dysthymia

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Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears moist it again, and frame some feeling blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you may already know, though if you’re reading this later, you may not.  But now you do know, just in case you care.

I’m writing this at the train station, where I just missed a late previous train because the elevator was slow.  I would think they might have been willing to hold the train for the 5 extra seconds it would have taken for me to board‒certainly, the conductor saw me getting off the elevator.  I would respect their desire not to delay if it were not for the fact that they were the ones already running late, according to a schedule that they had promulgated.

They certainly have no leg to stand on with regard to other people taking an extra moment to get on the train, when they are late almost every day.  If they ran consistently and reliably on time, I would respect their demands for punctuality from passengers.  But it is not so.  They are merely hypocrites.

Anyway, I wasn’t planning to get on that train in the first place, because I wasn’t on time for its scheduled departure.  I’m just irritable.

I’m also getting sick‒and not just in my usual, everyday way.  I have a low-grade fever (about 99.7 or so by core temperature) and feel achy and crappy and have a bit of a dry cough.  It could be Covid, I suppose, but I don’t give a f*ck.  Covid was disappointing in that both times I had it‒before and after vaccination‒it didn’t even come close to killing me.

Boo, I say.

Anyway, I probably ought not to go into work today, but I don’t know if my coworker will be there.  Supposedly he is going to be coming in, but then again, supposedly he was going to be there on Saturday, and I ended up getting a last minute Uber to the office (for which the boss has not offered to compensate me, by the way).  So, I’d rather go in and, if my coworker comes, perhaps leave early.

Ideally, I should have taken a 4-day weekend of sorts.  I should just have rested.  Unfortunately, we are not very civilized about such things here in this part of the world.  If I were like so many other people at work‒having a poor time sense and less than ideal work ethic‒I guess I would just indulge myself and give a mental “up yours” to everyone else.

For reasons of which I am far from certain, however, I don’t seem to be built that way.  This has led to me being taken advantage of quite a few times, sometimes continuously, in my life.  That’s probably a large part of what landed me in prison‒being used as a target and a dupe because I wanted to help people with chronic pain, since I suffer from it myself and knew the prejudice such people face.

I guess I was and am stupid, huh?  I don’t see myself changing this characteristic, except to the extent that avoiding it underlies my unwillingness to get very close to anyone.  I sure as Hell* don’t want any romantic entanglements.  They tend to cause me nothing but heartache and heartbreak, though I am at least truly thankful for my children.  I could never regret anything that led to their existence.  After that, though‒especially after 2013, which was when I last actually saw my kids‒all bets are off, and everything is pretty pointless.

Yes, I know, I wrote my books and stories and have done this blog since then.  Again, I say, everything is pretty pointless.  I’m not persuaded that those things‒this thing‒never having happened would be any loss to the world whatsoever.

Whenever I get sick these days, I hope that it will turn into something like pneumonia and perhaps kill me.  I’d prefer not to die of dysentery, but that would be tolerable.  And I’d rather not get meningitis or encephalitis, just because if I survive I might have brain damage that I wouldn’t like.

Reality rarely seeks one’s opinion of course‒a case in point is that I am still alive even after all those opportunities for pneumonia, and my open heart surgery and my back surgery and all the rest.

I just got on the next train, which was 6 minutes late from its scheduled time.  It’s so irritating.  Why is it difficult for trains to keep a schedule?  Buses sometimes have some excuse, but why trains?

It’s also a bit over air conditioned on board, at least relative to the platform, where I was literally sweating like a human despite just sitting still.  I’ve mentioned how the extreme air conditioning is just making the world slightly worse overall, and it seems obvious to me, but what are you going to do with the stupid humans?

Don’t answer that.  I have plenty of ideas of my own.  Only some of them involve the Hobbesian** point that humans can provide some important protein.

Anyway, if I do stay out of the office sick tomorrow, I won’t be writing a post before Monday.  And if this URI converts into an LRI or something equally serious and kills me, or at least puts me in the hospital, I might not be writing a post Monday…or indeed, perhaps I might not write one ever again.

If that’s a prospect that excites you‒and why would it not?‒just imagine how exciting it is for me to consider!  And yet, so far, I keep recovering every time.  Dammit.  F*ck you, Biology!

So, in case I’m not here tomorrow writing a post, I hope you all are happy and well and that you collectively have a very good weekend.  Try to stay safe and healthy; I don’t wish the negative things for others that I wish for myself.

TTFN

best-anime-about-illness

*Surer than Hell, really.  Hell is quite unlikely actually to exist, even if there is a God.  What sort of benevolent deity would punish for eternity the souls of people It created because they were imperfect?  How about doing some teaching and training and corrective maintenance, instead?  How about doing a better job at creating people?  I’ve often said, if even one person‒no matter how horrible‒is consigned to Hell for eternity for the deeds of a human lifetime, then a God that arranged such a thing is unworthy of worship.

**From Calvin and Hobbes, not the author of The Leviathan.

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Universal heat death will be cold, but today it’s too hot and yet too air conditioned, and life hurts

     I don’t quite clearly remember all that I wrote in my blog post yesterday, and even the memory of the process of writing it has that slightly hazy feel of delirium, though I don’t think it literally applies.  Today I have to go to the office, because it is payroll day, and I’m already way behind on what I need to get done for that.  But I am still in a great deal of pain, even for me.

     I do remember deciding to indent my paragraphs by five spaces, as a kind of homage to the days of writing fiction‒though I used tab keys for that then, because I was using MS Word, not a smartphone.  I’m still indenting for this post.

     I’m getting on a very early train today so that I can get into the office in time to get some catch-up work done, and at a slow pace, because I still am in enough pain that my usual concentration is markedly diminished.  I don’t feel quite as delirious as I did yesterday‒I seem to have had some form of GI bug that made things worse‒but I’m far from my peak powers.  I still feel rather ill.  But I cannot simply take much time off.

     It’s oppressively hot and humid out.  Just standing still and waiting for the train caused me to be covered with sweat.  And then, getting on the train, I find the car is over-air conditioned, so it feels, at least for a moment, uncomfortably cool.  This is an interesting paradox of our climate control of our little, self-contained worlds: we control transient environments perhaps too much, and can never fully acclimate to the overarching external circumstances.  Admittedly, the weather being so hot and humid is quite uncomfortable, so I have a preference for some degree of climate control.  But it becomes a minor shock to the system when one leaves one environment for another.

