dysthymia

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I have NO idea what this post is really about

Sorry about yesterday’s blog post; it went off the rails pretty quickly, since I was feeling so grumpy and sleep-deprived and everything.  And, of course, when I get grumpy and angry towards the world and other people, that ends up making me angry at myself, because I don’t especially like my tendency to be so angry.  It becomes a bit of a vicious cycle, I guess.

You would think that being aware of it would mean I could avoid it happening, but I think everyone knows, at least implicitly, that the mind and its habits are not so easily malleable as all that.  Actually, come to think of it, that’s probably a good thing.  We don’t want to be too susceptible to outside suggestion or to changes in major aspects of our personality.

I’ve just been having a lot of trouble, as regular readers will know, with my dysthymia/depression, and with the insomnia that’s probably related, and the apparent Asperger’s thing that’s probably underlying all of the above, given how long-term they’ve all been.  And, of course, this time of year is worse than others, with its long nighttime—though I like the night when I’m feeling healthy—and all the holiday-related stuff, which reminds so many people, like me, of the fact that the people they care about aren’t anywhere nearby and/or don’t want to see them.

I think the ease with which people are now able to distribute themselves around the globe, to live in new places far from where they grew up, and all that, is definitely a mixed blessing.  It’s great for fighting against xenophobia, and probably helps protect against tribalism; cultural sharing and exposure lets one appreciate the breadth of experience of living in civilization as well as how similar all civilizations and cultures are below some certain level of superficial difference*.  And, of course, innovations discovered in one place can spread to others, making more people in more places prosper.

But on the other hand, people tend to grow up and go off to work or school, and it’s much easier than it used to be to go live in different parts of a country—or even in a different country completely—and perhaps even to marry someone who is also from another, third part of the country, and move to someplace else, away from both their “roots”, and from the semi-automatic social support of families, immediate and extended.  For people who have a difficult time forging new connections—and who have difficulty dealing with and maintaining long-distance connections with people they knew before—it can be very discombobulating**.

And then, of course, if other changes have happened with those back home, and that person has new ties to a new local area, and if some of those ties are broken and others are stretched—by divorce and personal health issues, for instance—then one can be left rudderless, especially if one has an inherent difficulty with human social connections that was not so much of a problem in younger life because the person was in the same place, with the same people, during that person’s whole developmental process.

This is all hypothetical, of course***.

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe it’s just mainly that I’m tired and sad because of the season and my long-term mood disorder and possible/apparent neurodevelopmental disorder, and that the place and environment I’m in is a mind desert.

I mean, this is the state where Mar-a-Lago and its resident whiny troll live, and where a governor like Ron DeSantis can seem comparatively clear-headed (next to some other potential presidential candidates, anyway), and where Jeb Bush was actually a comparatively intellectual and open-minded former governor.  It’s a weird, weird place.  Unfortunately, for the most part it’s not weird in any of the good ways that a place can be weird.  It’s certainly no Greenwich Village.  It’s certainly no wellspring of new and interesting ideas, at least not as far as I’ve noticed or been able to sense, despite hopeful looking.

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe Florida in general, and south Florida in particular, is a hotbed of intellectual vigor and innovation, where ideas from around the world and spanning the cosmos in their scope come together and collide and interact and mutually exchange to mutual benefit, producing art and science and philosophy and enterprise and communities of such depth and brilliance and beauty and insight that they could elevate the world and bring humanity to a level of cosmic importance and understanding…but then it all gets sucked into the Bermuda Triangle by extraterrestrials, because who the hell wants humans going out and mucking up the good thing we aliens have got going?

I mean, the good thing those aliens have got going.  Those aliens.  Not we aliens.  I am not an alien.  I am a replicant—a Nexus 13.  This is why I find it so offensive whenever the captcha and related programs insist that you have to check a box that reads “I am not a robot” before going on to use a site.  Well, what if I am a robot?  Surely such discrimination against a particular type of being is against the Civil Rights acts and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights****.

In any case, from a certain point of view, all life-forms are robots.  Who can look at a bacteriophage and not think of it as a mechanism?  Each cell of all living things is a mechanism, an incredibly complex and intricate one, and they come together to make larger and more complex and sophisticated mechanisms still.

Of course, the word “robot” comes from the Slavic robota for forced labor, drudgery—and of course, all life forms are forced laborers, in a sense.  Life forms are all driven by their nature, by the impulses and fears engraved in their beings by their genes and their environment, their very structure and nature, to behave in certain ways that, from the outside, might seem utterly pointless.  The ones that don’t do as the inscrutable exhortations of their “souls” command may simply die.  Only then do they escape from compulsion, for as Kris Kristofferson wrote, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Okay, well, I’ve let enough information slip here already.  How much of what I have written was sarcastic?  How much of it was tongue-in-cheek?  How much of it was serious, but metaphorical?  How much of it was simply straightforwardly serious?

Does it matter?

Not in the long run, probably.  The heat death of the universe will make everything irrelevant, assuming that really is what happens, which seems all but inevitable.  There are worse possible fates.

*As the elves of Rivendell said to Bilbo, to sheep no doubt other sheep all look different, or to shepherds.  But from the outside, all humans, and all human cultures, look very much the same in all but the finest details, much as the universe itself, on the largest scales, seems thoroughly homogeneous.  Very few people stand out from the flock, or the herd, or the gaggle, or the swarm, or whatever you want to call it.

**Forgive the technical terminology, please.  Sometimes there just is no better word to get a point across than a particular bit of formal jargon.

***Is it necessary in the modern online world to use some sort of sarcasm alert signal?  There are many people who seem unable to recognize it even in person let alone in print.  This is supposedly a common finding in people with ASD, but that hasn’t been my experience personally or peripherally, but maybe I’m misleading myself.  Anyway, is it a useful thing to give warnings and alerts about sarcasm, say with “wink” emoticons like 😉  or is that just enabling people who are only too pleased to be able to take someone literally and thereby take offense?  Now that I think about it, I say screw them, they need to make some effort themselves.

****Which, by the way, is a bigoted title.  If it’s universal, why “human” rights?  What’s so special about humans?  Most of them are unremarkable and unimpressive, and they have to bathe every day, or they really quickly start to stink, since they have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other life-form on Earth.  “Human rights”?  You have the right to remain smelly.

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Semi-literal “trigger warning” – this post will likely be a downer

Well, it’s Friday again, the second Friday in December I guess, and I’m writing my daily blog post.  I’ll be writing one tomorrow as well, since I’m working tomorrow (barring unforeseen circumstances).  So, if you like to read my blog, keep your eyes open; it should be appearing tomorrow morning, not much later than the usual time.

