dysthymia

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A short but sour post

Well, here I am again, sitting at the train station after having walked 5 miles to get here, and I’m writing a blog post using my smartphone.  Today, of course, it being Saturday, the trains run less frequently, and also, for unclear reasons, the train I’m taking is boarding on the opposite side from its usual one, the announcement of which is being repeated at rather excessive frequency.  Still, I guess it’s better for it to be overstated than under-announced; that way all those taking the train will be well-informed of the change.

Yesterday at work ended on a frustrating note, in which I just left about half an hour early, because someone had lit sage and wafted that horrible, disgusting scent around.  Now, I’ve tried to make it clear that the smell of sage gives me a headache and actually makes me nauseated; and it’s not as though it’s a necessity for doing business.  So, I was already feeling my usual stress from the noise of all the voices, and the overhead “music”, and I had a very bad day with respect to back pain.  Once I suddenly smelled that crap, and there was even some joking about the fact that it bothered me, I essentially said, “fuck this shit”, and even though it had been raining like crazy, I packed up my backpack and left.

Honestly, I’m just so tired.  If someone lights that shit today, I think I will leave when it happens.  I have to endure the noise of the people all talking and it’s at least arguable that the “music” is necessary or at least useful for business, but the sage is just a disgusting pollutant.  And, no, it doesn’t have any mystical or supernatural properties‒nothing does.  But it can invoke a metaphorical demon in me.

I hate people doing crap like that, at least once they know it is a scent that nauseates me (or anyone else).  But then, I’ve become pretty misanthropic over time, so to a good first approximation, I hate everyone, at least part of the time.  I don’t think I used to be this way.  What’s more, I don’t just have antipathy toward humans, but often tend toward pan-antipathy, which is not hatred of bread (though it includes it) but hatred of everything.

When one hates everything, one can either work to try to destroy everything‒which is a bit of a tall order if one does not have the Infinity Gauntlet‒or one can simply try to escape from everything, either temporarily or permanently.  Admittedly, the notion of “escape” can make it seem like something cowardly to some people who are insecure in their own courage, or who worry what other people think despite hating them.  But that isn’t terribly consistent, logically.

I’m tired.  It’s early morning, and I’m just now on the way to the office, and I’m already so very tired.  I don’t know what to do.  Every day it feels harder to continue.  What’s the point of it?  One thing or another is always frustrating, and very little is rewarding anymore.  I even tried to tempt myself with ice cream or cookies or Pop tarts at the convenience store on the way back to the house last night, but I couldn’t get interested.  I forced myself to get a candy bar in hopes of getting some indulgent, good feeling, but it was just disappointing.

Oh, well.  Life is inherently unsatisfying, as the Buddhists say.  I’m tired of it.

Maybe I’ll get hit by a car or get hit by lightning or something along those lines.  Or maybe I’ll get severely ill, or have a heart attack or a stroke.  It would be nice to have it all taken out of my hands so I don’t have to keep trying.

I don’t know what to do.  And I’m tired, so I’m stopping this post now.  Have a good day.

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Phoning in yet another blog post

Well, here it is, Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I’m doing this one on my phone, because I didn’t feel like bringing the laptop with me when I left the office yesterday.  I had to leave late, because all of a sudden, at the end of the day, three different people got deals, and of course they all had to be processed and recorded‒and fixed, when the first 3 credit cards didn’t go through.  Of course, the people who got those deals were long gone well before things were finished; Cat forbid that they should have to leave late just because they waited until the end of the day to actually put in serious effort.  Cat forbid they should worry about inconveniencing other people.

I had hoped to get the 6:15 pm train and then walk back to the house from the train station while talking to my sister on the phone, but that didn’t work out.  By the time I even left the office it was already well past that train’s time, and the next one is 45 minutes later.  I was too tired and stressed out to talk then, and it was too late to start walking.  I didn’t really do any walking yesterday.

This morning, though, I awoke too early, and after putting it off for a while I finally got up and showered and walked the 5 miles to the station.  And now, I’m on the train.  It would be nice to get to the point where I get an endorphin surge from the walk, but evidently I’m not at that stage yet.

I wish I had something more interesting to write about, so you kind readers could have something interesting to read.  Alas, my creativity seems to be at a local nadir.  As mentioned, I haven’t really read anything this week so far, whether fiction or nonfiction, except a few short blog posts and news stories, though I didn’t get to the end even of most of those.  Likewise, I don’t think I’ve listened to a complete podcast nor finished a full YouTube video, though I’ve started quite a few.  Maybe I finished some on Tuesday in the evening, when I got off work early, but I’m not certain.

Anyway, I’m sorry to be such a drag.  I’m not a good or pleasant person, and I doubt that I ever have been.  Certainly most people who know me have voted with their feet in one way or another.  I ought to follow suit, and just walk away from everything, forever, and for good.

I didn’t even listen to any music or podcasts this morning, other than songs that were running through my head‒mainly The Man Who Sold the World and Ashes to Ashes today, though some others probably peeped in here and there.  Nevertheless, I kept my earphones in.  They’re good to have in place so that other people will understand if you don’t speak or listen to them.  You can even bob and sway a bit, if such is your habit, and people might just assume that you’re listening to music.  I don’t know for sure.  It’s hard to say what, if anything, goes through other people’s minds much of the time.

Oh, by the way, I apologize for not putting in hyperlinks to the sites or locations of the books I mentioned yesterday, which I usually do.  I didn’t really do any of my final usual edit on the site, because I just didn’t care.  I apologize, but I probably will behave similarly today.

Also, by the way, there seems to be some issue with the embedded Twitter sidebar on my site.  It claims I haven’t tweeted anything, which is a damned lie.  Evidently, the twit who now owns Twitter, and the twits he has running it, have fucked it up and made it difficult to connect to it.  If it gets annoying enough for me, I might explore how to fix the embedding, but I’m irritated enough at WordPress themselves for changing their input system for the worse.  This is the problem with constantly trying to update and change everything out of a sense of worry over competition:  while all improvement is change, most change is not an improvement.

Oh, well.  People are stupid.  They probably always will be stupid.  Even the very wealthy and successful are generally idiots, as we see demonstrated all too often.  Even bloggers (such as I) are often idiots, if you can believe such a thing!  No matter how smart someone may be, relative to, say, insects or baboons, or their fellow naked house apes, ignorance is always infinite.

And, on that uplifting note, I’ll stop for today.  It’s at least a shortish post, right?  I hope you all have a nice Friday, and a good weekend.  I expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since I work tomorrow.  I will try not to die before then, since my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday party is tomorrow, and I wouldn’t like to inconvenience him.

Still, there’s only so long I can keep staying alive so as not to cause problems for others.  Goodness knows, most other people don’t seem to have many qualms about inconveniencing me, or anyone else.

Is it any wonder I’m tired of the world?

Anyway, please try to have a nice day.

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Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps, and they that blog see time how slow it creeps

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the long-standing day of what was my weekly blog, back when I was writing fiction that almost no one but my family members would ever read on the other days of the week.

