Health

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This is the blog this man’s soul tries

Well, in case some of you were starting to feel lighthearted and optimistic‒just a little more at ease with yourselves and the world after two whole days without reading my work‒here I am to write another blog post that will probably bring you down and make you inclined to wonder whether anything at all is really worth anything, or if you should just give it all up, especially the habit of reading this blog.

Congratulations.  It’s Monday again, the start of another work week.  Also, Daylight Savings Time has ended (or is it “begun”?) over this last weekend, so for a bit, a lot of people’s circadian rhythms are going to be slightly off.  That will contribute to an increased number of accidents, both minor and major.  There will also be increased rates of illness (again, both major and minor), and I believe there is even some evidence that men at least will suffer more heart attacks after the time changes.

And what are the other advantages of Daylight Savings Time?  I’m not aware of any actual other benefits.

Of course, like most of you, I’m starting my own work week today, and it’s going to be a long one; the office is scheduled to be open this Saturday.  By then, the shifted time measure will be mostly adjusted in everyone’s heads.  I’m speaking of things here in the US, of course; I honestly don’t know off the top of my head whether other cultures have adopted this weird custom.

Whence did it originate?  I’ve heard explanations and excuses at various times in my life, but they are not very convincing.  If you know‒with reasonably good credence‒please share that information in the comments below.  And like and share it if you’re so inclined, especially if you have a strong sense of irony.  Heck, like and share the song itself if you want to immerse yourself in a kind of meta-level irony, or something like that:

I don’t know what to discuss today, even more so than usual.  I’ve committed to trying not to dwell on, or at least to share, my negative thoughts and emotions and so on, since I’m sure they do very little other than make other people feel depressed (yes, certain kinds of mental illness can be rather contagious, in a sense at least).

I won’t say I would never wish depression on anyone; that’s ridiculous.  For instance, I would feel much safer in the world if this Presidential administration, and indeed most of its equivalents around the globe, suffered from enough depression to make them second-guess themselves and doubt themselves from time to time.  It almost ought to be a requirement for office that someone be prone to dysthymia at the very least, so they would feel less confident that their shit doesn’t stink, so to speak.

And no, I am not suggesting that the people of the world ought to put me in charge for the best chance to make the world better.  I used to dream of such things, and I had a very Sauron-like wish to control events in the world for the greater good.  It might still not be too horrible a notion.

But my inclination over time has become more negative, more Melkor/Morgoth like.  So if anyone is inclined to encourage and engender acts of chaos and destruction on a hitherto unseen scale, by all means, give me immense power.  I make no warranties or guarantees or even assurances that I will use such power wisely.

I’ll try, of course.  No one can be expected (fairly) to do anything more than that, no matter what Yoda said.

Goodness knows I’ve tried a lot, in a lot of ways, all throughout my life, literally for as long as I can remember.  By which I mean, I’ve tried to do my best to do good things and to be a good person‒a good friend, a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good doctor, all that.  You can probably tell by my current state‒solitary, lonely, divorced, professionally ostracized, in bad physical health, in horrible mental health, alone*‒how well I’ve done at all those things.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve tried hard.  I’m not one to big myself up very much, but I have worked hard all my life, trying to be a good son, a good friend, a good brother, a good husband, a good doctor, a good father.  Yet despite my sincere efforts and my reasonably high intelligence, here I am.

I suppose a lot of the disappointing outcome(s) is/are related to my ASD, both the heart-based one and the brain-based one, as well as my tendency (probably related to the preceding) to depression and some degree of low-grade paranoia.

By “low-grade” there, I mean that I don’t literally suspect that there are malicious forces plotting against me or trying to control me; I honestly don’t think highly enough of humans (or any other beings) to expect them to be capable of such things.  It would almost be reassuring if they were.

No, I mean I just have a general, global sense‒not just intellectually, but in my bones as it were, in my deep intuitions‒that I cannot rely upon anyone or upon anything, other than the laws of nature themselves (whatever their final version might be).  I don’t “trust” anyone or anything, including (one might even say “especially”) myself.  Everything is a calculated risk.

This is of course literally true for everyone, but I think most people hide from that fact most of the time, usually (but definitely not always) without terrible consequences.  I don’t know if that’s worse or better.  It may be more pleasant, but I suspect it’s misleading, and has been responsible for, or at least it has contributed to, many ills the human race has brought upon itself and upon others.

Whataya gonna do?  I guess you’re gonna do whatever you must, as they say, since it’s not as though you can do anything other than what you do once you’ve done it, and so it was all along what you were going to do, and so it was what you must do (or must have done).

I hope you have a good day and a good week.  I’ve tried to withhold my depression and negativity, with at least some degree of success‒trust me, I’ve withheld‒and I will continue to do so, because sharing it is pointless, and asking for help is laughable.

*Now, that phrase had some redundant notions, didn’t it?

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Man overboard

As the real weekends go, it was better than most, to paraphrase The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  By this, I’m referring to this last weekend, the two days before this day, of course.

I did not work on Saturday, which is good, because that would have been the third time in a row.  I also got to hang out with my youngest on Saturday, and we watched about four episodes of Doctor Who together, which was good, good fun.  I cannot complain about that in any way.