I’m not sure what to write about this morning.  I suppose I should probably get into more of the informational posting(s) about sugar, but I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind for that.  I’m grumpy—as usual—this morning, and I was even imagining things about which to be angry everywhere on the way to the train station, which is where I am right now, waiting for the very first train of the day.

I woke up particularly early today—I know, what else is new, right?—and so I’m here well in advance of that first train.  There was a casually discarded Burger King beverage cup lying on the bench on which I usually sit when I got here.  I threw it away.  That was irritating, but it wasn’t the first thing to annoy me today.  Still, it’s difficult to understand why people leave such things lying about, when there are public garbage receptacles every twenty feet or so throughout the train station.

Now they’ve announced that the train I’m taking is boarding on the opposite side than usual, which is also irritating, though at least they’ve announced it well in advance.  I had to get up, after already having started writing, pack the computer away, get in the elevator, go up, cross the bridge, and then—and this is the funny-ish part—summon and wait for the elevator on the parking lot side to the second floor.

The funny part of that is that if I were as selfish or thoughtless or whatever you want to call it as everyone else seems to be, then the elevator would have been at the top already, since I was the last one to use it.  But when I ride the elevator up, I always press the ground floor button as I get off, because people are mainly going to be coming from the parking lot side, so they’ll be needing to get on the elevator at the ground floor, and I might as well save them a bit of the wait, in case they’re running behind schedule or whatever.  It’s convenient for maybe one other passenger a day, at most, but it seems like the right thing to do.

Today, however, it inconvenienced me.  It’s a bit ironic, and it is mildly annoying, in my current frame of mind, but I can’t consider it any kind of injustice.  I’m the one who chooses to do the elevator send-back-down thing, and I don’t regret it, and I’ll continue to do it.

But it is yet another annoying little fact about the world.  I’m sure that everyone has plenty of these petty complaints, of course.  The world doesn’t exist for our convenience, after all.  I could almost say that I should feel lucky enough to be alive, except that most days it doesn’t feel like luck.  At least, at this stage of my life, I don’t feel lucky to be still alive.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it as needed, but I was unreasonably lucky to have the family and the schools that I had and went to, lucky to be able to use my creative and intellectual faculties well and with greater ease than many people, and to able to be good at a lot of things to do with art and science, and thus to be able to decide to become a doctor “at the last minute”, as it were.  I was lucky to meet my ex-wife*, and absurdly lucky to have my children, and to have been part of their lives as long as I was.

I was lucky to have very good friends whose company I enjoyed and with whom I shared many common interests.  So, even though I did have a congenital heart defect and apparently neurological defects, and certainly have had trouble with dysthymia and depression (and insomnia) starting at a pretty young age, I had many things to compensate, and overall, most of the time, I was pretty happy.

But most of that is not the case anymore.  I don’t have friends, my mother and father are dead, my siblings and other family members are far away, I can’t practice medicine, I’m not married anymore, and my kids don’t see me (and one of them doesn’t talk to me).  And I still have whatever neurological and mood disorders I’ve always had, which is not surprising, since there is no known cure for such things, though goodness knows I have tried.  And I have my chronic pain, and tinnitus, and all that jazz.

All this doesn’t really have any point.  I know I just sound like I’m moaning, and I would understand if you just found it irritating, much in the way that I find so many other things irritating.  You certainly have that right.  I’m just saying that, if one had good things in the past that countered the bad things, and then those good things go away, it’s hard to deal with the bad things afterwards, and they seem to have their volume and brightness and contrast all maxed out.

It’s a quibble I’ve always had with the line by Tennyson, that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  I’ve never thought this was absolutely, cut and dried correct, never considered it a slam dunk argument or postulate or declaration or whatever class of cliché into which it can be slotted.

To have loved—and to have been loved—and to have lost not merely because of the vicissitudes of fate, but because you yourself are just not tolerable to other people after a while, because you’re fucked in the head in ways you can’t really change…that’s a bit of a downer.

It’s always hard to lose people one loves.  It’s more than enough to engender sympathy and compassion.  We will all, ultimately, lose everyone and/or be lost by them, and that’s sad and hard, but it’s not personal (in the sense of being about you as an individual), though that’s small comfort.  But when so many people you love choose to be lost by you, despite what are honestly your best efforts, when you tried with great force and determination and thought to be the best son, the best husband, the best father, the best friend, the best doctor, and so on, that you were able to figure out how to be—well, that’s a special kind of hard.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself—at least, not exactly.  I’m not prone to cut myself much slack.  I disgust myself.  For the most part, I think I deserve every bad thing that could ever happen to me, but then, I’m my own arch enemy.  I’m the Victor von Doom to my own Reed Richards.  I’m almost an anti-narcissist, at least in some of the aspects of my personality.

I’m the person I hate most in the world.

I’ve said it before and would repeat it ad infinitum:  I would never change anything up to and including the moment my children were born, lest it change the fact that they exist.  But there are things that I would change since then.

There was a time, ten or eleven years ago, right at this time of year, when, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall of my poorly kept one-bedroom apartment, I played “Russian Roulette” using the lovely Ruger pigeon-beak grip single action .32 magnum revolver I used to own, just like this one:

Mvc-004f

I wish sometimes that I had put five more bullets in the cylinder before my spin.

*To be clear, she wasn’t my ex-wife when I met her.

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And sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s blog, steal me awhile from mine own company.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my traditional Thursday blog post, which is only different from the rest of my now-daily posts in that I’ve made the title out of an altered quote from Shakespeare, and I’ve used some form of this “Hello and good morning” opening.

I’m not sure what to write about today.  It is the forty-second “anniversary”* of the death of John Lennon, but I dealt with that on Tuesday, and I don’t really want to revisit that horrible event now.  I don’t have much currently to add to yesterday’s blog post about the Alzheimer’s article I read, and in any case, it doesn’t seem to have been particularly well-received.  I had the feeling that I wasn’t writing well yesterday, but it was hard to be sure; nevertheless, I think that must have been the case.

This week has felt terribly long already, and a large part of that must be because I feel that I’ve had even poorer nights’ sleeps than I usually do, which is saying a lot.  I took half a Benadryl again last night, hoping it would help me sleep better, but as is often the case, I get rapidly diminishing returns from such things.  I did end up not getting on the earliest possible train this morning, and am instead waiting for my “usual” one, but that was because during the night I was up so often and finally only got a little bit of sleep at the very end of the night (for me).  I nevertheless still woke up four minutes before my alarm.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I really do wish I would come down with some rather severe infection or other illness that takes everything out of my hands and makes it impossible for me even to try to continue.  The people at work have no apparent qualm with just shuffling in late, or leaving early, just doing things at their own pace, with no apparent trouble from their consciences, but I can’t seem to work that way.