I’m writing this at the house, because I decided to take the bus in to the train this morning, because I already feel over-hot and sweaty and, most importantly, quite mentally fatigued.  I thought I’d give myself a short break and do my walking in the evening today.  That way, at least, I don’t have to carry a change of clothes with me to the office and have it drying out in front of my little desktop fan most of the day.  Not that anyone complained—they didn’t.  But it’s mildly irritating.

I’m getting tired of doing this blog, especially the Thursday one, in which I use a Shakespearean quote that I’ve altered to squeeze in some form of the word “blog”.  Then again, I’m getting tired of doing pretty much everything.

I haven’t read anything at all this week, apart from the occasional snippet of a news article.  I have listened to some podcasts—mainly Sean Carroll’s Mindscape—so far this week.  His solo “AMA” podcasts are often better than the ones in which he interviews someone, though I’ve encountered some interesting people through the latter podcasts, and have bought books by them.  Still, I did that far more often for people on the Sam Harris podcast.  I’m not sure why that is.  Maybe I just have more in common thought-wise with Harris, or I tend to find his guests more interesting.

Still, I like the AMA’s for both of them, the ones for Carroll because he is a physicist, and so people ask him many physics-related questions.  He has more than enough expertise to address them, and he’s a good explainer and thinker.  I think in some ways that Sam Harris is a more careful thinker, a more methodical and cautious one; his long-standing meditation practice seems to serve him well in this.  He strikes me as almost Vulcan in character, though not in any straightforward, simplistic, “emotionless” sense.  In any case, I admire both men and like to listen to their thoughts and listen to their interactions with other intelligent people about interesting topics.

I have Sean Carroll’s textbook on General Relativity, Spacetime and Geometry, but I haven’t read very far in it.  It’s not that it’s too difficult; it’s well written, and everything so far makes good sense and seems clear.  But I just have a hard time forcing myself to go through it, or anything else, really.  I have the book at the office, like I have Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, but I have to sit and actually read them, and there is no good time period during which to sit uninterrupted, even during my supposed lunch time.  And by the time I get back to the house—or early in the morning—I’m all but completely out of mental energy.

I also have Stephen Hawking’s book Euclidean Quantum Gravity (co-written with G.W. Gibbons) that supposedly goes into more detail on some ideas he mentioned in A Brief History of Time, and I’ve also hardly read any of that.  But, again, this week I really haven’t read anything, fiction or nonfiction.  I’m really running out of steam.  Nothing is very interesting.  Nothing is very fun.  I feel mentally exhausted, even though I’m getting more physically fit.  It’s just all very boring.

Maybe it would be better if I weren’t in pain every day, or if I had someone with whom I could really talk about things like physics and whatnot, on a regular basis.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  Well, I’m going nowhere, of course, but that’s more long term.

Maybe I should just Uber to the office, so I don’t even need to walk to the bus stop.  Why not?  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to save money.  I have no future for which to plan or prepare.

I feel a bit like Colonel Slade (I think that was his name) in Scent of a Woman, in that I might as well just spend whatever I have on minor diversions.  I have no interest in most of things in which he was interested, of course—no interest in Ferraris or escorts or fancy restaurants in Manhattan, or the Waldorf-Astoria.  I also have no interest in or expectation to find some high school student to walk me around—thankfully, I am not blind—nor to save my life in dramatic and touching movie-style fashion.

Also, of course, though I do appreciate and enjoy Jack Daniels whiskey from time to time—it’s probably my favorite hard liquor—I do not have a drinking problem, unlike the good Colonel, and I rather quickly get tired of alcohol on the occasions when I do drink it.  I could see myself getting habituated to Valium, in principle—the two times I actually took it, for medical reasons, are the only times in my life when I recall feeling “normal” and at ease in my skin—but I understand the nature of that process, and that such habituation would lead to feeling even worse in between doses.

In any case, I have no access to Valium (or any of its relatives), and have no intention to seek it out.  I wouldn’t trust “black market” Valium even if I knew where to look for it.

Of course, one might well ask, if I don’t really care if I live or die, what does it matter if I take something that isn’t actually Valium?  Well, if I were to be seeking Valium, it would be to try to experience that sense of feeling normal, perhaps for a third and final time in my life, and it would be terribly disappointing to get the wrong thing.  This is a situation in which it is better never to have loved at all than to have loved and lost, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m tired, and this blog post is already longer than I meant it to be.  This week has felt like a million years already.  So much for Pink Floyd’s line “every year is getting shorter”.  Of course, I understand that phenomenon, and I have experienced what is being described in the song.  But lately, time is moving more and more slowly, from a subjective point of view.  I’m dragging my feet, but the sun still just doesn’t keep up, and it certainly doesn’t feel as if it’s racing around to come up behind me again.

Of course, unless I’m secretly immortal, which seems ridiculously unlikely, it is certainly true that I am “one day closer to death” every day, as are we all.  But it still could be a comparatively long way off, at least if I leave it to its own devices.  If I do that, and experience life as I have been for so long, and if I live even only twenty more years (which would still have me die younger than either my mother or father, neither of whom had exercise habits or practices such as I do), it would seem a horrible semi-eternity.

I know, “semi-eternity” doesn’t actually make sense.  It’s akin to multiplying infinity times zero—it’s not a well-defined operation, mathematically.

I did invent a “number” in the past, which I called a “gleeb” for no particular reason, that when multiplied by zero would produce 1, making it, in a sense, “bigger” than infinity, or at least different.  I even worked out a little of the implicit algebra of the gleeb, during some down-time in the education department at FSP West.  It was silly, and it certainly wasn’t useful for any mathematical purposes, but when you realize that it implies that 1/0=gleeb, or 1/gleeb=0, and then start putting those identities into equations and the like, you can get some surprising and amusing results, such as that a gleeb raised to any positive power is just still a gleeb, and that the gleeb is, in a sense, the reciprocal of zero—though again, there’s no use or rigor to it.

Anyway, that’s that.  I want to go back to bed and try to go to sleep, but I’m not going to do that.  I work today, tomorrow, and Saturday, and it’s my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday tomorrow, so I wouldn’t want to interfere with his family’s enjoyment of that.  So, there it is.  I will need to survive until next week at least.  I don’t know if I’ll make it until next Thursday, but I expect I’ll at least write a post a day for the next two days, because that’s just me doing what I do every day.  I hope you have a good remainder of your week, whoever you are that is reading this.

TTFN

tardis-doctor-who

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I’m not tiptoeing but I’m walking a fair amount

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station, having timed my walk nicely to make me just miss the 6:10 train, so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to try to rush to catch it.  When I saw it arrive at the station, which I did, I was a bit too far away to have been able to catch it even had I sprinted.  So, my timing was good.

I’ve been walking to the station every morning this week, including yesterday*, which means that, as of now, I’ve walked roughly thirty miles since Saturday.  That’s no world record or anything, of course—a person in excellent condition could probably walk about thirty miles a day, if that were all they were doing, leaving plenty of time for rest breaks and sleep.  But it’s an improvement for me, at least.  Though I’ve had to adjust my wardrobe, bringing a full change of clothes with me, because by the time I get to the office, I look as though I’ve been swimming, I’ve sweated** so much.  As I think I mentioned before, I carry those little “scent bomb” sprays so I don’t offend anyone around me with my smell, and I’m reliably told that, at least in the short term, my sweat doesn’t actually smell too bad, which is not exactly high praise.