     And, of course, the second law of thermodynamics (and the first) demands that the only way we can get it cooler inside is by putting more waste heat, and at higher entropy, into the outside world than we remove from the interior of, for instance, a train car.  No matter how efficient the system may be (and I doubt that it’s all that efficient) it cannot, in principle, be perfectly so.  This has been known for more than a century and a half.  Even the biological machinery that maintains a mammalian body within a narrow range of temperature, which is more efficient than any equivalent product of technology, still produces tremendous waste heat in highly disordered form, converting low-entropy energy into high entropy heat that cannot readily be used, eventually radiating into the surrounding cosmos, where it spreads out more with the expansion of spacetime, as all things head toward a predicted final fate of maximal entropy.

     Of course, on a universal scale, that process is going to take a very long time, so long that a human lifespan might as well be one of the fabled “virtual particles” of quantum field theory, popping into and out of existence before the universe can notice them‒though they can have effects.  I’ve written about this stuff before, I know, and won’t go into it again.  I’m sure if you searched either on this blog or on Iterations of Zero, you could find posts that discuss such things.

     As for me, I feel that my little, virtual existence is rapidly approaching its end.  Every day is painful, and that pain is not productive or useful; it certainly does not seem to make me stronger.  And, of course, I don’t really do anything for fun, I don’t do anything useful, I don’t make any arguable contribution that I can see.  I don’t think I’m even so much as a part of the quantum foam that has effects that can be felt in the reaction rates of elementary particles.  I’m just a virtual photon in intergalactic space.

     Though, I guess, I’ve had some effects already, since I have saved some lives and eased some suffering, and I’ve written several books and short stories, and most importantly, I have two wonderful children.  But my effects on them‒and certainly the impact of my fiction, and any past effects of my medical work‒are no longer happening. I hear from my daughter, but I have nothing of use to offer her, and I almost never hear from my son.

     I’m not doing much that has even a local, transient use anymore.  I certainly don’t think I’m having or sharing any insights or ideas that could honestly be useful to any of my readers.  And I no longer seem capable of making friends, nor of connecting with my prior friends, nor anything else along such lines.

     So, when I vanish back into the vacuum state of whatever quantum field I represent, there will be no real loss to anyone in the universe.  It would be nice to have family and friends around as one gets sicker and wastes away, but I don’t think I’ve earned any such thing.

     It is whatever it is, I guess.  I’m very tired, anyway.  And so much of what I am is pain, nowadays, without any counter-balancing joy.  At least I have done those bits of good in the past, for whatever they are worth.

     Anyway, I’m getting close to my stop.  I’m still a bit queasy, I’m sorry to say.  Or, well, I’m sorry to be able to say it truthfully.  It’s the fact, not the sharing of it, that troubles me.

     I hope you all have a good day, though.  Try not to air condition things too much‒it only serves to make the universe that much hotter that much sooner.  Ironically, so does heating things, by the way.

     Take care of yourselves and each other.  Spend time with your friends and families.  Be beneficent or at least neutral as much as you can.  And don’t worry too much.  In ten to the hundredth years, no one will remember all this, even in principle.

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Here we go again.

It’s Monday again.

I don’t know how we keep allowing this to happen, but it keeps on doing it, over and over again, from the Monday on or immediately after the day we’re born until the last Monday on or before the day we die.  I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t really want to go back to work.

I’ll try to make this a comparatively short blog post if I can, unlike the weird one I did on Saturday, where I got off on a tangent about the number of possible blog posts one could write given a thousand words of length and a limited number of potential words after each previous one.  If you like that sort of thing, and you didn’t read it yet because you don’t read blogs on the weekend, do feel free to check it out.  I was writing off the top of my head, and I only briefly fact checked a few quick items, so there could be errors in specifics, but I think the reasoning was okay.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I suffered from ill-effects of something I had eaten Saturday, or perhaps some combination of things.  Anyway, I was feeling quite poorly, though thankfully whatever it was seems mostly to have worked its way through my system.  Fingers crossed!

Oh, and I don’t know if anyone anywhere has noticed, but for my last two blog posts, I added “tags” which are supposed to help people find what you write if they’re looking for material on given subjects.  It’s a part of that whole “search engine optimization” thing that’s been a big deal on and off, but which must surely change faster than even fashion and politics, given how the various things operating and interacting on the internet and the web are changing so quickly, and how new things become a big deal so quickly, and presumably will be altered and will warp and distort and mutate if they survive at all.  Remember Myspace?

And, of course, the advent of the various GPT-type things and their use in searching and in creating will no doubt change not only the structure but the content of the cyber-world.  Heck, soon most of the internet and web could be things written by LLMs having cobbled stuff together by interacting with other LLMs, and the humans who still go there won’t even realize that the base of the structure, founded in reality initially, has long since washed away, leaving only a cobweb of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense and so on.  And, unless there is some collision with actual, practical requirements of reality that forces natural selection to act on such things, it could go on existing for a very long time, all the while signifying nothing.

Of course, unless it is forced to solve problems for which there can be real world right and wrong answers, with consequences, I don’t know how it could develop into any kind of actual general, self-directed intelligence.  But I haven’t really thought about it all that much, and I am no expert.  I have read and listened to some of the experts in the area, and some of them impress me with their reasoning, and some strike me as rather foolish and simple-minded,  seeming to miss many points about how things can and do go wrong in reality.

I suppose it doesn’t make much difference what I think.  Anyway, servers produce so much waste heat and they use so much power, the whole WWW may become increasingly unworkable as temperatures rise and use of resources needs to be curtailed.  It may be more energy efficient and climate-friendly to build artificial intelligence using actual nerves, genetically engineered and powered by photosynthetic cells that remove carbon dioxide from the environment and are vastly more energy efficient than electronic circuits.

What are the odds that humans will avoid total catastrophe long enough for those few, those happy few, creative and intelligent individuals to figure out solutions to various problems and implement them?  Will the demagogues and the polarizing political fashionistas wreck everything too soon for it to be saved?

The clever and creative people are very impressive, and they never stop trying if they can help it, but it is much easier to destroy than to create.  The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics makes it just so easy for things to fail.

That’s not because the second law is some force acting on everything, some quantum field or curvature of spacetime.  It’s much more fundamental than that.  It’s simply the mathematics of probability and statistics, and it will apply in any system in which mathematics applies, which seems likely to be any possible universe.  There are simply vastly more ways for any system to be “disordered” than there are for things to be ordered in any particular way one might desire.  So, even the most well-constructed things will fall apart; even the most carefully balanced center cannot hold forever.