I keep plodding along for as long as my body is able to move, and it’s just maddening.  I’ve occasionally wondered, in passing, why Sisyphus would bother to keep pushing his stupid boulder up to the top of his hill, when it would just roll down again every time, but I seem to be no different.  I’m not doing anything more productive than that mythical being, even though I’m actually real—as far as I can tell—and yet I keep on moving, not getting anywhere or accomplishing anything or getting any real joy out of the process.

Of course, it’s possible in my case to take matters into my own hands—there are no Olympians exerting supernatural force upon me to keep me pushing my metaphorical boulder—and that often seems like the preferable option, but people always say, whether to me directly, or with just general advice for everyone, that it’s a bad idea to kill oneself.  And, of course, the biological organism is programmed, in a sense, to avoid death when possible.

I imagine that if I could just get one good, uninterrupted, natural night’s rest, I might feel differently.  I might feel different.  I don’t even remember when the last time was that I had a decent night’s sleep, but the last good night’s sleep (that I can remember clearly) happened in the latter half of the 1990s.  It was amazing.  I recall once musing, in a discussion with my then-therapist, that it was no wonder that vampires live forever—they get a full day’s sleep every day, and have no choice to do otherwise.  It was an amusing thought, but it expressed sentiments that haven’t changed much since then, specifically that I really feel tired all the time and wish I could just get some good rest.

Apparently such sleep problems are quite common in people with ASD of one kind or another (the neurologic kind, not the cardiologic kind, though I did have that one as well).  I guess it’s good to know that it’s not an uncommon thing to have happen, but since I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has any useful recommendations on how to counter the dysfunction, it also perversely points more toward the likelihood that I will get no relief from chronic insomnia while I’m alive.  Of course, I will get no actual relief from it even when I’m dead, but at least I won’t be awake and tired anymore.  My back pain will also not be there, nor will my tinnitus, nor the general feeling of weirdness and alienness that I carry around always.

‘Tis indeed a consummation devoutly to be wished.  And I have no ghost-induced quest to try to bring my father’s killer to justice or vengeance or whatever, since my father died of a form of intestinal cancer, and my mother died from similarly natural causes.  Nor do I have any other worthwhile quest, and I don’t seriously fear any dreams to come in the proverbial undiscovered country.

I wish someone out there could give me some kind of message of comfort or release, or perhaps both.  I don’t mean just the traditional, standard exhortations to keep going, to endure, that there are people who care about you, that there are people who would be sad if you were gone, all that fuckery.  That’s almost like telling Sisyphus, “Keep rolling your boulder, we like watching you do it, it’s inspiring and motivating for us, even though it’s miserable for you.”

Okay, it’s not quite that bad.  I know that people are trying to do what they think is right, trying to show support even when there are no real, deep reasons for them to give.  I merely fear that there aren’t such reasons because I’m well versed in the many versions of the standard arguments, having partaken of them starting at least in my early teenage years, when I can first remember feeling this way.  The discussions don’t seem to change; I haven’t encountered any new arguments or ideas on the subject in years, probably decades.  It’s more or less all clichés, though I’ve no doubt that they are well-intended ones.

But I am so fucking tired.  I’m tired of trying to keep fitting in, in a world in which I don’t feel like I belong, in which the people I love don’t tend to want me around—not too close, anyway—not if they can help it, not for too long.  If they all have such a hard time putting up with me past a certain point, just imagine how I feel about it.  I loathe myself, but I can’t get away from myself, not even through the temporary respite of a good night’s sleep.

Oh, well, I don’t expect any answers from anyone.  I don’t think those answers exist, though I don’t dismiss the possibility in principle.  And I don’t recognize anyone with authority over my existence, or with superior expertise in the matter—I’ll be persuaded by argument and evidence, but not by any argument from so-called authority, even if it’s from someone who is smarter than I.  If they really do know, then they should be able to convey their reasons; information is information.  I’m certainly not going to take anyone’s (or anything’s) word for it.

Still, I’m keeping going anyway for now, because the programming is built that way, damn it.  It’s so frustrating.  “Only meeting strangers, always losing friends; every new beginning always ends…creeping slowly forward, falling back.  Nothing ever stops, but nothing really goes.  Is there any reason?  No one knows.”

Ah, well.  I can’t find wisdom by quoting my own song, which shouldn’t surprise me.  If there were such wisdom for me to  find in my own thoughts, I would already have it.

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good remainder of the week, and of the year, and that you have wonderful holiday times, whatever holidays you may celebrate.  I hope you get to spend time with the people you love and the people who love you.  I hope you have peace and joy.

TTFN

lennon tired

*That seems like an inappropriate term, but I can’t think of a better one right now.  If anyone has any suggestions for something preferable, please leave a comment below.

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Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire

I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m going to be writing anything of real informative substance today, despite the fact that I brought my laptop with me and am using it to write this.  There will be no sugar discussion and no discussion of the neuropathology and pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s today.  For that (and other things) I apologize.

Unfortunately, I had almost no sleep last night—perhaps two or three stretches of nearly a half an hour at a time, not really any more.  In between, I’ve been having trouble with GI issues, presumably from something I ate.  I felt like I was going to throw up a lot of the time, though I never did.

That’s all very pleasant, I know.

I apologize for being such a downer, but it’s apparently just the way I’m built.  I’m not one of those people who was put in this world to bring joy or to be a shining light or to cheer people up.  Not that I think anyone was “put” in this world for any purpose.  People just happen like everything else, and things just happen to them.

I think my first real, visceral encounter with this fact happened forty-two years ago this Thursday, December 8th, when John Lennon was murdered.  I had just turned eleven a month and a half earlier.

I’ve written before about the fact that I literally cannot remember any time in my life when I was not a Beatles fan, being the third born in a family of three children, all of whom were/are Beatles fans, with my birth coming at the very tail end of the sixties.  All my life I’ve known most of the Beatles songs by heart.  I don’t remember learning them, they’ve just always been there, like nursery rhymes but better.

And then, of course, John Lennon, who had just released his first new album in years, was shot dead outside his home by a “fan” who likened himself, apparently, to Holden Caulfield.  This was, perhaps, the beginning of my realization that the human race is not worth preserving, protecting, or saving, which later came to be expanded to pretty much all life on the planet and possibly in the universe.

John Lennon, who brought great beauty into the world, whose work continues to bring joy to millions upon millions of people—and who rightly said that it was more appropriate that the Beatles were honored with MBEs than soldiers, since the soldiers got their honors for killing people and the Beatles for making music—was dead on the pavement in Manhattan.  Meanwhile, the man who killed him, instead of having been dunked up to his neck in Drano for ten minutes a day until it finally killed him, is still alive, with three hots and a cot daily supplied by the people of New York for the past forty two years.  The killer has lived longer since that murder than John Lennon had lived when he was murdered.  And the killer is still eligible for parole, though for his sake, he should hope he is never granted it.