I changed the high E-string on my black Strat on Monday afternoon***, and I even played a little after that.  Nothing serious, it was just nice to hear the sound of the new string, and it was good to feel the stupid sense of pride in accomplishment in having changed it.  That’s rather pathetic, but I guess that should surprise no one, least of all me.

I’ve been wearing bilateral spandex supports both on my knees and my ankles, as I think I mentioned earlier this week.  This seems to be helping to minimize the degree to which the walking exacerbates my back pain, which is a hugely important consideration.  The fact that it helps also raises questions about the specific things that have caused the triggering of worsening back pain at other times when I did not use bilateral supports.

I’m not using back supports, of course—when I was first dealing with my back problems, I rapidly concluded that back braces are worse than useless, at least for me.  But certainly, having a side-to-side differential in the way one walks can produce an irregular torque on one’s lower back that could easily stimulate worsening pain, especially when repeated over a five to six mile walk, which is, after all, about 13,000 steps.

Anyway, that’s about all that’s going on with me.  I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday yesterday, other than to write my related post and to get off work early.  I didn’t sleep particularly well, even for me, because I kept waking up throughout the night thinking that someone was knocking at my door, only to realize quickly that it was just the sound of moderately distant fireworks going off.  There were even people still setting off fireworks when I got up this morning and when I was walking to the train station.

I remember when I was very young that fireworks and related loud noises terrified me horribly, or maybe not so much terrified as just elicited a profound displeasure.  Some of my earliest memories are of being overwhelmed by the noise of fireworks, and of having to be carried (screaming) out of the showing of The Three Caballeros cartoon at Disney World once they started shooting their guns.  I’m still not a big fan of noise, especially chaotic noise (though I like fireworks now for their appearance), and if it were not for the fact that I love music, I think I would happily try to make myself deaf.

Of course, I am enjoying listening to podcasts and audio books while walking, so I would lose that if I were deaf, but it’s not as though such things are crucial.  On Saturday, during my 6.7 mile walk back from the movie theater, I didn’t listen to anything, and that wasn’t a problem.  In fact, thinking back to my above comment about someone walking thirty miles a day, I don’t see how one could listen to something for such a long time without their battery running out quite early in the process.  Walking thirty miles has to take on the order of ten hours (or more), and I’m not sure that anyone’s cell phone could play e-books or podcasts or music for that long, or even close.

Maybe silence is just better.

Anyway, it’s never truly silent, because I’m always listening to tinnitus in my right ear.  But that’s just one of those things.  Even if I were to develop full hearing loss I might still have that tinnitus, like an amputee with phantom limb pain.  If that were the only sound, and I didn’t hear all the stupid noise of people talking at the office and so on, I think it might be worth it.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I don’t think I’ve said or written anything of any use to anyone, but that’s pretty much par for the course for me.  I’m not looking forward to work today, nor am I looking forward to leaving work at the end of the day, nor to much of anything else.

I hope you feel otherwise than I do, though.  I wouldn’t want to try to convince anyone else to feel dysthymic or depressed or to be in despair.  I don’t admire foolish or delusional optimism, of course, but reasonable positivity is hard to denigrate if one is being honest.  I wish I were built to be that way, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case, though it can be quite irritating when one feels rotten.

Oh, well.  There’s no place to ask for a refund or replacement for the suboptimal product that I am.  All I can do is lodge my complaint, as I’m doing here, in case someone out there might be able to fix me, or at least so that no one out there is too surprised if I finally succumb to my mental issues, which could happen pretty much any day, honestly.  I’m more or less always seriously mentally uncomfortable, and it wears me out, and there’s really nothing happening in my life that compensates for it.

I want rest, or at least I want oblivion.  I guess we all have that waiting at some point.

*We worked yesterday for half a day, in case I didn’t mention that during my post.

**That doesn’t feel like a proper word.  The past tense of “sweat” feels like it should be just “sweat”.  However, Word’s spell-checking function is not highlighting “sweated”, so that probably means it’s the standard past tense of that verb.  Weird.

***That was the string I broke when I kicked the guitar in intense frustration (not related to the guitar) a few weeks or so earlier.  I tend to take my frustration out on things that I’ve created or that are important to me, largely because I feel that I have a right to do so, but also because I tend to direct my anger inwardly.  Whenever I get angry, I tend to divert much of it to myself in response to the simple fact that I’ve allowed myself to be angry.  It makes me feel pathetic and weak and that I’m a horrible person.  So I’ll tear up music that I’ve written, or drawings, or other similar personal expressions of creativity, and if I can’t do that, I’ll break things that have some importance to me, and if that doesn’t work, I may just directly hurt myself.  Of course, in kicking the Strat, I covered both of the latter—my right big toe was almost certainly fractured, because it’s still sore even weeks later.  That’s okay.  Fractured toes are just things that need time to heal (not heel).

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It’s the end of the week as I know it, and I feel…

It’s Friday.  This week, that means that I have the next two days off work.  I wish I had something fun to do tomorrow or Sunday, but really, my only goal is getting my laundry done on Sunday morning and trying to get a little bit of extra sleep if I can.

I don’t have any friends with whom to do anything fun, and I don’t want to try to achieve anything interesting or useful with anyone.  And if someone were to surprise me with anything other than, for instance, a trip to some kind of inpatient psychiatric facility (pre-paid), I would not be terribly happy about it, though I guess if it were someone I haven’t seen in a long time I might be happy, depending on who the person is.  But that’s not going to happen, anyway.  Actually, neither of those things is going to happen.  As far as I can see, I’m just going to continue as before.

I guess it’s somewhat noteworthy that this is the last day of June in 2023.  Tomorrow begins a new month, the month of Julius Caesar, huzzah (If June had 31 days, then July would begin on Sunday, and we would have a Friday the 13th in July, but alas, this is not to be).  Rent and power and water and other bills are all coming due.  I don’t really care about all that.  It’s not like I have anything else to do with my money, other than get new Kindle books or what have you.

Even that’s getting harder as time passes.  There just aren’t really any new books in which I’m interested.  I still can’t seem to read any new fiction—or old fiction for that matter, not even my old favorites.  There are no shows I want to watch, and no shows that I really want to rewatch, and very few movies.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind seeing The Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but I don’t want to tempt myself with movie theater popcorn and whatnot.  Going to the movies and not getting popcorn and maybe Goobers and such would just feel terribly sad, quite apart from going alone.  Anyway, I’m trying to avoid such foods.  They tend to make my overall energy and health feel worse, and that’s not something I need, obviously.

I rather wish I had been familiar with Uber and Lyft on that first weekend, when I was considering going to the theater to see GotG, and before I had made my current dietary changes.  At that time, I meant to ride my bike there.  However, I had increasing trouble with my back when using my bike, and then the front tire went flat and everything, and now it’s just sitting there upside down under the overhang, a little way outside my door.  It was yet another waste of money and time and effort.  And it’s too far to walk to any theater to see the movie without arriving sweaty and gross—and, again, right now I’m avoiding movie theater type foods.