I have though a weird, disquieting, sinking sort of feeling that it may have been the last time I will see my youngest, or maybe anyone else that I love.  It’s is not one of those reliable sorts of feelings, like those that lead one to new insights in science or mathematics or what have you.  It’s probably more a product of depression and anxiety, the feeling that anything good in my life is sure not to last, if it happens at all, because I do not and cannot possibly be worthy of anything good happening to me.

Is that irrational?  Of course it is irrational.  It cannot be expressed in any sense as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how many digits they may have.

Wait, wait, let me think about that.  My thought, my feeling, was expressed above finitely.  That is, of course, a shorthand for what is really happening, but even if one were to codify those processes down to the level of each molecular interaction that affects any neural/hormonal process that contributes to my feeling, we know that must be a finite description (though it could, in principle, be quite large).

Even if we’re taking the full spectrum of quantum mechanics into account when describing my mental state, we know that quantum mechanics demands a minimum resolvable distance and time (the Planck length and the Planck time) below which any differentiation is physically meaningless.

A finite amount of information can describe the events and structures and processes in any given finite region of spacetime.  In fact, the maximum amount of information in any given region of spacetime is measured by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of an event horizon that would span exactly that region, as seen from the outside*.

Any finite amount of information can be encoded as a finite number of bits, which can of course be “translated” to any other equivalent code or number system.  So, really, though the contents of my mind are, in principle, from a certain point of view, unlimited, they are finite in their actual, instantiated content, and can therefore certainly be expressed as an integer, and thus also as a ratio (since any integer could be considered a ratio of itself over one, or twice itself over two, etc.).

So, in that sense, my thoughts are not irrational.  Neener, neener, neener.

In many other senses—maybe not the literal, original sense, but in the horrified, cannot accept that not all numbers can be expressed as ratios of integers because that makes the universe too inconceivable, sense, among others—I can be quite irrational.

It’s very difficult to fight one’s irrationality from the inside, alone.  Even John Nash didn’t really beat his schizophrenia from within as shown in the movie version of A Beautiful Mind.  Also, his delusions in real life were far more extravagant and bizarre than those which appear in the sanitized version that made a good Hollywood story.

If one escapes from mental illness from within, one has to consider it largely a matter of luck, like a young child who doesn’t know anything about math getting a right answer on a graduate level, high order differential equation problem.  It’s physically possible; heck, if it were a multiple choice question, it might even be relatively common***.  But it’s not a matter of being able to choose to do it right and to know how it was done.

Severe mental health issues are going to need to receive assistance from outside, almost always.  This is not an indictment of them or of the need for help.

Surely, someone who has been swept off the deck of a ship by a rogue wave cannot be faulted for needing help from those still on the ship of they are to survive.  It would certainly seem foolish and almost inevitably fruitless if such a person tried to claw his way up the side of the ship to get back on board when there is no ladder and no handholds.  He should certainly not be ashamed that he cannot swim hard enough to launch himself bodily from the water and back onto the surface of the vessel.

One cannot reasonably fault such a person for trying to do the superhuman.  A person might try to do practically anything rather than drown or be eaten alive by some marine predator.  But, of course, barring an astonishing concatenation of events such as the time-reverse of the splashing entry into the ocean happening and sending the person out of the sea just as it was entered, such efforts will not succeed.

And though it might be heartening or at least positive for one to receive encouragement from those still on the deck—don’t drown, keep treading water, you can do it, you’ll make people sad if you drown, you deserve to stay afloat, I’m proud of you for treading water yet another day, it’ll get better, this won’t last forever, you’ve made it this far so you know you can keep going, you don’t want the people who know you to feel sad because you drowned, etc.—in the end it might as well come from the seagulls waiting to pick at one’s floating corpse.

Mind you, certain kinds of words can be more useful than others.  Words like, “Hey, around the other side of the ship there’s a built-in ladder; if you can get over there and time things right, you might be able to grab the lowest rung when the waves lift you, and then climb up,” might be useful because they are directions for using real, tangible resources that we know can make a difference.  Also, words like, “Hang on just a bit longer, we’re throwing down a life preserver on a rope so we can haul you up” would be useful, obviously, unless they were mere “comforting” lies.

Alas, though one could reasonably expect such literal assistance if one were washed overboard—the “laws” of the sea are deeply rooted in the hearts of those who work there, and they include a general tendency to help anyone adrift to the best of one’s abilities—when it comes to mental illness, the distress and the problems are difficult for others to discern and easy to ignore.  Calls of distress are often experienced as annoyances, and even treated with contempt, since those hearing them cannot readily perceive that they themselves might be similarly washed overboard at any time.

But, of course, they might be.

I don’t know how I got on this tangent, but I guess I never really do.  I just go where my mind takes me, and my mind is not a reliable driver.  It is, though, a reliable narrator.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  Nothing does.

Anyway, here we go again into another work week, because that was what we did last week.  I wish I could offer you better reasons, but I’m really only good at breaking things down, destroying things, not at lifting anyone or anything up.  That comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers.

*From within an event horizon, the volume could be much larger than the spacetime that seems to be enclosed from the outside, because spacetime inside the horizon is massively curved and stretched.  It’s conceivable (at least to me) that there could be infinite space** within, at least along the dimension(s) of maximum stretch, just as there is infinite surface area to a Gabriel’s Horn, but only finite volume.