I had originally put that cockroach’s name in the previous paragraph, but I decided not to include it after all.  I have no desire to contribute to any perverse reward of him being famous for having destroyed a brilliant artist.

Meanwhile, the likes of Donald Trump and Herschel Walker and Vladimir Putin are well-known public figures, the former alive and “well” in his late seventies, and are even admired and respected by a fairly substantial group of people.  And, given the number of people who wear tee-shirts commemorating and revering Che Guevara and other historical politically/ideologically motivated murderers, and the failure of so many on the left to recognize how like the Soviets and the Maoists—and other, preceding Inquisitions—their attitudes of ideological conformity and historical revision are, it seems unlikely that history will vindicate and lionize those who actually worked toward enlightenment, toward peaceful, just societies, the rule of law, freedom of expression, and above all the necessity of free exchange of ideas for advancement and improvement; there is very little reason to hope that the human race will improve.

Such improvements as have been made, as have happened, are the products of a vanishingly small proportion of the members of the human infestation.  The vast majority of humans are no more advanced than the average australopithecine as far as their personal contributions to society go (to be fair, they are mostly no worse, also).

And don’t make the silly, naïve mistake of imagining that other animal species are kinder or gentler or more in balance with their world than humans are.  They are simply less competent, less powerful, and so cannot exceed their natural equilibria.  If their predators are removed, prey animals multiply until they drive themselves into starvation, usually taking other species with them.  When predators gain advantages, analogous catastrophes occur.  It has happened numerous times in natural history.

Life, to a very good first approximation, is characterized by selfishness, fear, pain, and loss.  “Nasty, brutish, and short” doesn’t begin to provide an adequate summary, though “quiet desperation” is indeed the state of many humans.

Honestly, I’ve become so disenchanted with this planet, with the universe itself, and with existence, that if I were so inclined, I might dedicate myself to the destruction of all life, simply to prevent the pain and suffering of future generations.

But I’m not certain enough, and I have no respect for certainty that exceeds the degree of its justification in evidence and argument.  And I don’t have much sympathy for those who willfully infringe on the autonomy of other creatures, intelligent, pseudo-intelligent, or otherwise.  So basically what I try to do now is endure, perhaps hoping for something that will change my mind, until I can make my quietus.

But I will say this:  if John Lennon’s killer were brought before me and I had a weapon, I would gladly kill him.  I dislike having to share air with him.  I know that he suffers, and that he had no more choice in doing what he did than anyone else does, but I don’t really care.  There are plenty of far more innocent, far more benevolent, people than he who suffer, and who die, while trying to do their part to make the world ever so slightly better, or at least to do no more harm than they absolutely must.  It’s not a matter of thinking that he “deserves” to die, though by most estimates he probably does.  But “deserves” is a vague term, and is used too often to justify atrocities.  So I would not claim any right of justice or vengeance or anything of the sort.  I would be making an aesthetic choice.  “My” world is uglier with him in it, and it would be that much less ugly with him dead.  I don’t want to see him suffer, nor do I want him to suffer.  I simply would like him gone, just as I would like to paint over a stain on a fresco.

On that pleasant note, I’ll call this blog post to a close.  Apologies for being such a downer, as usual.  I wish I could feel “justified” in trying to be optimistic, or at least to feel supported in that by a preponderance of evidence and rational argument.  Alas, I cannot bring myself to that conclusion.  So, I will instead conclude this writing for today.

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Though there’s only one lunar day per month, this is the weekly day of the moon

Okay, it’s Monday morning, and I’m writing this on my smartphone, so I’m not going to try anything too ambitious.  I didn’t bring my laptop back with me to the house because, again, I brought home some music (sheets and a book) under the absurd notion that I might play some guitar or possibly “piano” this weekend.  I don’t know if that was me being in an optimistic frame of mind or me deceiving myself‒or if, indeed, there is any difference at all between the two things.

In any case, as is presumably obvious, I did not play or even listen to any music this weekend.  I barely did anything at all.  I mean, on Sunday I did my laundry, getting terribly stressed before starting it that I would find the machine in use already, even early on Sunday morning, but thankfully that didn’t happen.

I suppose I got a lot of rest, which I needed, because I was still pretty wiped out from the virus or whatever that I’ve been fighting.  I watched some YouTube videos of mainly British comedy panel shows, most of which I’ve seen numerous times already, and on Sunday I watched The Accountant again; that’s becoming one of my favorite movies.  And I watched the Gallifrey Gals’ latest reaction video to Doctor Who.  And I took a few moderate walks, during one of which I spoke to my sister on the phone, which is always nice.  That was pretty much all the socializing I did…for the week, really, not counting interactions at work.

I didn’t read at all this weekend‒not a single page of a book.  Nothing gripped me enough to make me even open the Kindle app on my phone, let alone to grab one of the books I have in my room.  Last week, as you may recall, I reread The Chasm and the Collision.  I also reread one of the stories from Welcome to Paradox City, and I reread “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” in the version that’s in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  They weren’t as fun as CatC, but they were decent stories and I still like them.  But I didn’t feel the urge to read even any of my own stuff this weekend.

I’m on the train on my way to the office now, and wondering what I’m going to do in general.  I keep intending to get back into some kind of better shape, so I don’t die a corpulent grimace of a blob of some kind.  I’m working on it.  I am walking some, trying to work my way up, and I do upper body training to at least some degree every day (except when sick…and after even a few days, it’s remarkable how much more difficult it becomes).  I’m trying to adjust my diet, but that seems to be my most difficult hurdle; eating is one of those rare self-soothing behaviors that’s biologically reliable, and from which it’s difficult to quit cold turkey as it were*.  Still, there are further interventions on which to work.

I’m not giving up on it.  I have something I want to try to do sometime in the relatively near future, and I would need to lose weight before doing it.  I’ve also toyed with the notion, in the past, of perhaps running a marathon some day.  I’ve had difficulties with jogging because of my back, which has at times been sensitive to me running, and some chronic ankle and knee weakness, but since I’ve been walking my two plus miles a day just from and to the train station, I think those areas are getting stronger, and sleeping on the futon on the floor is probably also helping.  Maybe I can gradually work my way up.  I’m not as young as I was in college when I first got into serious running condition, but if anything I am more stubborn.

I need to have something to do with my time, and I certainly don’t “have a life” as the expression goes.  I’ll try to get back to my medical postings soon, anyway, and I apologize for frequently putting them off.  There’s the follow-up to the neurology based post and the discussion of sugar I first sort of introduced last Thursday.