I was thinking of walking to the train this morning, but I’m really not up to it.  I’m getting a better handle on shoes for walking—or, technically, boots in this case—at least, and I now have three pairs of identical black lightweight hiking boots, which are good for the ankle support and for the general feeling of having my feet in armor.

But walking is a bit unpleasant just because it’s so very hot and humid right now in south Florida.  This probably comes as no surprise to anyone out there.

I regret coming to Florida, to be honest, though I think the state is quite beautiful, physically, in a great many ways.  I like all the plants and the reptiles and birds and amphibians, and even some of the arthropods (I like spiders, and dragonflies are also very nifty).  But most of the worst things that have happened in my entire life have happened since I’ve come here.

Not to say that there aren’t compensations, of course.  My daughter was born in Florida, and I wouldn’t change her existence or nature for anything.  But it would have been nice, once she was born, to have gone back north.  Imagine if my kids had been able to be in White Plains (where I lived before moving to Florida) and so had been able to go to one of the best public school systems around.

Actually, they’ve both done quite well with respect to their education, as they desire it, and maybe the added pressure of being in a more competitive system would have been unpleasant.  I don’t know.

Anyway, the past is done, so it’s pointless to dwell on changes to it.  And I cannot change the present, obviously, since it’s actually already happened/happening in each given moment.  And the best anyone can do is try to steer toward preferred futures, but it may be, as a matter of physical law, that the future is set and inevitable and/or partially random and unpredictable.

As far as the experience of limited minds and beings such as we are, though, the future feels like something over which we have at least some degree of control, or at least through which we have some ability to steer.  It’s limited steering, of course.  It’s not as if we were in a car and driving; it’s not even as though we’re in a sailboat with a rudder.  It’s more as if we’re surfing, and if we do it as skillfully as we can, we might be able to surf in the direction we more or less would prefer to go.

Me, I think those reefs up ahead look inviting.  There are lots of sharks in the surrounding waters, too.  It would at least be a bit exciting, though perhaps painful and frightening at the time, to go there.  Then again, there’s also that whirlpool over yonder; that might be interesting, too, and probably a bit quicker.

I’m not much of a surfer, however, even metaphorically (non-metaphorically, I’m not a surfer at all).  I don’t think I’m surfing on the chaos of reality anymore, anyway, and I don’t think I have been for a long time.  I think I’m just treading water.  And it’s not as though I can just build myself a surf board, or a raft, or a boat or a ship, or anything else, out of the water in which I’m floundering.  And there are no vessels on the (admittedly quite limited*) horizon (though I do keep trying to send up flares).  So, I’m kind of just stuck here, treading away, until I finally tire out and go under.  I don’t know what else to do, but I’m already terribly fatigued.  I guess it’s “good” that the ocean water is salty**, or else it would be harder work to stay afloat.  Or maybe it would be better if it weren’t, so I could tire out more quickly and just have everything done.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that.  I’m sorry, it’s not an interesting blog post.  I think I’ll head out now.  Maybe I’ll get an Uber or Lyft to the train station.  I feel too lazy even for the bus.  We’ll see.

Have a good weekend, please, if you’re able.  If you’re with friends and family, for goodness sake, don’t take them for granted.  Not that you probably do.  Anyway, thanks for reading.

*I say this because, if one were treading water, one’s head would only be a foot or so above sea level, and so the horizon is very short, being a function of the height above the surface and the radius of the Earth.  Thus, as your height above the surface goes to infinity, your horizon asymptotically approaches half of the planet, though of course you would be having trouble with the limits of angular resolution and the amount of light dropping off as the distance squared and so on.  If the Earth were flat—which it is not—the horizon, even from a foot above the ocean, would be indefinitely large, limited only by structures that got in the way, and any haziness that attenuates light.  If the Earth were flat, then from the top of Mount Everest, with a good enough telescope, you could see everywhere on the planet.  You can’t, of course.  The world is round.  This has been understood for thousands of years, contrary to popular conceptions about the ignorance of people in the past.  Eratosthenes knew it 2200 years ago, and even used clever geometry to measure the Earth’s circumference, to within a few percent of the modern best measurement.

**Oh, by the way, did you see the recent reports about the shifting of Earth’s axis (a very small one, but real and measurable) that’s been caused by redistribution both from melting of glaciers and from the extensive pumping of ground water and the redistribution of that and the glacier water into the ocean?  It’s interesting that I was just talking about the changing angular momentum of the Earth by such things shortly before that report came out.  It makes me feel almost clever, though I did have a bit of a self-deprecating (though far from unhappy) head-slap moment when they mentioned the changes due to depletion and redistribution of ground water.  That had not occurred to me.  It’s always nice to have new facts and notions pointed out that make such sense.

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“Don’t think I need anything at all.”

“No, don’t think I need anything at all.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and this morning I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer, which at the moment of writing this sentence is, in fact, resting atop some form of my actual lap.  Actually, it’s more on my right thigh and lower left leg, the latter of which is crossed over the former in what’s sometimes called a “figure four” posture, rather than being a true, traditional “lap”, like you might find in Lapland (presumably at discount prices).  Unfortunately, though useful, that figure four posture puts strain on my left knee—at least if it’s in any kind of sore state, which it is at the moment—so I’m probably going to have to switch that out.

I’m really tired, even for me.

I’m tired of trying.  I feel that I’ve been trying hard all my life, and in many objective senses, I honestly have.

I was never a slacker in school.  I graduated with all “As”, I was class valedictorian, I was a National Merit Scholar, all that bullshit.  I got a full ride scholarship to Cornell, without having anyone with any kind of real background knowledge or connections about how to apply to a high-level university or anything.  We certainly had no “connections”.

Anyway, you all know all that stuff:  blue collar town, scholarship to college, heart defect discovered and heart surgery done during my first summer of college, significant mood and (temporary) cognitive side-effects from open-heart surgery, leading to switched major.

Graduated with honors*, had a temporary (but severe) estrangement from my parents** due to issues involving my now-ex-wife.  Was administratively discharged from the Navy for health reasons related to the heart defect and also to my mood disorder.  Was not able, at that age, to finish my novel-in-progress, and so decided to go to medical school.  Got the distribution requirements easily enough, went to medical school on a partial scholarship, had some pretty bad trouble with mood disorder during third year or so.  Did residency, had kids, moved to Florida to start practice.

Had a back injury, with consequent chronic pain, worsening mood disorder, divorce, “temporary disability”.  Tried to do at least part-time medical work to help other people with chronic pain, but was not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to certain things that are beyond the straightforward (i.e., trying to help people with chronic pain but not realizing that some people—some patients and people with whom I worked, as well as the State itself—had ulterior motives of one kind or another) and thus not even recognizing that there was a chance that I could be arrested or charged with anything, since I wasn’t trying to do anything wrong…I was just doing what I saw as the essence of my job (trying to relieve suffering), and had no desire even for personal enrichment.  Seriously.  I gave away most of what I made to other people.  I’ve done that a lot, and consistently, throughout much of my life.

I’m stupid that way.