I guess I’m not an optimist, am I?  Nevertheless, I’m not a complete pessimist.  I think it is possible for the clever, creative people to create faster than what they create is destroyed, and to carry the mass of humanity and life itself forward into a future of cosmic consequence, the nature of which we cannot predict, because to predict it, we’d have to already know the things we’ll need to know to get there.  It’s possible.  But there are no guarantees, and there are so many ways for it not to happen.  It will require tremendous care by so many people‒as it has all along‒to avoid utter dissolution.

I don’t know if the odds make it worth the effort. But the clever people often don’t let that stop them.  And though most will fail, it doesn’t take very many clever, creative successes to move the world along.  They are just that powerful.

Maybe I’m more optimistic than I like to let myself believe.  That would be disgusting, wouldn’t it?  But I’m not dead yet, even though I often wish I were; I haven’t killed myself yet, though I think about it so very often and feel so bad so much of the time.  I’m stubborn, I guess.

I could really use some help with that‒not the stubbornness, but the depression and anxiety and pain stuff‒but I don’t have the energy and I don’t like myself enough to seek it out and to do anything more than cursorily try to help myself.  We’ll see how long I last.  Not long, I’ll bet.  But I’ve been wrong before.

With that, let’s quit this post.  Have a good week.  If I’m still alive tomorrow morning and going to work, I will grudgingly and grumpily write another blog post.  Damn it.

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.

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A somewhat more positive blog post. That may not be saying much, but take what you can get.

Well, it probably won’t surprise those of you who read my previous post to learn that I left the office early yesterday‒at lunchtime‒and came back to the house where, after eating a bit, I took a melatonin and half a Benadryl.  I’ll say this for that group of meds:  it was only a few minutes after taking them that I felt a strong pressure to sleep, and so I did.

Some of that may just be fulfillment of expectation, and I was, of course, very tired, but they are supposed to be rapidly dissolving melatonin tablets.  Benadryl never seems to act very quickly on me, so I hesitate to credit the fast onset of sleep to it.

I did wake up quite a lot during the night‒about like usual‒but at least the night was effectively longer, and I don’t mean that in the sense that it felt like it lasted a millennium, as I said yesterday about Monday night.  I mean that I was in bed for a good ten hours roughly, and that at least is something special.  I regret to have to inform you that my pain is only slightly abated, but with a bit of rest, at least it’s slightly easier to tolerate.

I’m writing this on my phone today, by the way, because there was no way in hell I was carrying anything I didn’t really need to carry when I left the office, and that meant no laptop computer.

I think I’m going to try to take just a melatonin in the evening tonight, to see if it works to help me drop off.  The fact that I still reawakened frequently throughout the night at least somewhat assuages my fear that I might oversleep if I take it.  I’m too tense about oversleeping anyway, so short of a general anaesthetic, I’m unlikely to sleep through my alarm.

That raises an interesting point for me.  I clearly have a sense of chronic tension, almost all the time.  I suppose it might be called an anxiety syndrome, but that never feels like quite the right term to me.  I don’t feel “anxious”, like I constantly want to run away, figuratively, but more that I’m constantly ready to fight.  Maybe that’s just an example of different people’s reactions to the same process‒the sympathetic nervous system function of fight or flight, which in me seems to tend powerfully toward “fight”.  Thus, in my song Breaking Me Down, I sing, “I always want to hit someone, but I never get in fights.”

I was strongly trained by my father not to get in fights unless it’s truly, absolutely necessary, and I think that’s good training.  But I always feel ready to fight (not necessarily physically, though that’s always an option).  I even keep weapons (nothing that can accidentally go off!) at my side when I sleep and in the office.

I know, that’s a bit weird.  It’s not that I actually expect to be attacked.  Of all the people I know in the office‒and most other places, really‒I am the one most likely to be inclined to violence, but I have always had exceptionally good impulse control.  I’m not even prone to act on wholesome impulses!  But if I need to get in a fight, I do want every advantage available.

In a sporting situation, fairness is important, but in “real life” I have no interest in fighting fairly.  A fair fight is one where you have a fifty percent chance of losing.  I want to bring that chance as close to zero as I can if things really matter.  I will cheat in any way I can if it’s a fight about something important, and I will feel that I have done right.  The leopard doesn’t offer its prey a head start if it can help it, nor does the prey wait until the leopard has a fair shot at it to run away.

Anyway, enough of that pseudo-macho stuff.  I just mean that, almost all the time, I feel defensive/semi-aggressive, though I strongly dislike getting in arguments (or fights, really), and even feel mortified and ashamed and self-hating if I make a heated comment online.  Sometimes I even feel nervous when I make a positive comment, as though I fear having to deal with anyone responding to me, even if that response is also positive.  It’s weird.  I suppose, to some extent, it’s probably simply the fact that I have always felt weird, like I’m crazy, like I don’t quite function like the people around me, even within my own family.  I think I’ve mentioned that here, before.

All that tension does wear you out, though, and if not tempered, or at least counter-balanced, by positive things, it can make life very unpleasant.  I’m not sure what to do about it, though.  Meditation can soften it, but as I’ve mentioned, meditation often seems to make my depression get worse.  That’s not much of an improvement, if at all.  So, I have my ongoing conundrum.

I don’t know, also, how much‒if at all‒that tension contributes to the worsening of my chronic pain.  It’s possible that it does a fair amount.

In any case, I would say that I probably have some version of chronic anxiety, but that it doesn’t present as what I would call “anxiety”.  I don’t feel worried or afraid, I just feel hostile and often even hateful.  If the Force were real and I had any affinity for it, I don’t see how I could avoid the Dark Side.

Anyway, I’m going in quite early to catch up on things I let go yesterday because I could not focus at all on anything important.  But this pain and this tension and this depression are really grinding me down, and I don’t know how much will and energy I have left.  I’m very, very, very tired.  Maybe if I use the melatonin every day, I’ll gradually feel at least a bit better.  Just because it’s not globally useful doesn’t mean it couldn’t help for certain people in certain circumstances.

If it doesn’t help, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I keep speaking (or writing) about giving up and dying, but I keep on trying to find solutions or at least palliatives to my physical and psychological difficulties.  And I keep retrying lots of things that have failed before, in a sort of desperation to do something, anything, to see if I can feel less unhealthy.  I’ve not had a lot of luck, but maybe I would have been worse without the various things I’ve tried.  There’s no way to know, since I can’t compare alternate realities.  There’s also no way to know that I might not have been better than I am if I hadn’t tried to combat my dysthymia and pain.

Oh, well.  I’m probably wasting my time and my efforts.  But, if anyone out there knows of any brilliant new ideas, please let me know…but remember, they should probably be truly new, or at least not cliché.  I’m a trained MD, and I’ve read about and tried a lot of things beyond even that extensive training and practice.