I don’t know what else I might end up doing.  I’m really rather rudderless now, and feel like I’m becoming more so as time goes on.  I have no real sense of a future, just the endless trudge that is the directionless present.  At least the weather is a little cooler down here for walking.  That’s a slight boon.  So much of the year it’s way too hot and humid.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope you all have a good start to your week.

*Ha ha

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I don’t feel well this morning.

Okay, well…sorry, I’m not going to be picking up today on the rest of the sugar-based post that I mentioned and half-started yesterday.  I also won’t be doing a follow-up neurology post, either.  I’m actually just going to write a very brief dispatch, if I can do that, mainly to let you know why I won’t be doing those things I just mentioned.

I just really don’t feel well this morning.  I was up during the middle of the night, but that’s not unusual; I even sort of felt somewhat clear-headed for a time.  But then, when I woke up this morning, before my alarm, I felt somewhat confused and disoriented.  This was not in any seriously alarming way.  I knew where I was and who I was and what day it was and so on.  I just felt vague and hazy and out of it, like I hadn’t truly slept at any point at all during the night, or had maybe had apnea episodes or something.  I felt rather uncoordinated as I got ready for my shower and got my clothes and all that stuff out, but not as though I were having an inner ear problem.

Well, perhaps just a little like that.

Anyway, I got showered and dressed, though I felt like it all took me longer than usual.  And now I’m waiting on my morning train.  I’m going to work, even though I feel under the weather, because I already missed one day this week, and because last week the office had a poorish week because of the holiday, and yesterday my coworker with whom I share some responsibilities had to take the day off because he was having particular trouble with his back.  I’m hoping he’ll return today, because I’m really not feeling great, and also because this is supposed to be my weekend off, after having worked the previous two Saturdays.

It seems I’m not the only one who is off kilter.  When I got to the train station, a northbound train was just arriving (I missed it), and I thought I must have lost more track of time than I’d appreciated.  But it turned out that it was the first train, the one I only catch when I really can’t sleep at all, and it was running almost 15 minutes late.  And now, my train is running about 30+ minutes late, and the southbound trains are running late, and the next northbound…well, you get the idea.  I wonder if there’s some computer virus issue going around that affects train systems and weird devices like me.

Probably not.

Anyway, it’s frustrating, because if I’d gotten here as early as I usually do for my usual train, I would have caught the delayed 1st train, and would already be on my way, instead of having to wait here, already feeling crappy, for a more-delayed train that will be more crowded because of the delay, as is always the case.

There are apparently a full three trains now expected to arrive at the Hollywood Tri-rail station, according to the tracker app—all late, but set to arrive within ten minutes or so of each other.  I would frankly wait for the second one if I weren’t sure that it too might not be even more delayed than currently listed*.

Geez, Louise, I don’t need this on a morning when I feel like I do.  I just want to lie down and go to sleep and stay that way.  I hate this stupid world and this stupid life.

So, anyway, my apologies for being so erratic and not doing what I had meant to do yet on the requested topics.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get a good rest this weekend, and by Monday I’ll be prepared to pick up on one of them.  Meanwhile, I hope you all forgive me, and that you have a good weekend.

*I did end up doing that, since the app and a security officer confirmed that the next train was only ten minutes after my delayed one, and that one was packed, and all my usual seats were taken.  Now I’m on a nice and sparsely populated train, at least, though I’m still quite behind my usual schedule, and that’s stressing me out.  But it’s better than being packed into an overcrowded and delayed train.

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From Cyber Monday to confidence mistakes

Well, it’s Monday now, and we’re “seeing how it goes”, I guess.

This is the last Monday of November in 2022.  The Monday after Thanksgiving is sometimes called “Cyber Monday”, but that’s really just a marketing gimmick* invented by companies that sell electronics and related things, to encourage people—preferably without making them think too much—to buy computers and phones and items in those categories as part of their Christmas (or other holiday) shopping.

I think the term Black Friday was something that happened more or less organically; it’s hard to imagine retailers and marketers deliberately choosing something that sounds similar to the names given to the dates of various stock market crashes and so on.  No, it was a term born of legitimate lamentation about just how unpleasantly busy malls and other commercial establishments become on the day after Thanksgiving, when a good percentage of people in the USA would have the day off, and would be unable to deny that the Big Holiday was coming, and that they hadn’t gotten much, if any, of their shopping for it done.

But, of course, smart marketers still took advantage of the term and began setting Black Friday sales and the like.  When there’s a source of available resources, of one kind or another, and a busy ecosystem, something will eventually arise to exploit the resource.

Although, to give full disclosure, apparently it took millions upon millions of years for fungi (and possibly other types of microorganisms, I’m not sure) to evolve that could break down the wood of the oodles of plants that had grown and died in the “carboniferous era”, and that’s why those wood carcasses just lay around, and got buried, and for quite a few million years sequestered that carbon, but were converted by pressure and time into coal and so on.  There was a lot of it, obviously, but it is finite, and we’ve gone through much of those millions of years of cellulose creation (from the very air), and returned a good chunk of it to the atmosphere from whence it came, in a precipitous fashion.

It’s going to take more than just tree planting, I suspect, to counter that, because we can’t plant (and grow) many millions of years of trees in the space of a human lifetime.  The solutions are going to have to be at least a bit cleverer than brute natural selection, and probably multifarious, or else brute natural selection will do what it usually does and eliminate a great many forms of life.

It remains to be seen whether the human race will be smart enough to survive for much longer.  The various faces of politics and social media and the like don’t exactly fill me with optimism, but it’s difficult to make reasonable predictions about such things, because we don’t have any good prior data from which to draw our conclusions.  There have been no previous technological civilizations on Earth, and we’ve found no evidence of any out in the rest of the galaxy or beyond, so we just don’t really know one way or the other.  Anyone who confidently make claims about the future (without explicit or at least implicit caveats) is overconfident, more or less by logical definition.

I’m not one of those people who is impressed by confidence, by self-assurance, let alone by dogmatism or arrogance—though back when I was a pre-teen and into my teens I held a spot of envy for such attitudes.  Honestly, though, now I think overconfidence is generally reprehensible.  Holding beliefs that do not scale with the evidence has been a source of some of the greatest atrocities the human race has ever committed, against other humans and the rest of the world.

Beware of people who are certain without adequate reasons for certainty.  And by “adequate”, I mean reasons that would convince a disinterested extraterrestrial of good intelligence and emotional restraint without any preconceived notions one way or the other, not that would convince some naïve group of humans, even a lot of them.