Then, of course, I went to jail and prison, and I haven’t seen my kids in over ten years.  I haven’t spoken (in any sense) with my son in that time***.  I’m still in chronic pain, my mood disorder is as bad as ever or worse, and I’ve recently discovered that I’m possibly/probably on the autism spectrum, which would explain a lot of my not understanding or expecting the issues that led me to be arrested, among other things.

It probably also explains part of why I had so much trouble with (for instance) dictating charts after I went into private practice.  I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that last bit here, but that was a nightmare for me.  I had the most horrible time trying to dictate chart notes, and always ended up getting backed up—a lot—no matter where I was in practice.  It seems all the other doctors and everybody just loved dictating charts; they thought it was so much easier than writing.  For me it was like trying to build a sand castle using knitting needles.  But I didn’t understand why I had so much trouble with it, I thought I was just being lazy or weak or something, and I just had to force myself to learn to do better, so I kept on trying, and I kept on getting backed up (severely) over and over again.

It’s a stupid idea, anyway.  Writing and speaking are two different kinds of processes, and organization and recording of medical notes is better done in writing.  Also, that way there’s also not delay in getting the notes into the chart.  I couldn’t speak and say the things I’m writing here with anything approaching the speed and clarity with which I am typing them.

Nowadays, I think most medical charting is done using portable computers, which—if the system is good—is probably an excellent option.

Anyway, all that leads up to now, when I’m living alone in a single room (with attached shower/bathroom), in a house that is not my home, working at a job that I’ve worked at basically just to keep myself alive and fed while writing fiction…but now I’m no longer writing fiction, I’m no longer doing music, I’m no longer doing anything apart from this blog.

Tomorrow would have been my 32nd wedding anniversary.  Though I’ve been divorced longer than I was married, it’s still an important, or at least consequential, day to me, though I’m guessing it isn’t as important to my ex-wife.  I don’t know, I think I’m a member of a species that mates for life to a single mate (though clearly that was not the case for her).  I certainly have no desire to get romantically involved with anyone else ever again—it’s not worth the risk.  I also can’t imagine anyone wanting to get involved with me.  The few minor attempts I made after my divorce were laughably bad.

There’s nothing good coming down the pike.

And no one is going to help me, I’m pretty sure of that.  I’ve sent out coded and not-so-coded distress signals, here and elsewhere, over and over again, in various ways, some of which are perhaps opaque, but others of which I think are rather obvious.  Maybe it’s just a case of some form of “the bystander effect”, I don’t know.

I’ve tried to do therapy again**** (online this time), with limited and very temporary effects, and I’ve called 988 and spoken to the very lovely person who was there—they deserve all the plaudits and support they can be given.  (I’ve tried to call it more than once, the first occasion of which involved a misadventure due to T-Mobile’s bad service at the time).

It’s all ultimately not getting me anywhere.  I’m not accomplishing anything or contributing anymore to the net worth of civilization.  I’m certainly not contributing to my own well-being, because I don’t think that even exists.  I’m just adding my little, inconsequential bit of entropy to the eventual (probable) heat death of the universe.

I need to die.  I’m just having a hard time working up the nerve to do it.  I wish I had a drug or alcohol problem, because the use of those is associated with higher rates of suicide, and even “accidental” overdose death, but I don’t seem prone to such things.  I have large bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen and naproxen that I could take, but such means are unreliable, and the process tends to be quite drawn out.  I don’t own any guns anymore.  I did buy two helium tanks and a non-rebreather mask and tubing, but setting that up and applying it turned out to be difficult, and I didn’t have a good place to do it.  I hate the idea of leaving a mess for innocent people, though that may be unavoidable.  That’s also the main reason for not just cutting various arteries open after ensuring that I’m adequately anticoagulated—I’m not afraid of blood (and I’m demonstrably not afraid of cutting myself), but I know other people are, and I don’t really want to traumatize others more than I already have in my life, if I can help it.

I had a rather strong bourbon and diet-Pepsi last night; alcohol is supposed to help one harm oneself, but it’s just made me feel more tired today than usual because of worse-than-usual sleep.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I don’t know if or what I’ll write after this.  I hope the rest of you are feeling better than I am.

*After initially missing the deadline for my honors thesis, thinking it was due a month later than it was, and having to write the whole thing—52 pages!—in one weekend.  I might have gotten more than a basic cum laude if I’d been better able to manage deadlines and all that, but it was never my own idea to try for honors, anyway.  Not that I regret it, but it was not my ambition.

**And more indirectly, in consequence, with the rest of my family, since they were caught between.  I feel very bad about that, and about the time I missed with them and my parents, all over someone who left me in the end.

***His choice, not mine.  We have exchanged one email in that time, and he sends along his thanks via his sister for birthday presents and the like.  He’s a good person, and I love him and am proud of him and do not blame him.  He’s not much better at dealing with things like this and with other people and with radical changes of circumstance than I am, and I think he was badly hurt by everything that happened.

****I’ve gone to at least four or five therapists, and I’ve even been (very briefly) hospitalized once for depression while I was out on bail.  I’ve tried at least seven different anti-depressants with mixed results, at best.  And here I am.

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In Diana, we are simply passing through history.

It’s Tuesday morning, now, as I’m writing this, which makes sense, since yesterday was Monday.

In case anyone was wondering about the title to yesterday’s blog post:  After deciding not to try to work any reference to any song titles or lyrics relating to Monday into the title‒though I did link to that Carpenters’ song‒I thought I would reference the moon, nevertheless, perhaps as some metaphor for madness.  That seemed appropriate for my blog, since I’m rather steadily mentally deteriorating.  So I figured, who better to give a quote about the moon and madness than Shakespeare?

My first thought, though, led me just to the classic Heinlein novel, which I had thought had been a direct quote, albeit not from any play I had read.  But it wasn’t, apparently.  So I dug around a bit and found a quote from Henry IV part 1‒which I have read, but quite a long time ago‒and took the appropriate lunar reference.

However, I didn’t want simply my usual, slightly altered Shakespearean quote, though that might make up for last Thursday.  The fact that the original line references Diana* made me think of turning it into a Japanese “quote” and replacing Diana with Tsukuyomi, the traditional Japanese moon god or goddess (more often the latter in manga and anime depictions) sibling of Amaterasu, the Japanese god (or goddess) of the Sun/Dawn (obviously a very important deity in the land of the rising sun).

I can’t claim the Japanese expertise necessary to have translated by myself the quote into yesterday’s title, at least not without a lot of work and probably making a mess of things, so I used Google Translate.  I do know enough Japanese to have been able to tell, basically, that it was a decent translation.  I originally planned to leave it in the Japanese characters‒I had gone as far as to remove Google’s transliteration of “Tsukuyomi” or “Tsukiyomi” into katakana** and put in the actual kanji/hiragana characters‒but then I decided that would too pretentious, even for me***, and so I left it in the transliteration into romaji.

For the picture, I used a version of Tsukuyomi found in the brilliant and beautiful manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by the unparalleled manga team CLAMP, creators of such works as Cardcaptor Sakura among many other (in my opinion) even better and more beautiful works.  I altered the picture, though, to make it darker and more eerie and sinister-seeming, since that seemed appropriate for a moon goddess as a representative of madness, as the Shakespearean reference seems to imply, and which certainly seems most pertinent when it comes to me.

