingdom was lost.”

“For want of the price of tea and a slice, the old man died.”

Oh, well.  Since I work tomorrow, I think I might try my walking home quest after work, then.  I have new socks that I ordered for just such a thing after Wednesday.  It would be cool if they help.  Perhaps I would sleep really well afterwards.  Or, hey, who knows, maybe I’ll get hit by a car (or other vehicle) on the way, and this will all be taken out of my hands.

There are worse things I can imagine.  One of them is simply my life continuing, as it currently is, indefinitely into the future.  The prospect of facing several thousand pounds of rapidly moving metal, perhaps steered by someone who has been drinking, seems much less unpleasant than that other, more banal and yet supposedly desirable alternative. 

by

No blog post today

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.

by

A post triggered by an ongoing problem with WordPress comments

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.

by

Mad morning musings and “The End of All That Is”

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.