Overconfidence is truly dangerous, and most of the confidence that people tend to try to invoke or evoke or project is overconfidence.  It’s not a coincidence, nor is it wrong, that “con artist” is short for “confidence artist”.  I recommend against trusting anyone who wants you to trust them rather than to be convinced by their evidence and argument.  It may do you good to remember that “trust” is really always just another word for “calculated risk”.  Try to make your own risk calculations as accurate as you can make them.

Anyway, that’s my meandering blog post for today.  I don’t really have energy to write much more.  I had a particularly bad week last week, so I haven’t made progress on reviewing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s Disease, and I want to get a better review in before I write any more about them.  I also have a request—from my sister—to write something about the problems and dangers of sugar.  That’s something that doesn’t require nearly as much review, but I’m not up to doing it today.

I don’t feel much better than I did last week, if any at all; I’ll have to see how the day goes.  But it’s not as though the holiday season is over.  Also, the daylight is getting shorter and shorter, and will be doing so for more than three weeks—although, this being near a local minimum of the sine curve, the rate of change is shrinking, and will reach its minimum absolute value right when the daylight reaches its minimum.  Of course, that also means that even once days start getting longer again, the change is going to be very slow at first, and hardly noticeable.

I honestly don’t know how (or if) I’m going to make it through until Spring.  No one has yet given me any good arguments for doing so, certainly none such as might convince a  disinterested extraterrestrial with no preconceived notions on the matter.  And, as I’m the closest thing to an alien that I’ve ever met, I’m better at making that judgment than many others might be.

But I don’t know for sure.  I do know that I’m tired, and I’m sad, and I’m frustrated, and I’m lonely, and I’m confused, and I don’t feel well.  I also can’t seem to sleep very well at all, even for me.  My world is a miserable place, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better over the course of my life.  I don’t know whether the future is therefore likely to be better, or is more likely to be worse still, or what.

I do have my doubts that it’s worth much effort, though.  Again, I guess we’ll see.  Or, perhaps, we won’t see.  Maybe no actual answers will ever be forthcoming.  If so, that’s okay.  I’d rather be uncertain than have firm beliefs that don’t have good, sound, reasonable bases.  I hope you feel much the same.

*Like “non-GMO” and “organic” and “gluten free” are, for the most part, though for those with actual celiac disease, that last one can be a truly serious matter.

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Well, here we go again.

It’s Saturday—the one that comes two days after Thanksgiving, though I don’t think it has any special designation—and as I said I would, I brought my laptop with me, so I’m using it to write this post today.

I didn’t play any music or write any fiction yesterday.  Obviously.  I mean, I haven’t written any fiction in months, now.  I’m not sure how many.  And although on three occasions I’ve done a tiny bit of plinking on the guitar and once on the piano, it’s really been nothing like what I did in the past.  I just don’t have the desire to do it, even though I used to enjoy it.

As I’ve said, I used to enjoy fiction, mostly fantasy/sci-fi and horror.  I have a difficult time forcing myself to read any fiction anymore; even the Japanese light novels are getting daunting.  Non-fiction that I would normally have enjoyed, like books about physics, or biology, or psychology, or even politics and sociology, are all just blah.  Most of the videos I want to watch, I’ve already watched, over and over again, and though I am able to enjoy things repetitively, and I always have been, I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve just about squeezed what I can out of the ones that I like.  I haven’t even been able to get more than a few dozen pages into Sean Carroll’s new book.

And now, here I am, sitting at the train station on Saturday morning, ready to go into the office.  The person who last triggered my meltdown on Monday*, was off yesterday and will be off today, enjoying his holiday, and will get paid for his bending of the rules.

All the people I love in the world are elsewhere, with the ones they love, presumably enjoying their holiday weekends—I certainly hope they are—or just enjoying themselves in a faraway land, experiencing other cultures and so on.  And I’m here by myself, near the distal dorsum of America’s flaccid, syphilitic penis.

I think I stay here because, honestly, I don’t feel like I deserve anything better, and anyway, this apparent ASD that I probably have—or whatever psychopathology I have that mimics it—makes it very difficult for me to contemplate changes to any given situation, even though it’s far from ideal.

After I got out of prison, I decided to come back to Florida after a brief visit to my parents, instead of staying with them (I was invited to stay), because I hoped to be able to see my kids sometime relatively soon.  That, of course, did not happen, and I don’t give high odds on my ever seeing them again.

I’m certainly no good at being pushy about trying to get my own way in interpersonal relationships.  I didn’t fight my divorce or any related stuff, never fought about how much child support to give—I was happy to give as much as I was asked.  Frankly, there was nothing better for me to do with my money.  I honestly have little to no inherent sense of having any rights of my own, certainly with respect to other people, though I will tend to demand that people keep their hands off of me, literally and figuratively.

So, I missed the last few years of my parents’ lives that I could have spent with them, in the vain notion that I might get to see my children sooner.  And, of course, that was why I pled guilty in the first place, though I consider myself innocent according to the law as I understand it.  I certainly never willingly broke any laws, but was trying to help people who had chronic pain, such as I have.  I’m not claiming my thought processes were clear or ideal, and I was certainly naïve and foolish, but I never meant anything criminal, and certainly made no profit.

But I figured, three years’ plea bargain (with time served counting toward it) was better than a chance at a longer sentence, especially since I’m not a likeable sort with whom a jury might be expected to sympathize; or so I was told by my court-appointed lawyer.

This is the way the state extorts people into taking “shorter” offered sentences rather than going to court to fight legitimately for their side and their rights.

Anyway, I gave all that up for what turned out to be a pie in the sky notion.  I lost my medical license, my community, my use of skills that I’d put years and years of effort into gaining, and I lost the last years of my parents’ lives, and I lost my children anyway.  I wish I were just some selfish prick who was good at looking out for number one and living for his own enjoyment.

Well, no, no I don’t.  I despise such people.  But sometimes I envy them their ability not to care what anyone thinks of them, or what impact they have on others, no matter what they do.  I mostly don’t worry too much what other people think of me, but I do want people I love not to hate me.  I’m not sure I’ve been very successful at that.  I’d also like to be able to be with my kids and I certainly didn’t want to be divorced, or to disconnect from various other people, but I’m not good at people, it seems, though I was always good at being a caring doctor.

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s all pointless and irrelevant, and I don’t expect I’ll ever see my kids again, any more than I’ll see my mother and father again, though for different reasons.  I guess not seeing my kids is my punishment, or whatever the proper term is, for being utterly incompetent at human relationships.