**See, mathematically, one can stuff infinite space inside a nutshell.  Hamlet was right.  He often was.

***Perhaps this explains why certain types of mental health problems can respond well to relatively straightforward interventions, and even to more than one kind of intervention with roughly comparable success, e.g., CBT and/or basic antidepressants and such.  These relatively tractable forms of depression are the “multiple choice problem” versions of mental illness.  This does not make them any less important.

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“Like”, “comment”, and “share” (if you feel like it)

I’m very tired this morning.  By which I mean I’m more tired even than usual.  My head is a bit foggy—more so than usual, again—and I feel like I just belong lying down inert, perhaps in an open-topped coffin.  I’ve occasionally thought that they looked like good places to sleep.  It seems a shame to waste them on people who are already dead.

It’s Wednesday today, and I don’t think I’m going to have anything nearly as thoughtful to say as what I wrote yesterday, which was at least rather “deep” if not particularly useful or helpful or interesting to any of my readers.  I did get an interested comment on my take on one of the reasons mindfulness is useful, and that’s always nice.  I’d love to encourage greater feedback from more of my readers, here on the site in the comments, but I don’t know what to do to encourage them [I decided just to do a little cajoling in the headline, in case that works].

Probably there is just some percentage of people who tend to comment, no matter the situation.  It’s a bit like the long-known “fact” (which may or may not be a true fact) that every advertisement, from flyers/mailings to commercials, actually elicit a response in only about two percent of people who interact with it.  I suspect it’s probably similar with things related to blogging and social media and the like.

One sees it most readily on places like YouTube.  The number of views of a video is almost always something like an order of magnitude greater than the number of likes (and often it’s larger than the number of subscribers), and that’s still larger, though by a ratio that’s not as clear to me, than the number of people who comment (let alone share).

My own YouTube videos (and those of my published songs) are poor examples, or perhaps one might say “poor samples”, not representative of the phenomenon as a whole.  I have a number of “views” on my music videos that is generally a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of “likes”, but I know why that is.

Almost all of those views are from me, because I put my songs in my YouTube music playlist, and so I have listened to them often, back when I used to ride my scooter to work and back.  I had a lovely Bluetooth enabled helmet.  I like to listen to songs and sing along in a car, or similar, when I’m on my way places*.  So I’ve listened to my own songs probably orders of magnitude more times than everyone else put together has listened to any of my songs.

It’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?  I’m also the one who has bought more copies of my books—because I gave copies to the people in the office—than everyone else put together, I’m fairly sure.

As for this blog, well, I get a higher number of likes relative to number of readers than I do with anything else, and I even recently have been getting a comment or so most days, which is very nice.  There’s at least some interaction.  It would be nice if I could reach a larger audience, but I’m not terribly good at self-promotion.  I am pretty good at self-denigration, though.  In fact, I’m one of the best there is at it!

Ha ha.

Well, like the song says, it’s all just a drop of water in an endless sea.  Or, it’s all just spit in the ocean** as more people probably say.  My spit may be more purulent than average, but it’s all still just spit.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to discuss today.  I’m very tired and worn out and I’m in ongoing pain that only responds somewhat to all the mitigating things I try to do, at least so far.  I’ve been through a quarter of a century of trying, and I have not been passive nor uncreative nor ignorant in my attempts.  As those reading might notice, I’ve thought about this matter a lot.  You probably would also if you were in chronic pain for nearly half of your life (so far).  It has a way of garnering your attention.  It’s built that way.

It’s interesting to note that shortly after I’m sixty, if I’m still alive***, I will have been in essentially constant pain for half my life.  After that it will become a majority (unless I’m cured at some point along the way, of course).

I occasionally (not often, though, because it’s too disheartening) wonder what my life would be like, what I would be like, if not for my chronic pain.

Things would almost certainly be vastly different.  I cannot be certain that they would be better—there are probably at least a few things that would be worse.  But it seems likely that my life would be much better overall, if only because I wouldn’t have a huge chunk of my will and energy stolen by being in pain all the time.  That constant pain really does make everything else harder.

But no matter the state of the rest of my life, at least one thing would be true (by “definition” in this case), and that is that I would not be in pain every fucking day of my stupid useless life.

Surely that must be worth something.  It would not be worth not having my children exist, but almost everything else would be worth trading.  I sometimes think of it as parallel to a line from Me and Bobby McGee:  “I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”  It’s nice poetry, albeit a bit weird to think about temporally.  But in my case, I think of it as basically saying I would gladly give up some significant fraction of what would otherwise have been my future if I could be out of pain.

But, of course, my future is less valuable to me now at least partly because I am in pain.  If I were not in pain, ironically, the future would be much more valuable, since it would be at least somewhat less uncomfortable.  If I could be free of depression, and the tendency thereto, that would make things better still.  That might even constitute a future worth having.

Yeah, yeah, I know, wishes, horses, manure, beggars riding, dogs and cats living together, watermelon, cantaloupe, rutabaga, yada, yada, yada.  I’m wasting my time and yours.  And I’m writing too much, because I’m using the lapcom, and I’m not saying or doing (or being) anything at all worth saying or doing or being.  This is all just stupid.