The world isn’t made for us, and certainly we were never born to be comfortable.  It’s the feelings of dissatisfaction that prod us to act to stay alive and to thrive and to reproduce.  That’s good engineering, like smoke detectors being hyper-sensitive and fire alarms being extra jarring.  But if the smoke alarm gets stuck in an active position, leaving the alarm always going, eventually you’re going to want to cut power to it, and to hell with the risk of fire.  And if you can’t shut it off no matter what, eventually, you’re either just going to deafen yourself completely or leave the house.

That’s metaphor, of course.

I hope you all have a good day.  If you’re able to get good nights’ sleeps regularly, please make sure not to take it for granted.  And have a nap in my name, if you can!  I know it does me no actual good, but somehow it seems like a nice idea.

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“…and the worms ate into his brain.”

It’s Tuesday morning.

It’s odd how a night can seem to last for a thousand years, and yet, nevertheless, the morning can come far too soon.  That’s the situation in which I find myself, today.  It’s nothing particularly new, but it has been a night that’s tending toward the bad tail of the bell curve, by which I mean, it was worse than most of my nights.

I keep wanting to write some form of the present tense, as in “it is” a worse night than most, because there has been no real boundary between last night and now.  My back and leg pain has been more or less continuous, and though my consciousness has been waxing and waning, there has been no real rest.

There’s a rather famous philosophical notion that, as far as one knows, after one has gone to sleep, when one wakes up, one might have died and been replaced during the night, and one could be a completely new being in the morning, with just some implanted memories from the person who came before.  Of course, this could also be true in any given waking moment, since all we know of our personal past is our memories of it, but there’s a definite feeling of continuity during a given day—sometimes there’s too much continuity—that is interrupted when we have a true night’s sleep.

Well, I definitely feel a rather strong continuity now with yesterday; I have no sense of having been significantly unconscious overnight, though I know I wasn’t fully conscious the whole time.  And now I have to go to work, where my only regular, pseudo-social interaction happens, but which also tends to make me stressed much more than it makes me feel good, mainly because of noise and irregular interruptions.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are many people at the office whom I like, and even one or two with whom I can have enjoyable conversations, at least about some things, though not about very much.  I know, it’s my own fault that I have no friends anymore.  And by “fault” I mean, I know that I am faulty.  I’m a bad product, a lemon.  Any sensible consumer protection agency probably would have demanded I be recalled to the factory if there were such a thing.  I was born with both cardiac and (apparently) neurological defects.  These things should have been covered under the warranty.

I know, I know, melodrama, right?  It’s curious that I express myself so over-much here in this blog.  Apparently, in person, I’m rather wooden, and don’t smile very much—though I get the impression that when I talk about music I like or about math or science or things of that nature, I light up a bit.  Certainly, I get more energetic.  And then people’s faces soon tend to glaze over and look either confused or bored or whatever.

I used to wake up with leg aches a lot when I was little.  I don’t know what the cause was, really; they used to think they were “growing pains” or something along those lines.  I just know they hurt an awful lot, and they often woke me up.  When I started having my “new” onset of pain—it turns out almost certainly to have been related to a back injury—as an adult, I thought that it was some kind of recrudescence of the problem I had as a kid.

I underwent all sorts of tests to see if there was a neurological/myological problem of chronic, perhaps congenital, nature.  I even went through electromyography, which is a lot like getting a protracted series of intramuscular injections in which the needle is just left in the large muscle group and then you’re told to flex the muscle while it’s in there.  I don’t recommend it as something fun to do, even if you think you’re something of a masochist, which I am not.

Anyway, they didn’t find anything like that, at least nothing obvious, and I eventually learned I had a seriously ruptured/torn L5-S1 disc, and ultimately had surgery on it.  To be fair, the surgery reduced my pain, but it clearly has not eliminated it.

Sorry, I know this is all boring and repetitive.  Such is life, though, isn’t it?  It’s boring and repetitive.  At least, it’s repetitive.  I guess when one has family and friends and loved ones, people with whom one can spend time doing nothing in particular in each other’s company, the repetitive doesn’t feel boring.  I’ve been in that situation before, and for long periods of time.  I had a good, close family, with good parents, brother, sister, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on.  I had friends growing up, in school, and in college.  I was married for fifteen years, and that wasn’t boring, certainly.  I had friends in med school and residency, and I had my kids.  That was all truly great and wonderful.

I am now tired and worn down, and quite alone/lonely, but I don’t necessarily want to want to die, though I often do feel that I want to die.  I want to want to live, which is not quite the same things as wanting to live, unfortunately.  I need help.

I feel like the narrator of the song Hey, you, asking if people can feel him, if they can touch him, if they would help him to carry the stone.  But, of course, it was only fantasy, as the song goes on to note.  The wall was too high, and no matter how he tried, he could not break free.  And so on (see above).

Pink Floyd does seem to resonate for me, and it has since I first started listening to them, especially their big four albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and of course, The Wall.  I’m clearly not alone in this, which is actually somewhat ironic. Isn’t it?

Oh, by the way, based on the way I save my blog posts in the computer, I’ve just realized that the day of the week for the current date is one day later than it was last year.  In other words, July 18th (today) is on a Tuesday this year and was on a Monday last year.  This means that every seven years it should come around to the same day, except that leap years make the cycle irregular.

It will be five or six years instead of seven between returns to a given day, depending on whether there is only one leap year embedded in the course or if there are two.  There can’t be more than two, because leap years are every four years, but there are only seven days in a week.  I guess that could mean, though, that it could be more than seven years before a return to the same day, if the year when one would be returning to it is a leap year, and then that day might be skipped over again, leading to a longer course of time between.  I could try to work out the potential maximum length of time between when one date falls on one day of the week next time, but I’m already getting bored of this.  In any case, in the long run, it ought to be on average that the date falls on the same day of the week one out of every seven years.

Except February 29th, of course.  There are more than seven years between any repeated day for February 29th.

Anyway, I’m going to go.  I’m in so much pain, despite what meds I have available, that I think I’ll call a Lyft or something to get to the train station.  I hate doing that, but I’m just worn out.  Also, it’s not as though I’m saving money for some possible, imagined future retirement; I don’t see how it’s possible that I have a future of significance.

I would like to have a future.  I would like someone, somewhere, to find me some kind of answers or help or something.  But that’s pretty unreasonable to ask of other people, all of whom have their own problems and pains and troubles.

I guess the show must go on, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

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“I thought you died alone a long, long time ago”

Happy Day of the Moon, everyone.