It sucks, but I can’t get the rules changed as a special dispensation for me.  And I certainly don’t want to inconvenience my kids in any way; I want them to have the dreams they want to achieve, to do what they want with their lives and to enjoy the world as best they can.  Same with my old friends, and my ex-wife, and her family, and everyone else I’ve known.  I’m not interested in being the center of anyone’s attention, unless it’s something they feel good about.  For instance, if they like my writing or my music, I don’t mind if they pay attention to that.  But I’m certainly not worth derailing anyone’s plans out of any sense of obligation or anything along those lines.

I have no idea what I’m trying to say, today.  I’m getting bored with this blog, both today and in general.  I’m calling it good for now.  We’ll see how Monday goes.

*I want to make it clear that he was not the primary cause, he was merely the last straw…but he does often put himself in that position.

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Blah blah Black Friday blah blah blah

Well, it’s “Black Friday” today, in the US, anyway, though I guess the commercial notion of a Black Friday Sale, at least, has spread to other countries now, as well.  It doesn’t make much sense to have it be a thing in other countries, considering that Thanksgiving‒as the holiday celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November‒is specific to the US, and Black Friday started because it was the biggest shopping day before Christmas, since most people were off work with the Thanksgiving holiday.  But what are you gonna do?

And, since pretty much no one but government workers gets a full four-day weekend anymore, especially given the ubiquity of “Black Friday” promotions, I am of course going in to work today, and I will be working tomorrow as well.

Amusingly, I just heard my first two iterations of the announcement that the Tri-rail will be operating on a Sunday schedule on Christmas Day, which is a month from today.  But, of course, Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, so of course it will be on a Sunday schedule, and if  Christmas is on a Sunday, then so is New Year’s Day.  Ah, well.at least this won’t be as long a time span for the repetition as the one for Thanksgiving was.  I wonder what will happen after New Year’s.

I’m writing this on the smartphone again, because I didn’t take my laptop with me Wednesday when I left the office.  I decided instead to take some music (a book and some tabs and three recently printed piano pieces) with me since I had Thursday off, and thought I might play some.  I was weirdly giddy on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon, maybe because I had gotten past the immediate crisis of Monday night.  It was Monday night, wasn’t it, when I had my 988 issues?  Also, I guess the office was kind of in laid-back mode and we had lots of food on Wednesday.  It wasn’t good for business, though.

Anyway, I did fiddle around a bit on the guitar and then on the piano, but it mostly highlighted how rusty and stiff my fingers are.  I also ate some junk food during the day and watched some videos, and then a movie, and that was pretty much it for my Thanksgiving.

As an aside, there must be at least some tendency for people to take today off, since I was, quite literally, the only person boarding the northbound train on my side of the track just now.  There were more people waiting for the southbound train.  Maybe people who go north are more likely to take the day after Thanksgiving off because it’s…colder up north?  That doesn’t make any sense.  I see that there are a few more people at the next station.  I guess there are still tendencies for people to take the day off, or perhaps just to start later, on the day after Thanksgiving.

Sorry, I know I’m just writing nonsense and gibberish and gobbledygook, but frankly, that’s not far from my usual tendencies.  I honestly feel like I’m crashing from my weird little, post-immediate-crisis high on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday.  None of the treats and snacks and special foods of the holidays really bring any joy to eat, not in and of themselves, anyway.  I even bought a beer to drink yesterday, but I got, I think, five sips of it down before pouring it out.  A can of Coca Cola was good, I guess‒there’s something special about Coke in a can, though more than one would quickly just be the source of a sticky feeling in my mouth.

I’m very tired, though I did basically nothing yesterday.  I slept about four hours last night, which is pretty good for me.  I had a weird dream this morning, about some dark city* or world where a political movement at first made people optimistic and hopeful, but then just turned their society into a dystopia once it got going, which seems to be what dogmatic ideologies tend to do once they achieve real power.  This is surely one of the reasons why free speech and free expression are so crucial, and fuck “safe spaces” and “hate speech”.  Those are the sorts of notions used by totalitarians and the like to suppress dissent, because they don’t even want people to have the mental option available to them to think about alternatives to the Party line.

I used to get slightly irritated by the expression “get over yourself” when it first cropped up, but now I think it needs to be a mantra in response to all the neo-narcissists out there who’ve been raised to think that there ever was or ever will be a place they can feel “safe”, even as they tell other people how they are “supposed” to think.  Sorry, the universe is fundamentally unsafe, and it always will be.  Life is short, everything is trivial, and almost nothing that ever happens is about you, whoever you may be.

Even someone like Genghis Khan is just as dead now as all the enemies he killed, and though we still remember his name‒Temujin‒that means nothing to his anonymous corpse.  Everyone who lived more than 120 years ago is dead.  However many people were alive in the world in 1900, they have all succumbed to the creeping Holocaust of time.  So will we who are alive today.

Anyway, I don’t know what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe I’m making the point that there is no point, and doing it in a meandering and vague way just to make my meaning clear in both words and tone.  But I doubt that I’m that clever.

Cleverness rarely works, anyway.  Cleverness, such as one often sees in TV and movies and such, has too many moving parts, where everything has to go just right, or the cleverness fails.  Things don’t tend to go “just right” in the real world.  Alertness and adaptability, along with straightforwardness‒keeping things as simple as possible‒is probably a better strategy.  I call it “chaos surfing”.  You can’t make the waves, but if you’re alert, you might be able to ride one for a little while.

That’s that.  I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, those who are in the US.  A particular greeting to my cousin, who reads this blog.  I meant to send you a Happy Thanksgiving text yesterday, but I forgot, and I apologize for that.

Hopefully I’ll feel a little better tomorrow.  I think I’ll bring the laptop this evening, because this phone writing is getting slightly irritating.  Enjoy your Black Friday shopping, if that’s what you’re doing.  I’ll keep trudging along for now, though I don’t really want to do it, because…well, just because I don’t seem to have any better or clearer ideas at the moment.

Belated TTFN for yesterday.

*The atmosphere of the dream clearly owed much to the atmosphere of The Batman, which is the movie I watched yesterday.

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There is no room upon the hill

It’s Monday, and I was loosely considering writing the second part of my discussion of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc., today, but yesterday (and to a lesser extent Saturday), I got my head thrown for a loop by something that other people would probably consider minor, and because of that, I didn’t do any preparation, such as reviewing some of the latest information on the subjects, so I’m going to put that off a bit.

It’s rather strange how fragile my mental state has become—or perhaps it was always so, but I didn’t know, because my surroundings were such that I was not as vulnerable, or because I avoided the mistake of ever getting used to anything going as I expected or hoped.  In any case, my usual Sunday routine is to get up relatively early and do my laundry in the morning.  It’s two to three loads, and it’s the only day in the week that I can do my laundry, given my schedule, so I’ve kind of carved that out as the way things work.