I hope you all at least have a good day.  I would not mind if this were my last one.

*I can’t do it anymore because I don’t ride or drive anywhere anymore, so I am not “alone” when commuting anymore.  I’m also not alone at the house.  It’s really quite disappointing.  I like to sing.

**This is a bit amusing:  I made a typo when I first wrote that phrase, and it was rendered as “spit is the ocean”, which seems almost like some vaguely deep thought about how oceans are lived in, swum in, excreted in, and bled in by numerous living creatures.

***Right now that seems a horrifying prospect.

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Pain, pain, go away…and don’t come back some other day

I’m writing this post on my smartphone today, because I decided not to bring the lapcom back with me on Saturday.  I was very tired and sore and worn down from the week and felt that even that small extra weight was more than I cared to carry.

I got at least a bit of physical rest yesterday, but my mental rest was poor, and was somewhat disrupted by a few seemingly minor things that happened.  Worse, though, is the fact that I tried to sedate myself on Saturday night somewhat, but still woke up by two in the morning, after maybe four hours’ sleep.

It’s quite frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I suppose it’s better than being one of those people who never seems to be able to wake up on time or to get places on time.  I don’t know how such people would have survived in the ancestral environment.  I suppose it’s just as well for them that they don’t live in such an environment.

So, anyway, I was both rather stressed out and unrested on my “day off” and now I’m no better rested, because I slept even less last night.  Also, my pain, which doesn’t like to become too boring (except in describing the character of the pain), has shifted its focus, and now it is my entire lower half (umbilicus down) that is achy and sore and doesn’t want to move.  Neither side is worse, but neither side is better*.  Although my left middle back and side are way more tight and sore than the right, and my left shoulder still has that weird, seemingly neurological, stiffness and pain.

It would be nice to be able to walk to the train this morning; the weather is not bad for it, and it would be a slight money-saver, though a time loser (but my time is mostly wasted time, anyway).  Unfortunately, I don’t know that I am physically up to the task, and I fear it might exacerbate my pain.  That’s never a good thing.

I wish I still had a scooter, or one of those electric scooters or bikes‒or better yet, that I could ride the bike(s) I have without having to fix their tires and such.  Maintenance of such things is really difficult for me, though; it’s not difficult to do as it were, i.e., the tasks are not in themselves particularly challenging physically or with respect to knowledge or dexterity.

It’s a matter of will in a sense.  Also, these kinds of tasks seem to do something akin to or analogous to creating an allergic reaction:  they make my mind itch horribly, and itching is, of course, a kind of pain, and my mind only has the reserves to deal with so much pain at any given time.

I seem able to regenerate less and less of that reserve each day‒either that or just my reserves are constantly being depleted at a rate faster than they can recover and so there are no “reserves”, just a base rate process that is in the net negative on average every day, and which will eventually run out and that will be that.

I don’t know what will happen then.  I’m honestly surprised that it hasn’t happened already.  Maybe it has.  Maybe this is me without any actual capacity to deal with anything other than those things which are more painful for me not to do.  Hmm.  That’s a vaguely interesting thought.

Whatever the best description is, I am very worn out.  More and more‒or so it seems right now‒I have no sense of any future for me.  I can’t even readily imagine my own future; I can’t see how a future can possibly happen that entails anything but quietly catastrophic dissolution.  And, of course, my pain doesn’t help my mood disorder(s) and my mood disorder doesn’t help it.  It’s another one of those cycles that has a vicious streak a mile wide.

Whenever I mention a vicious cycle, part of me nearly always thinks of the words “viscous cycle”, and I think vaguely about what might constitute a viscous cycle.  If any of you have any amusing thoughts about that, I would be delighted to hear them.  I could use a bit of a laugh today.

I’m really worn out, and it’s only Monday.  I don’t know why I bother.  I mean, I could give causal explanations, of course‒all things that happen in the ordinary world have causes‒and my descriptions would probably be fairly accurate and correct, though probably incomplete.  But as for reasons, that’s another matter.  Coming up with those is more difficult, and some of them are quite tortured.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the author and psychologist Viktor Frankl points out the notion, not original to him but poignantly and painfully rediscovered by him in a profoundly visceral way in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, that a person can endure nearly anything if they have a purpose, a reason, a meaning.  But such meaning is not always there to be found, and I don’t want to try to embrace a false one; and though it is possible for people to make meaning for themselves, my knack for that has worsened over time.

Again, the pain wears away so many things, as it has also stripped away so many people and so much property and so many accomplishments in my life.  I think I would be quite a different person, or at least there would be a real difference in balance in my personality, if I could be free of anything but more ordinary pain.

I wouldn’t even complain about being “comfortably numb”.  I know pain is biologically important, of course, but mine has gone well into the region of diminishing marginal returns, then rounded into negative marginal returns, and its net value crossed the x-axis downward a long time ago.  It might be nice to experience at least a brief period of having pathologically too little pain.  Even if it would make me vulnerable to injury and illness, I wouldn’t mind much.  It’s not as though I don’t crash up against illness and injury (in some sense) every day anyway.

Oh, what’s the point?  I’m sorry to bore you all with this nonsense.  I really should just call it quits, because this is at least as pointless as anything else I do, and that’s saying a lot.  It almost certainly does not do the world any net good, and I’m not sure whether it does me any good.