Anyway, I’m sure that’s all quite boring, but I thought the title might seem strange and obscure enough to merit an explanation, and while I was at it I ran off at the keyboard.  That, at least, is not too unusual.

I’m writing this on my phone again, by the way.  Yesterday I decided not to carry my laptop back to the house, because I knew I planned to walk from the train to the house (which I did) while talking on the phone to my sister (which I also did), and I figured I’d keep my load light-ish, just to make the process as pleasant as could be.  It wasn’t raining, which was good, but it was rather hot and, of course, humid.  Fortunately, having someone to whom to talk makes the trip pass rather quickly, subjectively speaking.  In objective time, it took slightly longer than usual for 5 miles for me, which makes perfect sense.  I was talking while walking, after all.

I’m afraid I have to report that I am still pretty stressed out at work, and when I am not at work, and just in general, other than when I was talking to my sister.  I had a third quasi-chamber locked and loaded already yesterday, if you’ll remember my reference and metaphor/analogy from the other day.  At one point, I decided just to take it, which I did, and that little bitty minor risk did calm me down a bit.

I’m still just quite, quite depressed, and I guess I’m also what would be called terribly anxious.  Though it doesn’t feel like “fear” of any kind exactly to me as much as it does a kind of mental itchiness and swelling tension, as though most things in the world give me a central nervous system neurologic allergic reaction that makes me want to peel myself out of my own metaphorical skin.  I’m not afraid of anything per se; it’s more as though I’m being squeezed and stretched at all times in numerous directions in some mental vector space, and it’s both crushing me and tearing me apart, slowly and sadistically.  I find nearly every interaction‒especially ones involving interruptions to something I’m already doing‒to be incredibly irritating and stressful.

I feel a bit like an injured and sick feral cat that’s being approached and molested by various different gawking people (no good Samaritans) and other animals when my instinct is to want to be left alone and unmolested, so I can succumb to the elements and just die.

It’s all really very uncomfortable‒though there are pleasant interludes, at least, as noted above about talking to my sister‒and I really don’t think I can last much longer.  I need to escape, but there’s nowhere in this world, in this life, to which I can safely flee.  Not as far as I know, anyway.  There’s no rescue shelter out there that’s going to take in and try to help and heal and find a home for as diseased and damaged a stray as I am; certainly I see no sign of one, and I can’t just keep waiting and hoping.

Well…I can, or I could, in principle, but there is no percentage in doing so as far as I can see.  I’ve been waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping for quite a long time, meanwhile subsisting on the delusion that some nominal, abstract “fact that people somewhere in some abstract kind of sense kind of care about whether I live or die” can actually make any literal, physical difference.  But, like “thoughts and prayers”, it seems not to matter in actual fact (though it is appreciated, and I don’t mean to denigrate such thoughts).  Or, if it matters, it doesn’t matter enough to keep me going indefinitely.  I’m a miserable person to be around, and I’m a miserable person to be.  I just need to screw my courage to the sticking place and finally take more decisive action than exposing myself to a slight risk of a GI bleed.

Real daggers still work against daggers of the mind, but a bare bodkin is an intimidating thing to turn upon oneself, as Hamlet knew.  But I need to do something.  I can’t just keep waiting and deluding myself that something in me will get better.

Oh, well.  Time to head to the bus stop.  Maybe the walking will help my morning back and leg pain.

Have a good day.

*Not Wonder Woman, but, unless I’m mistaken, the counterpart to the Greek god (or goddess) Artemis, sibling of Apollo.

**Which seemed a dreadful bit of disrespect toward such an important deity, treating it as if it were a foreign-introduced word.

***If you can imagine.

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Tsukiyomi no mori no ban’nin, hikage no shinshi, tsuki no tesaki ni narimashou.

It’s Monday morning again.  I can only think of two songs off the top of my head that provide fun references to the day, and I think I’ve used them both more than once, so I’m not going to do that here.  I suppose I could refer to the Carpenters’ song about Rainy Days and Mondays, but that’s a slightly gloomy and glum song, though pretty (and, to be fair, with some upbeat aspects), and I can do gloomy and glum just fine by myself, thanks*.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful, which is not a bad attribute for a day off.  I did my laundry, which was good, and I also got some rest‒I took several naps throughout the day, which, again, is good.  In all fairness, that’s pretty much what I do throughout most nights:  taking lots of short naps and waking up in between.  I even did that on Saturday night after taking two Benadryl before going to sleep.  In fact, I started having a hard time even dozing back off at about 4 am on Sunday.  But that’s just too early to be getting up and starting laundry, even for me.  So I toughed it out until about 6:30.

You’ve got to be hard on yourself sometimes.

Oh, I’m writing this post on my phone this morning, because I just felt too lazy to bring the laptop with me on Saturday.  There was no particular reason to avoid it.  I just didn’t want to bother.  I’m not sure what I’ll do today; I don’t want to force myself to decide in advance.

I’m somewhat disappointed to report that I don’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects, at least so far, of the little experiments that I began the other day.  It’s not impossible that some could accrue yet, but I think I shouldn’t get my hopes up.  It would be such a weight off if I could just start having a GI bleed or something.  Maybe I’m too half-assed about it.

Rat poison used to be primarily comprised of “super-coumadins” in diatomaceous earth**.  That might have been a useful option.  Nowadays, though, most rat poisons (I have checked) seem to be the new neurologically targeted stuff that’s highly specific toward rat nervous systems, and much less dangerous for humans and dogs and cats if they accidentally ingest it.  I know, that’s a good thing (unless you’re a rat or love rats).  But it’s disappointing if you want to have readily available options for encouraging your own self to bleed without a prescription.

Thank goodness aspirin was discovered millennia before the FDA or DEA and has never been used to “get high” by anyone***.  If it were discovered in the modern world, it would never be available without a prescription‒not in the US, anyway.  You even have to go to the effing pharmacy counter to get pseudoephedrine for your cold and allergy symptoms, because some people turned a certain amount of it into amphetamines of one kind or another.

Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  Let’s keep a useful and comparatively harmless medicine**** restricted in availability for people who want to use it for legitimate reasons, in order to prevent rare people from turning it into a product other rare people use because they like it.  Remember, illicit drugs aren’t forced on their users.  People buy them because they want them, just like people do with fast food and candy and beer and tobacco and fast cars and the like, none of which are without drawbacks.

Ah, to hell with it.  It would be nice to improve human civilization using reasoned action with actual measurement of end-points and serious attempts to obtain good data, with a goal of improving things overall, in general, for everyone.  But that’s not how humans are built, is it?

I really want to check out of this madhouse hotel.  It’s noisy and garish and smelly and loud, and it’s almost impossible for me to get a good night’s sleep in it.  And I can’t seem to find anything to do here that’s any fun.

Oh, well.  Maybe things will get better this week.  Try not to laugh; that’s me attempting my closest approach to cautious optimism.  I’m not very good at it.

Princess_Tomoyo

*The “pretty” part might be a personal deficiency in my work, I’ll admit, but sometimes you’ve got to let gloomy and glum just be full-on ugly, and not try to sweeten the hit.  I can do that.