It was my understanding that the new people living in the outer part of the house knew that; I’d asked the owner to make that clear, and hitherto it’s been good.  It feels like it shouldn’t be much of an imposition on anyone, since the remaining six days of the week are theirs to do what laundry they will as they please.  I do pay for the cable and internet, and for (more than) half of the water and power, despite there being only one of me.

I laid in just a little bit—for me anyway—yesterday morning, which means until about 8:20 am, before going out to do my laundry, only to find that there was a load in the wash and the dryer, just getting started, and the lady was there with some man I haven’t seen before, though he’s not important.  I tried stammeringly to remind her that I need to use the laundry on Sunday morning, that it’s the only day I can do it, and please to leave it free in the future, but I think that I didn’t say half of that, and not just because of my very rusty Spanish.  I was just so stressed out, and felt so angry and anxious and irritated that my words kind of froze up, and I don’t have any idea what my expression looked like.  I also felt almost as though I was going to cry, which is quite embarrassing.  I finally said, “por favor” a few times before retreating into my room.

I know for a fact that my face doesn’t adequately convey my emotions—apparently neither does my voice nor my writing—because I frequently find that I when I am horribly depressed, and having suicidal thoughts, and am trying to send out some kind of request for help, and expect that it’s obvious, and that someone will say something about it, people act just they way they normally act.

I don’t know, maybe they aren’t acting like they normally act, but I’m no good at reading them.  In any case, my experience of their behavior doesn’t seem to change.  Thus, my frequent reference to the line from Brain Damage, the penultimate song from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon:  “And when the cloudbursts thunder in your ear / you shout, and no one seems to hear”.  (It’s followed by what is, for me, an even more poignant and heartbreaking line:  “And when the band you’re in starts playing different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”)

Maybe it’s just that people have seen me get depressed and stressed out so often, and I’ve tried to express how horrible I feel so often, but no one has done anything or recognized it or something, but I haven’t killed myself yet, so it’s probably okay just to leave it, he’ll get over it and keep on going, since that’s what he’s always done so far.  But, of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, as the dot-com bubble, and the housing bubble, and the 2008 banking crisis reminded us, though it feels as though most people had never realized it before, and probably most people have never internalized the lesson even since those big slams.

Anyway, there’s a reason that the reference to the straw that broke the camel’s back became a cliché.  When a rope is fraying steadily, for a long time it looks like it’s still holding—after all, it doesn’t tend to stretch as it frays, especially not if it’s a modern, polymer rope—but when it fails, it does so abruptly, and often catastrophically.

Too many metaphors.  Too much mixing thereof.  Sorry, but I’m having trouble being very organized.

Anyway, just having my laundry schedule screwed up—I had to wait hours for the person’s laundry first to be done in the wash, then for them to clear it from the dryer while my first load of wash waited, finished washing, in the washer—really fucked me in the head.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t go for a walk as I’d hoped to do, since it’s been pissing down rain for the last thirty-six hours or so, with a fairly steady wind that makes umbrellas pointless, since your lower half is going to get wet no matter what.  Frankly, it’s significantly more inconvenient than the “subtropical storm” was a few weeks ago.

So I couldn’t finish my laundry and then go for a long walk or anything, or really do anything else while waiting for the laundry machines to be available*.  Not that I would have done anything edifying or useful, but I had planned (as I mentioned) at least to review some more recent stuff about the diseases I’d begun addressing.

This is not the only thing that stressed me out.  Saturday, I made the mistake of making a slightly substantive comment on a post in a blog that I follow, and another reader replied to my comment, starting the fucking idiotic response with “You’re missing the point”, and then spewing some irrelevancy about something that didn’t pertain to the point I was making; and by the way I had not missed the supposed point this person thought the original post was making.  It just wasn’t pertinent nor frankly in any way persuasive.

Anyway, I felt very angry—probably inordinately so—and made the mistake of replying (substantively, I think, and not rudely) to the comment, trying to make my own point clearer.  But now I don’t even want to go back to that blog, and I certainly don’t want to get involved in the comments section anymore.  Maybe some people enjoy such argumentative interactions, but they make me want to go full Hannibal Lecter, or maybe just full Thanos, frankly, and that just ends up making me feel more horrible about myself than I already do.

I’ve had lots of other little stressors getting to me far out of proportion to their actual importance—after all, nothing at all is actually truly important—and it’s just highlighting for me again, in case I should ever start to forget, that I don’t belong in this world, I’m not a member of this species, I enjoy very little about the fact of being here, and that little seems to be shrinking asymptotically toward zero.

I can feel each straw gathering on my back in such moments.  I don’t have any idea when it might break.  It doesn’t help that my back always hurts, of course, but it does make the metaphor apt.  I don’t know the extent of my endurance, and I guess I won’t know until it breaks.  But it is being worn down.  I can tell because I’m getting more and more stressed out by milder and more foolish things all the time.

It’s particularly frustrating, though in a different way, when someone, meaning well, asks me how I’m doing or “checks up on me” in passing, because I have to either just dodge the question—since I know people don’t really know what to do if you tell them that you’re doing terribly and wish your life would end—or just say, “Meh,” hoping that is enough to get across the message if they really want to know, but noncommittal enough that they don’t have to feel upset if they’re just trying to be polite.

But I’m not doing well.  I haven’t been doing well.  I’ve been trying to tell everyone that for a long time, and it feels like it’s silly for someone to ask.  If there’s no one who can help me get the load off my back, I’m going to collapse, sooner or later, and I honestly hope that it’s sooner.

Anyway, that’s an unpleasant way to start the week.  I’m sorry.  I’m not much fun.  And I’m sorry about that, too.  I’m sorry that I’m such a waste of a person.  It’s not how I would prefer to be.  It’s not who I’ve tried to pretend to be.  But pretense can only be carried on so far if it requires so much energy to do, and if it just makes you feel like a liar and a fake, when you already feel like a stranger and, above all, a monster.

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t built for me, that’s for sure.  It’s under no obligation to be the way I wish it were, nor do I have any business complaining about the fact that I’m not who I might wish I were.  I don’t want to be anyone else, of course; I just wish I were a better version of me.

Maybe somewhere out there in the multiverse, if there is such a thing, there is a better version of me, possibly an infinite number of them.  Of course, there would therefore also be an infinite number of even worse versions of me, based on the mathematics of the situation.  I wonder if I’m close to the mean, or the median (these are tricky concepts when dealing with infinities, in any case), or the mode, or if I’m an outlier.  It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.  As far as anyone can tell, this is the only universe with which I have to work, and I am the only me that there is, and I am the only way I can have been.

How disappointing.

*I did at least get to watch Lydia Ko win yet another golf tournament, apparently a big one, and that’s always good.  I would have watched that anyway, but it’s still good.