I guess I’ll keep doing it until it becomes more painful to do it than not to do it.  Or until I die, I guess.

*I sometimes like to indulge a clever paradoxical descriptive trick I picked up from Piers Anthony by saying something like “each leg hurt worse than the other one”.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, you filthy animals.

Well, guess what.  It’s Saturday now, and I’m writing a blog post, which can only mean that I am working today.  At the last minute, the schedule of the office was changed and now we’re working.  And we’re supposedly going to be doing this now every other (meaning alternating ones) Saturday.  But, of course, I worked last Saturday.  And who knows how things will change in the future?  I’m pretty sure not even the boss knows, because he changes the specifics somewhat irregularly, though there are always colorably reasonable purposes behind such changes.

I suppose I could merely have said, “No, I’m not coming in this weekend.  I worked last weekend, I had to walk to the bank after work and I caused my knees and my pain in general to flare up badly, and that problem continues.  I need a fucking break.”  But, of course, I’m not really built quite that way.  I have been too strongly trained to operate on the approach that to shirk going to work is to be a jerk*.

So, here I am, at the office, and it’s the middle of the night.  That’s right, when it got to be time to leave, I was in too much pain to want to ride the train‒it’s not comfortable to sit in, and I usually have to go to the upper levels to find a seat, which is a little exacerbating and occasionally exasperating‒and I didn’t want to pay to Uber back to the house like I did on Monday and then Thursday for the above reasons, so…I stayed here in the office overnight.

I’m tired of being in pain, I can tell you that.  I wish it were the sort of thing one could simply “get used to”, but biology does not tend to select for creatures that can get used to and ignore pain.  That would defeat the whole usefulness of pain.  Make no mistake:  like fire alarms, pain was and is (and probably always will be) terribly useful.  And “terribly” has more than one legitimate meaning here.

The trouble is that in the modern world, we suffer from and yet survive injuries and disorders that would almost never have been survived by our ancestors, and we can live on with the consequences of these injuries and illnesses for decades, but our nervous systems don’t have any clear function that suppresses or diminishes pain after a while.  There’s no selection pressure favoring such a thing.  Even for our ancestors who might have survived to have chronic pain, that problem tended to develop after peak reproductive years had already passed, and so evolution literally could not and cannot detect the issue.

Indeed, it’s just barely conceivable, though by no means demonstrated, that it might be good for male humans who have injuries that hamper them to feel the pain worsen, to have it lead to them removing themselves from the population in one way or another.  When they can no longer be physical providers, in order to increase the share of resources for their offspring and their other kin, they can kill themselves, directly or indirectly, giving the genes they share with close relatives that harbor that tendency a selective advantage.  This is hypothetical, bordering on speculative, but it might make some sense.

This could also be related to female humans being better suited to endure long-term pain than males, since matrilineal support among human tribes is common***, but that’s getting ever more speculative.

Don’t get me wrong; the ideas are plausible.  But it’s just when one’s ideas are strongly plausible‒but not specifically tested or backed by clear and specific evidence‒that one must be especially harsh and strict with oneself.  It’s comparatively simple, and psychologically rewarding, to come up with plausible and logical hypotheses, but even if one is very smart, most of one’s hypotheses are going to be incorrect.  Whether you’re more Popperian or more Bayesian, the crucial usefulness of testing a hypothesis to try to refute it or to see how your credences shift is inescapable.

This mildly interesting digression doesn’t change the fact that I am in searing pain lately, and it doesn’t seem to diminish much for long.  I’m already prone to dysthymia/chronic depression (veering into the acute stage frequently) and anxiety with at least some obsessive compulsive patterns, all of it occurring in a nervous system that is…atypical from the start.

I hate the world.  I hate my body.  I hate the twisted mockery my life has become.  I hate large parts of my mind (but not all of it).  I hate being around people.  I hate being alone.  I really just ought to stop the whole fucking ride and get off.  I just need to work up the nerve and the commitment.  I’m getting there, believe me.

Anyway, I hope you’re having just a lovely Valentine’s Day.

*And to rhyme all the time is to act like a slime and be covered with grime**.

**I know, none of that makes sense.  It’s not really meant to make sense.  I just accidentally did some internal rhyming in a sentence and that stimulated me to do more of it.

***There are good biological reasons for this as well.  Mothers, and therefore maternal grandmothers, all know whether a child is their child or not, so it’s easier to know that it’s a good idea to spend effort and resources on those descendants.  Males, in general, can not be as certain.

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“But see, amid the mimic rout, a crawling shape intrude.”

First of all‒first today, anyway‒I would like to apologize to anyone who feels disappointed that I did not write a blog post yesterday.

I’m sorry.

Okay, there, I apologized.

I don’t know if anyone actually missed there being a blog post to read from me yesterday.  Probably, I ought really to be apologizing on the days when I do write a blog post.  I know that I probably make a lot of readers feel like crap when they read my blog, no matter how good their intentions.

Then again, no one is forcing them to read it, are they?  If I could somehow make it so that people felt some powerful compulsion to read my blog, I would probably make a lot more people read it.  Heck, I don’t know that I would waste the effort on my blog; I’d be more inclined to make people feel compelled to read my fiction, if I could do that.  At least then I might eventually make some money from it, and more importantly, my stories would be read by more people.  Some of those people might even end up finding my stories to be some of their favorite stories.