A weird thing happened when I began this blog post.  As I was trying to write a footnote to explain that by writing “Day of the Moon” I simply meant “Monday”, the little spell-checker in the footnote marked Monday as a misspelled word.  Now, I have in the past temporarily forgotten how to spell a common word, for causes unknown—the last time I clearly recall such an instance was when I could not for the life of me remember how to spell “sure” when I was a kid—but Monday?

I tried to figure out how I could have messed that up.  And when I right-clicked on the word all the options offered to replace it were French.  It turned out that somehow, the proofing language in that section of the post had flipped to French, and I had to reset it and start the post over.

That seems truly bizarre to me.  It’s not because of anything I did, at least nothing obvious, because I have never used French in writing anything, as far as I can recall.  I know only a very limited number of words in French.  Unlike many people, I don’t find it a particularly beautiful language, and the very fact that the French government tries strictly to control the language’s grammar and lexicon by law is frankly (Ha ha) laughable.

Anyway, that’s all a weird, contingent tangent* that had nothing to do with anything I was planning to write.  That’s okay, though, since I didn’t really have anything planned to write.  That’s how I usually begin these posts.  When I do deliberately try to write about something, it’s usually a subject that not many people seem interested in.

My post from last Thursday was a good example—when I pondered whether reality is more truly described by continuous functions or by stepwise changes iterated at such a minute level and in such short intervals that we, the macroscopic, cannot tell the difference between them and the truly continuous, and how one could tell the difference.  It seems like an interesting question to me, but I don’t appear to have anyone with whom to interact who has any particular thoughts about it, or has anything to add to the conversation.

I did talk to my sister on the phone last night (not about that subject), and that was really nice.  It’s hard to find the time to do it when we’re both available, so the frequency of those interactions has been lower than I wish, but then again, a great many things in the world are quite different from what I would wish them to be.

I took melatonin and Benadryl in the evening on both Friday and Saturday nights.  I don’t know how well it helped me rest—I certainly woke up several times during both nights, but at least on Saturday morning I let myself stay in bed, though awake, until comparatively late in the morning.

Last night was rough for sleep, mainly because I got spasms and pains alternating down first my right side from my lower back to my hip and knee and ankle and foot, then switching over to my left side a little later.  It’s rather maddening, but I’m probably “mad” anyway, so it’s not like it’s going to make me insane in any new or different way.  It will just pound away at the gravel that’s all that remains of any monolith of sanity I used to possess, until it’s eventually turned into sand.

Related to that pounding, a rather odd thing happened yesterday, or it seemed odd to me.  I often watch “reaction” videos, especially to songs that I like, because it’s neat to see someone apparently experiencing a piece of good music for the first time.  It’s almost (but not quite) like listening to a song with a friend who hasn’t heard it before.  Anyway, after the second or third one I watched, the YouTube algorithm offered me an actual song, not a reaction.  In this case it was the original, David Bowie version of The Man Who Sold the World, and I played it and sang along with it, then with Ashes to Ashes, then with Karma Police, by Radiohead.

The weird part was that, as I sang these songs—none of which are especially sad, though they’re not especially happy, either—I started to cry.  With each one, there were several places in the course of the song in which I had to catch myself and hold back tears and even sobs, and I’m not at all sure why.  I haven’t done any singing in quite a while, really, other than rare and brief moments, just as I’ve only played guitar once or twice in the last six months or so.  But I don’t know why it felt so horribly sad and despair-inducting to be singing.

I stopped playing songs after that.  It was too weird and disquieting; I’m not sure what it signifies, if anything.  But I do feel more sad and hopeless as time goes by.  This blog—in its current form, anyway—was meant in part to be a cry for help, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might have the desire and the ability to do or say something that would rescue or at least assist me out of my downward depression spiral and my thoroughly empty life, which is devoid of anything deeper than work “friends”, commuting, and YouTube videos.

I get the impression that people don’t think I’m savable, which I guess I can understand.  Or maybe I make arguments that are too convincing, or at least too persistent, about my own lack of hope, so much that people think they could never talk me out of despair.  Maybe they couldn’t.  Maybe talk isn’t what’s needed.  I certainly think I would need something more than just talk, but my judgement is far from sound.  Still, I really feel like I’m wasting time, more and more, if what I was doing was trying to ask for, or to seek, or to wish for, help.

As far as I can see, help is not forthcoming.  And while it may seem, from the other side of the blog post, that this is something with which I’m sanguine and of which I’m coldly accepting, this is not the case.  I am not quite dead yet, even internally.

Time’s been my way when I’ve rescued other people—actually, I’ve done it quite often, and I did it for quite a while.  Still, apparently there’s no counterbalance for my having saved other people’s lives and relieved other people’s suffering—or else maybe I’m even more reprehensible than I often feel I am.  Whatever the case, I don’t seem to be eliciting any assistance from anyone who can do much of anything.

Maybe I need to be in situation where there’s immediate danger to life and limb before I can actually get anyone to help me.  Maybe I just am not going to get any help.  I’m certainly not able to help myself.  I’ve been doing it and trying to do it for years or decades, depending on how you draw boundaries and define your terms.  I’m at the end of my psychological resources.  I’m also caught in some kind of mental block, where I can’t seem to reach out (directly) to anyone in any way, or to explain how badly I’m doing, or even to call 988, which I often want to do.  I just feel like I’d be wasting their time.

Anyway, that’s already too much for today.  I’m going to head to the bus stop.  Maybe something will happen on the way to work that will bring things to a head, and I’ll either get help or get gone.

Almost certainly that won’t be the case.

*Which might be a good name for a band.

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Something for the rag and bone man

It’s Friday morning, July 14th.  I strongly considered walking to the train station this morning to try to get back into that habit, since I’ve been sick this week, but then last night I had an especially horrible night’s sleep.  I think I got maybe an hour or an hour and a half total of sleep, not continuously, but spread out over the time between 10 and 3.  Now I feel surreal and slightly hallucinatory.  I really don’t even want to go into the office, but I’ve already missed one day this week (Monday), and I’m off this weekend, so I’ll try to trudge through today.

I don’t know what to do about this.  My sleep and other issues seem to be worsening, and it’s getting to the point where fewer and fewer things keep me wanting to do anything.  Most days, honestly, I half-wish I were dead, but today it’s more than half.  I’m so tired; I don’t know what to do.  But I’m not sleepy.