**Coumadin is a brand name of warfarin, an anticoagulant that interferes with vitamin K dependent aspects of the coagulation cascade (is that factors 1, 2, 7, and 9, or am I misremembering?) and of course, diatomaceous earth is basically composed of bajillions of microscopic silica-based skeletons of ancient marine organisms (diatoms), which have tiny little spiky projections everywhere.  I believe that the idea was that the diatoms would make lots of little perforations in rat GI tracts, but I don’t know that it ever did much.  Super-coumadins are more than able to induce various kinds of massive hemorrhaging on their own.

***That factor seems to be the main issue with a great many of the drugs that are illegal, if not all of them.  If people can, at will, do something that will make themselves feel good, even if only temporarily, then what carrots and sticks can keep them being fully productive cogs in the spontaneously self-assembled machine?  Caffeine, on the other hand, is by far the most widely used and abused drug in the world but is quite legal‒and Starbucks is the world’s largest drug pusher, followed closely by Dunkin Donuts and then McDonald’s, or those were the rankings the last time I checked.

****The over-the-counter decongestants available are not as effective, are not as long-acting even in slow-release forms, and are associated with significant and sometimes acutely dangerous elevations of blood pressure, even at their usual dosages.  Blood pressure elevation is, generally, only a theoretic concern with pseudoephedrine; I never saw it actually cause secondary hypertension in anyone.

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What are the odds that I’ll get out of this tunnel?

Well, it’s now Saturday‒the first Saturday of official summer in the northern hemisphere, (and of winter, in the southern).  I hope you readers out there have something fun planned with your families today and/or tomorrow.  You might as well.  If you can find an excuse to celebrate together, you should do it.

I am writing this post‒the first draft, at least‒on my smartphone, because I didn’t bring my laptop computer to the house with me.  Instead, I brought my hardcover copy of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  It was an odd decision, I think.  Recent history has not shown me prone to reading real books at the house when I’m off work.

I think maybe it’s wishful thinking.  I guess I figure that, if I want to read any of it at the office during my down time, I can fire up the desktop version of the Kindle App* and read it there.  Since it’s basically a pdf, the limitations of the desktop app won’t matter much, and it should be big enough to see and read on the desktop screen (though I haven’t tried yet).

If that doesn’t work‒assuming I even try it‒I can always just bring the book back.

Anyway, that’s not really what I want to write about today, but I’m not sure how much I should write about what I feel like discussing, because I worry about the possible reaction.  I also, oddly, worry about a lack of reaction.  Maybe part of me is hoping to raise an alarm.  Maybe this is yet another of my hundreds of cries for help, this one a bit more strident, since the others haven’t worked.  My mind is in a peculiar state, even for me.

Anyway, that thing I briefly mentioned near the end of the post yesterday…well, I decided to do some minor trial runs of it, with slightly live ammo, so to speak.  At moments when something particularly stressed me out, I just quietly did that little thing.

I won’t get into details.  It’s nothing very dramatic, really.  If it were a game of Russian Roulette (which it isn’t, at least not literally), it would be one using a single loaded chamber in a revolver with, I don’t know, maybe a hundred chambers in the cylinder.  Probably more, maybe slightly less, it’s hard to say.  But the risk involved right now isn’t very high.  Still, it accumulates, as risk does, when iterations are independent.

If the chance of something happening on the first try is 1%, or .01 (or 1-.99, which is the chance of it not happening) then if you spin the cylinder twice, the total chance of the thing happening is 1-(the cumulative chance of it not happening), or 1-(.99 x .99), or 1-.9801, or .0199.  That’s close to 2%, but it’s not quite there, and the new, added increments get smaller and smaller.  Otherwise, after a hundred goes you’d be certain to have something happen, and with independently randomized iterations, that isn’t the way it works.  After a hundred random tries at something in which each attempt gives a 1% chance of the event, your actual likelihood of the event happening once is about 63%, if my figuring is correct.  Someone please check my math**.

Now, if one is playing traditional Russian Roulette without spinning the barrel between each trigger pull, then by the end of six pulls, the odds are essentially certain‒barring misfires‒that someone will “win”.  Whereas if you spin the cylinder (randomly and fairly) each time, the odds are, let me see…about 66.5% after 6 tries.

The point I’m making is that it’s not a high chance, but it gives me some sense of control and possible “escape” each time, and I think that helped calm me a bit yesterday.  I even think I might have slept a bit better last night.  That might be just because I was feeling physically a little improved since the previous day, though.

I did wake up quite a number of times throughout the night, each time filled with frankly absurd anxiety about something, but I have no idea what.  That’s just what usually happens, though.  I also woke up once coughing my brains out from a reflux/regurgitation event, but I think I know the dietary indiscretion behind that, and I don’t mean to repeat it.  That’s a horrible feeling.

Anyway, I think I feel slightly more level…though it’s still very early in the day, and just thinking about it while (now) waiting for the train seems to belie that possibility, as I feel tension and anxiety building rather quickly.

It’s so frustrating.  I just can’t ever seem to feel in any way at ease or relaxed or at home.  I really do feel sometimes like I don’t belong on this planet, or even in this universe, like there’s been some meta-cosmic mix-up.  You would think that one would get more used to the world after one had been in it for a longer period of time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Possibly at least some of my former ability to handle it was due to the presence of my family and friends, who could provide good examples and smooth out rough edges and act as allies who helped when I was at a loss.  When needing to rely solely my own resources, I think I just get worn down.  It also doesn’t help that, despite my having worked quite hard all my life to succeed and thrive in this place, and having achieved quite a lot, it just wasn’t enough, and everything all went to shit, largely due to me just not seeming to get other people and what they meant or needed or intended or what.

Maybe I was just unlucky.  My back injury and chronic consequent pain really set the boulder rolling downhill.  Without that, maybe I would have been fine.

That boulder has been rolling for a long time, now.  I’m on more level-ish ground than I was, but only because it’s nearing the bottom of the valley; most of its prior, impressive height has long since been lost.  If this were a metaphor for energy states of quantum fields, I’d say it’s approaching the vacuum state, or at least a pseudo-vacuum; I can’t see the shape of the whole curve.  Maybe at this point I’m effectively already in the vacuum state, and any seeming movement is just quantum jitters.

Sorry, I’m skipping from metaphor to metaphor like a grade-schooler playing metaphor hopscotch.  How’s that for a meta-metaphor***?  

Anyway, I’m not getting anywhere with this right now, except heading toward the office.  But maybe, just maybe, I’ve put in motion things that will give me a higher chance of quantum-tunneling to a lower, true ground state, where I can rest, or at least stop being constantly in pain and anxious and depressed and lonely and futile.  Or maybe‒there’s always that foolish hope‒someone will help me.  Though it’s hard to blame anyone for not doing so.  I’m a rotten person who isn’t really worth the effort.  I know I don’t like me.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I hope, again, that you all have a nice first weekend of summer.  Or winter.  Either way, if you have friends and/or family with whom to spend your time, please make the most of your opportunity.

*Which, by the way, sucks compared to the smartphone/tablet version, and is very frustrating.  If any of you out there are on the development team at Amazon for this, or have access to those who are, please let them know that they need to improve their product relative to the other versions.