That would be much more important than having more people read my blog, as far as I can see.  No one is going to read blog posts to their kids or talk about them with other people.  No one will wistfully pull a volume of my blog posts down from a shelf on a cool and rainy afternoon in autumn to pass a quiet day reading with a cup of tea or coffee or cocoa, maybe with a quilt or an afghan over his or her or their lap (perhaps with a pet dog or cat keeping the reader company).

It would be just barely possible that someone somewhere might do that with one of my stories if enough people knew of them.

Anyway, that’s that.

I didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick from work.  “Sick” feels like it’s not quite the right word, though.  “Sick” feels as though it should refer to someone suffering from something infectious‒a bacterial or viral or fungal disease.  Of course, I know that’s not the only way for a body to become compromised, but it’s the first notion that comes to my mind when I hear the word “sick”; much like Forrest Gump, I’m inclined to ask, “Do you have cough due to cold?”

This is not to imply that I was well.  I certainly was not well yesterday, not even for me.  The pain about which I wrote on Monday did not improve through the course of that day, and I left the office right after lunch time.  I tried to rest at the house; however, the pain (like the proverbial horrors) persisted.  It also did its really annoying thing where it shifts its focus from one side of my body to the other, probably as I compensate for that one side when it’s flaring, which this leads to increased irritation of the other side and then I compensate for that, and so on.

That cycle’s got a vicious streak a mile wide!  It’s a killer!  Look at the bones!

Anyway, at this moment, it’s my left side pain that dominates, from my shoulder and wrist and thumb and fingers (not really my elbow, oddly enough) down to my ribs, my back, my pelvis, my hip, my knee, and my ankle, down to the arch and ball of my foot, and to some degree my toes.

The right side still hurts, but it’s slightly drowned out by the left side.  That will probably shift, though.  It may do so sometime today.

I’ve been trying to medicate myself adequately with what’s legally available, but it all has limits, and lots of the available things have significant toxicity.  NSAIDS like Ibuprofen and Naproxen (and aspirin) can do some good, but they are hard on the kidneys and on the stomach.  I’ve been having a fair amount of nausea these last several days, probably at least partly because of these meds.  Acetaminophen is not anti-inflammatory and it is easier on the gut and kidneys, but it’s dangerous to the liver* in significant doses, and it doesn’t do much in less than significant doses.

So, yeah, that’s all that.  CBD seems to help a little bit, and I do use it, but it (plus its related compounds) makes me feel rather loopy.  This isn’t always a horrible thing, but it can make it hard to get things done.  And, unfortunately, since I am here alone in a civilization without much of a safety net, I cannot simply not get things done and try to rest and recover somewhere.  If I were independently wealthy, I suppose I might be able to do that‒or if there really were a great many people who bought and read my books, I might be able to have a less stressful lifestyle.

Alas, I am not independently wealthy, nor am I a bestselling author, nor‒as Théoden says to Aragorn‒am I as lucky in my friends as some are.  That’s not to say that I have not had good friends; I feel I have had some of the best friends it is possible for a person to have.  But I don’t really have then anymore; at least I don’t have them around.

I cannot blame this on anyone but myself, if blame is to be had.  After all, I am the common denominator of the whole situation.  Occam’s Razor suggests that I am probably the single biggest contributing factor in the fact that I have no friends, and no family, around me now.

I am not a good pony; I am not a good investment; I am not a good risk.

It doesn’t matter, though.  I’m just tired and worn down and in a great deal of pain, and it’s more annoying with every passing day.

People will tend to say they don’t want other people to take their own lives when their pain (physical, psychological, or both) is too persistently great.  But they don’t offer any actual help dealing with it, just trite clichés and moral homilies and pseudo-comforting nothings (“You would be missed”, “there are people who will miss you”, “there are people who would be sad if you were gone”, etc.**) that are not far removed from “thoughts and prayers”.

Whatever.  I guess we’ll all see whether or not I write a blog post tomorrow.  Or, well, I guess those who bother looking will see.  I will either see or I won’t, depending on the circumstances, but even if I don’t see, others may still see, if they look.

See you then.

*Its metabolism uses up glutathione (if memory serves) which is a scavenger of free radicals in liver cells.  When it gets used up, the radicals generated by the various stages of hepatic detoxification chew up the liver’s own cells.

**Really?  How would they even know?  If I stop blogging and posting tomorrow, as far as anyone but one or two people could know, it might be because I just quit blogging or got hit by a car or got abducted by extraterrestrials.  It would have no significant impact upon anyone.

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[Insert blog post headline here]

I really feel horrible today.  That’s not intended to mean that I feel that I am horrible today, though it doesn’t preclude that, either.  I more often than not think that I am horrible.  But today, in addition to that, I feel rotten.

And that word I mean almost literally.  If someone told me‒with at least a colorable claim to knowledge‒that the pain I have is because parts of my body are decomposing while I am still alive, I would not immediately dismiss the possibility (though I consider it quite unlikely).

We had a bad (and weird) day at the office on Saturday, then I had some things I had to do afterwards that required a great deal of walking.  It was a bright day but still cool out, though, so that was not so bad; it reminded me of walking places with my friends when I was young, though I have no such friends now.