I think tonight, even though it gave me some trouble last time, I’m going to take one of those melatonin, as well as two Benadryl, just to see if it helps at all.  The research apparently shows that melatonin doesn’t do much other than to reset one’s sleep clock if one is off kilter, but maybe in some people—maybe in people with weird brains to begin with—it might help.  I don’t know.  Anyway, I don’t work tomorrow, so if I have a bad reaction and get a headache and all that, it won’t matter much.

It’s not as if I have any plans for Saturday.  I don’t see anyone or spend time with anyone, though I’m going to call my sister this weekend, and that’s a good thing.  I don’t go out or do anything interesting.  I’ve sort of half-decided I want to try to replace the inner tube in my bike and retry that again, maybe go for a ride.  That might be worth doing.  I have the necessary equipment, at least.  I don’t know if I’ll have the will to do it, but I’ll wait and see.

I had plans to talk about that second topic I raised at the end of yesterday’s lengthy post.  I’m referring here to my thought that, perhaps, having big jackpot lotteries and the like for people to play legally has actually done harm to the overall work ethic and productivity of the nation, because at least some people will console and delude themselves with the dream—and yes, it is a dream, since to a good, five-sigma approximation, no one wins the lottery—that they might get a windfall and never have to work again, and then they could get and have all the joys and comforts they envision.

I imagine—and this is conjectural—that when there is no lottery available, people can’t even dream of getting ahead or getting more comfortable other than through working hard and saving their money.

Like I mentioned yesterday, this is not something I would imagine is to blame for all, or even a lion’s share, of the diminishment of the middle class and the work ethic and whatnot.  There are many factors in the equation or the program or whatever you might call it that determines the economic and sociological structure and function of a society.

But I don’t think the lottery has been a good thing in any sense.  It doesn’t appear to have benefited public education at all, which was one of the things for which lotteries were supposed to raise money.  If anything, it might have given those in government an excuse to be able to cut some of the tax-based funding for education.

Certainly the public schools appear to have gone downhill even since I was in school, and I don’t think I’m just being a typical curmudgeon who thinks the younger generation is stupider than the youth of my generation were.  In fact, I don’t think they are stupider.  Probably they’re overall somewhat smarter—they certainly have less exposure to environmental lead than people did when I was a kid, and the general knowledge base of civilization has definitely increased.  But the education system in general appears to be much worse than it used to be, and what’s more troubling is that people seem not to care as much about education as in the past.  The respect for teachers and for schools and for getting an education in general seem to have declined significantly.

That doesn’t seem like a good way to run a society with an eye toward the future.  In fact, the future seems more and more bleak by the year.  Thankfully, of course, there are smart people out there, and some of them will be able to get educated in spite of the schools they attend, and when push comes to shove, these individuals will do their best to come up with new solutions to new and old problems, and they will carry the rest of the human infestation along with them, for better or for worse.

But if people in general were better educated—if they were taught even basic probability and statistics in high school, or even junior high, for instance—there would be much less of a market for con games such as state lotteries.  One sees people lining up almost every day in the convenience stores, spending absurd amounts of money (which they cannot afford) on slips of paper that they might as well use to blow their noses or wipe their asses.

I always told my patients that they should never make a special trip to buy a lottery ticket, because they were far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident on the way to the store than they were to win the jackpot.  I suspect this might be true even if they walk to the store, though at least then they would be getting exercise.  The odds of them getting injured are even greater than the odds of them getting killed, and in the USA, people with injuries that cause persistent diminishment of ability are going to have extra expenses and decreased productivity and lower quality of life for a long time, and our healthcare system is woefully inadequate.

And make no mistake, injuries that you have do cause chronic diminishment of your capacity—“you are still the victim of the accidents you leave”.

Nietzsche’s famous quote about “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is just a load of bullshit.  Remember, the man died of neurosyphilis, but syphilis doesn’t progress to the nervous system very rapidly.  It didn’t kill him quickly, but it certainly didn’t make him stronger, neither physically nor mentally.  Exercise, practice, education, deliberate self-improvement—these things can make one stronger.  Accident and injury don’t tend to do that.

Not to say that a person can’t find wisdom and lessons even from horrible events, but to do that, one needs to be primed to look for such lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I probably could go on and on and off on tangents of various kinds related to this.  It’s frustrating to see people make excuses for why they don’t think they need to worry about educating their children, and at the same time to see people wasting their money on absurd gambles.  Gambling is only a winning industry for those who own the casinos or the lotteries (if them).  It is true that a very good poker player can make a living at the game, but only if there are worse poker players against whom they can play.  It’s a zero sum game.  There are no lions unless there are hinds; there are no wolves unless there are sheep.

Better to get educated, because knowledge can be shared and gained without real loss to the sharer.  Information can be reproduced now at very low cost—lower than it’s ever been before.  Education can be a positive-sum game, a mutual exchange to mutual benefit, which is the type of interaction at the heart of any functioning, productive economy.  If you get smarter, it doesn’t make me stupider; indeed, it often makes me smarter by feedback, for if you learn or create some truly new knowledge, then I can subsequently learn it.  More knowledge, more information, can benefit everyone.

But I doubt that it will.  I don’t have high hopes for the vast majority of humans.  As David Deutsch has pointed out, it certainly seems possible for the future of humanity to be a cosmically significant one, in the long term.  But there’s nothing that guarantees it.  It can easily go wrong, and most times throughout history, the production of knowledge has gone wrong, and has ground to a halt for centuries at a time and more.

Oh, well.  I’m too tired to do much but feel pessimistic about everything, anyway.  This blog is the closest thing to contribution to society that I do anymore.  I don’t know that it does me any good, though.

Anyway, I’m off to head to the train station now, for another depressing day of pretending that there is any point at all to continuing to strive to make a living.  I hope you all feel better, or at least better rested, than I do.

karloff-monster so tired

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

Well, it’s Wednesday morning now, as one might expect, if one lives life linearly and ordinally, which is how I do it.  I’m writing this on my little laptop computer today, because my thumbs have been getting sore from the use of the smartphone for blogging—more precisely, the base of my thumbs and my first MCP joints on both sides hurt quite a bit.  Also, I just type faster on the laptop, and It’s easier for me to express myself, though why I ever bother doing that is not quite entirely clear to me.

I feel pretty rotten still—physically, I mean.  I still have body aches and soreness and weakness (or at least asthenia) and a general feeling of being slightly breathless.  I still had a very low-grade fever as of last night, but I checked my oxygen, which was 95-96% saturation, occasionally pushing up to 97%, and my pulse rate was in the high-90s to low 100s, a bit variable with respiration.  That’s actually slightly low for me.  All my life I’ve tended to have a rapid pulse, possibly related to the atrial septal defect with which I was born, which can affect the heart’s inherent pacemaker and conduction system because of its location.