**Don’t bother accounting for the possibilities of more than one occasion of the outcome happening.  We’re talking about Russian Roulette‒if one “event” happens, there will be no more spins.

***Since I used the word “like” I guess it’s technically a simile about metaphors.  That’s not as much fun, though.

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I was out sick yesterday – again. Or is it “still”?

Okay, I’m writing this post—the first draft, anyway—on my laptop, and actually on my lap, because for right now, I’m sitting on the piano bench* in my room at the house.  I’ve decided not to try to walk to the train this morning, since I’m still feeling under the weather from yesterday.

As you may know, I did not write a post yesterday, and as you may have guessed, this was because I was out sick.  I considered getting onto my WordPress account just long enough to write a pseudo-post titled, “NO POST TODAY”, with a single line in the main body:  “I am out sick.”  However, I didn’t feel up to doing even that, and frankly, I don’t think it really matters to anyone out there, anyway.

Anyway, I was out with a very bad headache and fogginess and some nausea, but it didn’t feel like a typical migraine that I might have.  I suspect it might be a reaction to the fact that, upon arriving at the house, thoroughly exhausted, on Wednesday night, I took a rapid-release pill of melatonin.  I was trying to help myself sleep, if it was possible.

I’ve tried melatonin more than once in the past, and I’ve gotten results that generally made me feel worse rather than better, but I was at the end of my rope, or at least near the end, and I just wanted to be able to sleep.  I knew that if I took Benadryl on a work night, I’d feel groggy and slow for most of the next day, so I didn’t want to do that.

The melatonin may have ended up helping me start sleeping sooner and staying asleep longer—it’s difficult for me to tell—but it did not help me feel in any way better rested.  I awoke—well before my alarm, still—after still not having gone to sleep before eleven or so, despite my horrible exhaustion, feeling absolutely rotten, and having chills, though if I had a fever it was low-grade.  I also felt a bit sick to my stomach, though I did not throw up.

I had reconsidered melatonin after encountering a few stray articles in various sources indicating that melatonin might be useful for sleep disturbances among autistic people—these articles might have been focused more on autistic children, as most of the research is—and since I might have “Asperger’s” to use the relegated term, I thought maybe it would be worth another try.

Of course, Matthew Walker, in his book Why We Sleep, the best popular scientific book I’ve encountered on the subject, said that while melatonin may be good for jet lag and the like, it doesn’t seem to be useful for chronic sleep disorders**.  Still, he was speaking generally, and about the human population, not about changelings and replicants and mutant, weirdo strangers like me, whatever I am, so I thought maybe it would be worth something.

I don’t think I’m likely to try it again, at least not anytime soon.

The most sensible thing for me, probably, would be just to give up.  I’m just not going to be able to get a good night’s sleep ever again, not without the aid of significant pharmaceuticals, and then it won’t really be a good night’s sleep, since pharmaceuticals of all kinds interfere with natural sleep functions.

We don’t know quite what all those are, but sleep appears to be incredibly important for creatures with nervous systems, since every single one of which we are aware spends a significant amount of its time in that semi-inert, quite vulnerable state.  You would think, if it were possible to go without it, evolution would have produced some creature that used that option.  But even marine mammals like whales and dolphins sleep, though I understand that they do so with only half their brains at a time.

There is even a mouse (or vole of some variety) in the far north that is capable of literally going into a kind of suspended animation for months at a time, lowering its heart rate and body temperature nearly to zero (C) and decreasing the freezing tendency of its bodily fluids, and basically shutting down like a sci-fi astronaut.  But it has to rouse itself from this cryo-stasis periodically to sleep!  It needs to wake up from suspended animation so it can sleep or else its brain will suffer!

So, again, sleep is very important, and I’m certainly not getting anything like enough of it, and never in uninterrupted spans of more than maybe an hour at a stretch.  I think I must be missing out on some of the dreaming process, too, since I don’t remember dreams at night, even though I wake up quite frequently, and you would think I would sometimes do so during REM cycles.

Also, almost as soon as I attempt meditation, once I focus on my breath and am still for a moment, I begin experiencing strange courses of thought and images and stories that are quite reminiscent of dreams, as if my brain had been champing at the bit to get running with them at the first opportunity.

As I say, I don’t expect to find the answer or solve the problem.  I would just like to reset or else unplug the game at this point.  It’s long since ceased to be fun, and it’s getting more and more tedious.

I came up with an interesting possible means of shutting down the game the other night—Wednesday night, actually—and I made a test run of the delivery system that was encouraging***.  I may do another test today, and in the meantime I’m going to consider possible payloads, though I have at least one main idea that I mean to try primarily.

It comes down to a thing I recall from reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  I don’t remember which of the books it was in, but it was  almost certainly one of the first two, and probably The Illearth War.  Thomas Covenant is telling one of his dreadfully dark true stories of the “real” world, about a man from India who was diagnosed with leprosy, and who killed himself during his flight to go to the Leprosarium in Louisiana, after having lost his whole family because of his diagnosis.

Covenant makes the interesting observation that it seems much easier—at least at first—to commit suicide by means that are typical for another culture but are not typical of your own, because they don’t feel as real to you, and so the barrier to their initiation is lower.  I think there is something to that insight, though it must also be balanced against the observed effect that publicly well-known suicides, especially of celebrities, etc., tend to make certain methods feel more normal, more “acceptable”, and like more “reasonable” approaches for people tending in that direction.

Like most things in the world, the system is complex.

But, anyway, my idea is neither really from another culture, nor typical of modern American culture.  It has some antecedents in some old-fashioned things, and its effects would be potentially delayed, which is part of the whole “lowering the activation energy wall” notion.  But it’s really sort of a “uniquely my own” kind of thing, which seems appropriate.

I don’t seem to be able to connect with any other people around me; they don’t understand me and I certainly don’t understand them.  It seems reasonable, or at least predictable, that I would do something atypical or even unique.  It would at least be nice to end things on some original type of note, ironically.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress—probably, anyway.  We’ll see what happens, I guess.  To paraphrase Yoda, the future is always in motion.  Though that may not actually be true, depending on how much (if at all) reality departs from pure determinism, but from the local, “human” point of view, that’s the way it feels, since we’re always simulating the future in our heads as our means of trying to shape it and to guide our own actions.  It feels as though many different things are possible, even if in actuality they are not.

Neo took the red pill, and for the character it no doubt would have felt as if he made a choice that could have gone the other way, but no matter how many times you rewind and replay that moment, it always turns out the same.  Reality may be just like that, only more so.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m working tomorrow, so you can reasonably expect a blog post from me tomorrow morning, barring the unforeseen (see above regarding predicting the future and so on).  I hope the rest of you out there have a good day.

*Such is its official name, though no piano has ever sat upon it.

**If memory serves.  It’s been a bit since I read the book, though I used both the print and the audio version, so I got a double whammy.  Anyway, it’s possible I’m misremembering.

***No, this wasn’t what caused any of my symptoms on Thursday morning.  The delivery system is inert, of this I am convinced beyond what I consider a reasonable doubt.  My “Bayesian prior” is certainly over 90%, anyway.