Anyway, I had to do something Sunday morning that required a bit of walking, too‒not as much, but significant.  I was feeling okay up until that point.

Well, I don’t know for sure what happened, but by early afternoon, it all hit me, and the entire lower half of my body, and to some degree my left shoulder and arm, were in increasing pain.  My left hand was also cold, which demonstrates some autonomic aspect to the pain, which is not too surprising.  I have tried to medicate it with the resources I have available, while trying to avoid permanent liver and/or kidney and/or stomach damage.  Alas, my success has been limited.  Because of my pain, among other things, I hardly slept at all last night; it was a bad sleep even for me.

Sorry.  I’m sure this is all hideously boring.  Believe me*, it’s even more boring to be the one describing it.  I don’t really know what I’m going to do about it, though.

At this stage of my life, all I wanted and expected was to be able to come home after work or on the weekends and just be with my family‒my wife and kids and such.  But largely due to my chronic pain, that is all a long-vanished fantasy.  Nobody wants me to come home to them, and no one certainly wants to come home to me.  I don’t even want to come home to me.

In some ways I don’t have to come home to me, since I don’t consider where I live now to be home.  It’s just a shit-hole in which I exist when I’m not at work or en route to or from work or going to the store or the bank or whatever.  I haven’t felt like I was home anywhere for at least the last 13 years, and probably really for some years before that.

And I’m not very good at taking care of myself, so my life tends to be a mess when I’m left to my own devices, and that tends to get worse over time‒it’s like my very own, personal, bespoke version of the second law of thermodynamics.

So, yeah, I’m not feeling well at all, but there’s not a whole hell of a lot that I can do about it.  And my depression and the other mental/neurodivergent shit doesn’t help.  It’s not like there are any programs or anything available near me.  I couldn’t afford one if there were, and I have no insurance, and as far as I know I have no secret inheritance anywhere.

I mean, come on, who’s going to leave an inheritance to me?  I tend to drive away anyone I care about (not deliberately).  I think you can grasp why that might be just from reading the smattering of my thoughts that I share here.  Believe it or not, I do not share the worst, most self-hating (or world-hating**) thoughts that go through my mind.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I will go to work because there’s really nothing better for me to do; I was at the house all day yesterday and it has not made me feel better, so I don’t see why another day there would improve things.

I hope this is the start of a good week for you, at least.

*Or don’t if you don’t want to, I don’t really give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass whether you believe me.

**To be fair to the world‒which probably deserves better than my judgment‒one of the main things I hate about it is that I am in it.  I suspect I would find it much more pleasant if this were not so***.

***Well, okay, I wouldn’t find it better if I were not in it, since I wouldn’t be there to find it better.  But my projection of my perception into the world as it would be without me in it certainly seems no worse than the world as it is now, and it would have the relative benefit of my absence.  I think my conclusion is therefore reasonable.

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どうも ありがとう Mister ロバあと

It’s Wednesday the 4th of February (02-04-2026 in the US).  The best I can currently think of to say about today’s date is that it is composed entirely of even digits‒twos, zeroes, a four, a six‒which is at least uniform in a sense.  But it’s rather boring, too.

Admittedly, most people probably find any such evaluation of dates with respect to numerical patterns boring.  I would apologize, but it’s not as though anyone is forcing anyone else to read my blog.  If someone were doing so (and I wouldn’t necessarily try to stop them), I’d like to think I would have a far larger circulation than I have.

As it is, my circulation is roughly 5 liters.  Ha ha.  That’s a (lame) joke regarding the volume of blood in a typical adult human body.

While I may not feel as though I am a member of the same species as most humans, I recognize that my gross physiology is basically the same, and so my blood volume should be comparable.  My body just doesn’t seem to work quite as well as that of the average person, at least in some senses.  For instance, my chronic pain has continued to attack me with exceptional aggression over the past several days; yesterday was particularly bad, and today is not shaping up well so far.

Not that this is anything new.  I’ve been in chronic pain every day for a quarter of a century now (though I suppose when it had just begun one would not call it “chronic”), if my memory is accurate, which it usually is.  That’s just a bit longer than my youngest has been alive.  It’s not pleasant (though my youngest is), and at least partly in consequence of my chronic pain, neither am I.

I do think that my outlook and my personality would be much better if I did not have pain every day.  I would probably sleep better, as well.  I almost certainly would not have gotten involved in trying to treat other people’s chronic pain in less than ideal circumstances, and so would have avoided at least some catastrophes that happened because of that (apparently misguided) intention.

Still, I’ve been prone to depression since I was in my early teens, well before the onset of my chronic pain, so maybe I’ve always been unpleasant.  And though I didn’t know it, I’ve had ASD all my life (even after the heart-based ASD I had was corrected through open-heart surgery when I was 18).

That’s a weird coincidence of acronyms, isn’t it, those two kinds of ASDs in one person*?  It can be rather confusing when the same acronym signifies two quite different things.  Still, there are only so many 3-letter acronyms available.  The maximum number in English is 26 to the 3rd power, or 17,576.