Apparently, the average number of heartbeats in a lifetime for a human (or closely related alien) is about 3 billion.  This is more than that of most mammals, which hover a little below two-thirds that many, if memory serves.  That number is roughly consistent from shrews to blue whales.  Geoffrey West discusses some of this in his book Scale, which is really interesting, and I recommend it.  As for me, I haven’t read anything in over a week, really, other than a few blog posts.

I just did a quick calculation regarding my chronic, diagnosed “sinus tachycardia”*.  If my average heart rate were 110—which my pulse can hover near, at least some of the time—I should have lived to about 51.8 years.  I’m already slightly past that, but within the realm of rough experimental error.  If 105 were closer to my average, my expected lifespan would be about 54.3 years, which would mean I have less than a year to go.  I figured the first number by dividing 3 billion by 110, then by 60, then by 24, then by 365.25.  I then did the second one by replacing the 110 with 105 and repeating the whole thing, but it occurs to me that I could just have taken 51.8 x 110/105 and gotten the same answer more easily.

So, basically, if my pulse has been steadily tachycardic—which I can only infer roughly based on the moments in which I’ve actually measured it, since I obviously didn’t measure it in between—then I’ve already lived just about as many heartbeats as I’m expected to live, on average.

Of course, there are some big “ifs” there.  There have certainly been times when I’ve been more fit, and that has tended to slow my resting heart rate somewhat.  Also, let’s not be too quasi-mystical about all this; it’s not as though there is some ethereal hourglass that measures out not seconds but heartbeats in the platonic space of life and death.  It’s just a rough average.

If the world is deterministic, then of course, one does, in a sense, have a pre-programmed number of heartbeats before one dies, but there’s nothing about that number that would determine the length of one’s life; it would, indeed, be a consequence of the various things that determine the length of one’s life, just as would the length of that life in seconds.  It wouldn’t be a dispositive fact, merely an epiphenomenon.  It would be casual rather than causal, one might say.

This is all a bit silly, but in many ways it’s reassuring to me that, just maybe, I really have come to what will be the natural end of my expected life.  I’ve read that people on the autism spectrum have shorter expected lifespans than people not on the spectrum (the range is wide, apparently anywhere from 36 to 61 years, which seems pretty imprecise) supposedly largely due to the various difficulties with self-care and social support and the like.

One reads plenty of reported evidence that a key determinant of a long and “happy” life is the degree of one’s social support network—not necessarily its size, but certainly its quality.  Well, when one of the fundamental aspects of a dysfunction is difficulty with ordinary social communication and connection, one can expect a group to tend to have a poorer social support network and ability to self-advocate.  And, of course, the three major proximate causes of death are apparently—according to a quick Bing search—epilepsy, heart disease, and suicide.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of epilepsy.  I do have a cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, which was discovered by chance on an MRI done for other reasons.  It’s a benign finding, in and of itself, but it turns out to be slightly more common in people with ASD (the neurologic one, not the cardiac one) as does ASD itself (the cardiac one, this time, which I also had).

So, I do/did have at least one form of heart disease, though I don’t know whether it counts in the measure of what they’re describing as such causes.  I think the third thing in the list is by far the most likely cause of premature death for me, if “premature” is really the right word.  After all, my “social support network” is locally all but nonexistent, and is very limited on a distant scale.

Of course, sleep disorders—also apparently very prevalent in those “on the spectrum”—are significant impediments to a long and happy life for anyone, and my sleep has been disordered for a very long time.  As a case in point, yesterday I was so physically wiped out from work and feeling ill that I just took a ride from the train station to the house and tried just to shut off the light, take half a Benadryl, and go to sleep.  Then—to no one’s surprise, but to my frustration—I could not get to sleep until after midnight, and then I started waking up by no later than two in the morning, awakening on and off every ten to twenty minutes until finally there was no point in delaying anymore.

I don’t know why I’m discussing all this trivia.  Maybe I’m just to try to get the message out that, if I do die “young”** in the near-future, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, you shouldn’t think of it as something sad, as some kind of tragedy.  My life is pathetically empty, and rather unpleasant most of the time.

I would never say there aren’t people who have it much worse than I do.  Of course there are.  That will almost certainly always be true, by any set of criteria one might choose.  It’s also irrelevant.  There are people who die young who, based on the quality of their lives, would have been better off having died even younger.  And there are those who live very long lives who still could have lived even longer with great happiness and well-being, and so even after a century, such a death could be considered premature by some criteria.  Futility is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I’m dragging this out, as I tend to do.  I just feel very tired, and very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any particular joy, or prospect of future joy, that makes me want to keep going and live longer.  I’m lonely and sad and uncomfortable and awkward and weird, living in a world in which I feel like an alien or a changeling or a mutant, or whatever.

Well, lets call that good for now, so to speak.  I’m going to get a Lyft to the train again today, because I’ve taken longer than I’d like to catch the bus, and anyway, I’m still just wiped out.  I’m going to try to time the train I take so that I get to my destination after the nearest CVS is open, so I can pick up some cold medicine***.  Maybe a decongestant will help me feel like I can breathe a little better.  Who knows?  But I need to do the payroll today, so at least it might help me stay awake for the time being, even if the decongestant effect doesn’t make much difference.  After that, I don’t think it really matters much.

*Nothing to do with the sinuses in one’s head, but with the sino-atrial node in the heart, the intrinsic pacemaker.  It means that one has a fast heart rate—tachycardia—but that its origin is at the usual source of the heartbeat.  It’s not an aberrant source or a reentrant tachycardia such as might occur when the conduction system of the heart develops a loop that keeps feeding rapidly back into itself and generating a truly and significantly over-fast heartbeat.  That can degenerate into more dangerous arrhythmias, whereas sinus tachycardia does not tend to do so.

**Scare quotes added because I do not feel young in almost any way, other than, perhaps, my ability to remain curious about various things in a way that seems unusual in other people somehow.  Many days I feel as if I’ve lived for centuries, but not in a cool, Anne Rice vampire kind of way.  Rather, I feel more like a mortal who has kept one of the Great Rings.  I’ve discussed that metaphor before and won’t bother going into it now.

***I did time it correctly, and the CVS was open…but the pharmacy was not, and will not be until 9 am.  Unfortunately, one cannot get real Sudafed—the decongestant that actually works without causing dangerous elevations in blood pressure—except at the pharmacy counter, and only in limited amounts, because some people have used it to make amphetamines.

This is a truly absurd and sub-moronic standard.  It’s harder for a law-abiding citizen in Florida to get a product containing pseudoephedrine than it is to get a gun, and all so the state can prevent a small minority of people from willingly taking a substance into their own bodies that no one is forcing them to use, just as some other people use beer or potato chips or Big Macs or ice cream…or tobacco.

And, of course, they aren’t actually preventing anything.  If they wanted to prevent drug use, they’d have to try to find out why life is bleak and empty enough for some people that they seek artificial sources of transient mood elevation (even though those sources are dangerous) and perhaps try to remedy or at least remediate the causes.  But, no, the same sort of people who would decry government overreach if corporate or upper-echelon income taxes were raised slightly, or if the government tried to ensure that people are vaccinated to curtail the spread of actual contagion to millions, and who would take up arms in open rebellion against any attempt to restrict gun ownership at any level, are willing to have the state keep people from using a comparatively safe medication for congestion and force them to use more dangerous ones—like oxymetazoline, which I am going to have to use, today.

The law truly is “a ass” and “a idiot”, and it’s written by people who are—and who are voted into power by—cretins and troglodytes who cannot even comprehend the nature of and the science behind the comforts and technologies which keep them alive and relatively safe.  If any readers here have any influence in this particular issue, please try to do something about it.  If necessary, just burn it all—the whole stupid planet—and let nature start over in some new state.  There are still a billion or so habitable years on Earth in which hopefully to bring an actually intelligent species into existence for the first time.

by

“I wonder why I’m shivering in such infernal heat.”

Happy Tuesday, everyone.  I guess this is, traditionally, the day of Mars, since the Spanish word for the day is “Martes”, which I think harkens back to the Latin name for the god of war (Mars…duh).

At times, I find it strange that there even ever was a god of war (mythically, I mean‒I know that there never was an actual god of war).  I guess, given the human race, it shouldn’t really surprise me.  Heck, I’ve even been led to understand that the good ol’ god o’ Abraham was originally a war god, but I have less provenance for that conclusion, so take it with a pillar of salt.

Incidentally, it’s also 7-11 in the American dating system, and that’s mildly amusing, given the name of the ubiquitous, quintessential “convenience store”.

As you might have noticed, I did not write a blog post yesterday.  Unfortunately, that’s not because I was dead, in case you were wondering.  I suspect death is, if not pleasant, at least not as unpleasant as the way I felt yesterday and the few days before (and is much how I feel today, though somewhat less so).

I started feeling ill on Saturday during the day, with that general achy soreness one feels when fighting an infection.  Then by Sunday I started having a modest fever, and yesterday I was just wiped out and in pain and my back pain was also acting up worse than usual.

I still don’t feel great today, but I need to go into the office before too much stuff gets backed up with which for me up to catch.  I’m not completely sure about the grammar of that last sentence, but I think you probably get my meaning.  I suppose it doesn’t much matter.

Anyway, I’m still under the weather, but I don’t have any symptoms that suggest contagion, so I’m going in.  I may have some low-level bacterial infection somewhere, but if so, it’s difficult to tell where without more localizing symptoms.  I suppose it’s possible I could have an infection in and around the hardware in my lower back, but I would expect the character of my back pain to change at least subtly in such a case, and it has not.

Maybe I just overdid things with my walking in the morning last week‒if my calculations are correct, I walked about 40 miles total, and in the reputedly hottest week on record, or something along those lines.  Maybe I just overexerted myself enough on too short notice to have given my body time to adjust.

If that’s the case, I may regret taking the days off yesterday and the day before.  But then again, it would be rather disappointing to walk myself into oblivion just locally.  How drab and dreary that would be.

I suppose, in a sense, such a thing would be appropriate for me.

So, all that and other lifestyle changes may have affected my resistance to some ailment, and maybe I’ve just been fighting some low-level virus or something.  If so, it doesn’t seem to be too horrible a one, or at least it’s not acutely too virulent.

It’s a bit sad to think, but I probably will die alone, when it happens.  Of course, in a sense, everyone dies alone.  Even if you die at the same time as lots of other people, perhaps in some massive catastrophe, you die alone, since it’s not as though you can share the experience with anyone else.

Of course, by that logic, everyone lives alone too.  But maybe that’s just an impression formed by someone who is probably on the autism spectrum and who has gone through a series of reversals* that have left him sundered, at least physically, from the people with whom he used to be able to connect.

Anyway, the point I guess I’m making is that there is something non-futile, or so it seems to me, in dying with your loved ones nearby, for you and sometimes even for them.  I was very disheartened to have arrived too late for my final visit with my father, and could only say goodbye to him after he had died.  I was at least there for my mother’s final day or so, and I think she was aware that I had come.  She was quite out of it, but she interacted with me some.  I tried to start reading The Chasm and the Collision to her, which I had just published not long before…I think.  My recollection may be faulty here.  I have the impression that she just missed reading that, and I think it would have been her favorite of my books.

I don’t think I would have wanted my parents ever to read Unanimity.  It’s just too dark.

I think I may take an Uber to the train this morning.  It’s a bad habit, I know, but I’m still a little wiped, and the prospect of walking to the bus and then from the bus to the train is mildly unpleasant.  If so, I’d better leave soon.  I may write more of this once I get there.

And that’s what I’m doing, just for a short while.  I don’t want to make the post too long, but I figured I’ll let you all know that I got to the train station, and that I even got on an earlier train than I was expecting given that fact, because that earlier train was running late.  That’s a slightly amusing bit of irony, I think.  But I have a weird sense of humor.

Anyway, I’m glad I took the Lyft (not an Uber; my apologies to the branding and marketing people at Lyft) because even walking down the stairs from the bridge over the tracks kind of wiped me out and made me feel a bit breathless.  I wonder if I could have a low-grade lower respiratory infection without having a cough.  It does happen.  A low enough respiratory infection often doesn’t trigger the cough reflex; that tends to involve the upper airways.

Oh, well, who cares?  I’m probably fine, and if I’m not, well, it’s not the worst thing that could happen.  The only people really relying on me are doing so for business purposes, and those purposes can all be fairly easily adjusted.  I’m certainly not crucial or essential for anyone or anything.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I have over a thousand words of gibberish down so far, written on my phone.  I think for tomorrow I’ll try to remember to bring the laptop with me; my thumbs are getting sore.

Again, I hope you all have a happy “day of the god of war”, contradictory though that may seem.  Contradictions can be okay.  And at the same time, they can’t actually exist; they can only be spoken (or written, etc.) they can never be instantiated.

*I suppose it must have been an odd number of reversals, since an even number would have left me going in the original direction, and that’s clearly not the case.