You might think that ought to be more than enough for there to be no overlap, but of course, acronyms aren’t merely randomly chosen letters.  They need to signify something specific in order for them to be useful, and far more words start with A or S or D, for instances, than start with X or Z or Q.

It’s a bit like dealing with words in general.  In principle, a word of a particular length (let’s use the variable x to signify that length) in English could be any one of 26 to the xth power possibilities.  But English is not a random cipher, and there are many possible orderings of letters than are not “allowed” in English, because they don’t produce any plausible sound.  English is, of course, a written version of a spoken language.  If a word can’t even be pronounced, it’s not much of a word.

One cannot, for instance, have a word that consists of all consonants (certainly none are coming to my** mind).  One could produce strings of consonants that could be sounded out, I suppose; one could for instance pronounce the string “mrndl” pretty readily, I think.  But that’s just generally unwieldy, and in some languages it cannot be done.

In Japanese, for instance, all but one pair of kana representing sounds/syllables (hiragana for native words, katakana for imported words) are of the “consonant-vowel” sound type (e.g., ha, ke, ni, su, to, etc.) or just vowels (e.g., a, i, u, e, o).  Only the “n” syllable stands alone (sometimes pronounced as almost “m” depending on the context) and it occurs only at the ends of words.  Thus, in the game of shiritori***, if a player says a word that ends with “n”, they lose, because the next person cannot possibly begin a subsequent word.

How did I go from discussing the uninteresting digits of today’s date to the game of shiritori?  I suppose I’ll find out when I do my editing.  It is strange, though, even to me.  I can only imagine how bizarre and confusing it must be for others to read my blog posts.  With that in mind, I’ll cease this particular crime against humanity or against logic or reason or whatever for now.  Please accept my apologies, and hopefully you will have a good day.

[P.S. The above headline would be transliterated as “Doumo arigatou, Mister Robaato”, which can be meant as “Thank you very much, Mister Roboto” (as in the Styx song) or as “Thank you very much, Mister Robert.”  Curious, ne?]

*Actually, there is a higher incidence of cardiac ASDs, as well as several other atypia that I have (such as a cavum septum pellucidum) in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD than in the neurotypical population.  Interesting, isn’t it?

**Wait a moment‒the word “my” is superficially composed of two consonants, isn’t it?  Well, in a sense that’s true, but this is one of those cases we were taught about in elementary school in which the letter “y” acts as a vowel.

***(しりとり)  In this game, one person says a word, and the next person has then to say another word that begins with the same syllable with which the previous word ended.  It goes on until one player cannot think of a word that hasn’t already been used or until someone uses a word ending with “n”.

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Who’s hogging all the ground?

It’s Monday, and I think it’s Groundhog* Day in the US, but I may be misremembering that.  It’s never been a holiday to which I’ve paid much attention.  The notion of the groundhog seeing its shadow and that leading to six more weeks of winter is one of those rare superstitions that I don’t think anyone I’ve met actually takes seriously.

I was awake almost the entire night last night.  It’s very frustrating.  On Friday nights (when I don’t work on Saturday) I tend to sedate myself rather thoroughly, though I use only legal, OTC methods.  To a slightly lesser degree, I also do so on Saturday nights, though I have to make sure I get up to do my laundry on Sunday morning.

But then, on Sunday nights‒and to some degree every other weeknight‒I have a terrible time getting to sleep and then staying asleep.  And then my brain becomes ever more frazzled and worn down, even after a relatively restful weekend, at the very beginning of the week, and it rarely improves as the days pass through the weeks.

Of course, my rest isn’t helped by the fact that I’m continuing through a flare-up of my chronic pain.  That’s probably not helped by the unusually cold weather in south Florida; it went down to 33 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday night and about 35 last night.  That’s as chilly as it’s been since I’ve lived down here.  I know, though, that cold weather is not the main culprit behind my pain flare-ups, because they happen at least as often during the middle of the summer, when it is neither cold nor dry.

Also, my chronic pain problem only began after I was living in Florida.  Before coming here, New York City was the warmest place I had lived, but I never developed any chronic pain problems up there.  Of course, I’m older than I used to be, which is what happens when you haven’t died yet.  But that didn’t happen all at once, whereas my chronic pain sort of did‒and not terribly long after I had moved to Florida.  So, the problem is basically internal, a neuromusculoskeletal kind of thingy.  I suppose perhaps changes of pressure might affect it, but temperature doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.

Anyway, sorry, I know that must be tremendously boring.  Believe me, I get quite bored of being in pain, which has been ongoing for more than twenty years, with no days off, not even major holidays.  It gets very, very old.  It certainly contributed to the downfall of the life I had tried to build and to the wreckage in which I now live.  And it’s damnably hard to build anything back up, literally or figuratively, when one is in pain.

So, yeah, a lot of things that stir my ambition‒and ambition has always been a noteworthy part of my character‒get left behind at least partly because I just can’t keep doing things when I’m in pain.  I don’t know if that’s because biology has programmed us not to want to do things that are associated with pain (and most everything in my life is so associated now) or just because dealing with the pain wears out one’s willpower, in a sort of “learned helplessness” situation.  Probably, both aspects are involved, and there are likely to be others as well.

Okay, I know, this is still boring, isn’t it?  Sorry.  I would love to say insightful things or pose interesting questions or make serious comments about various things happening in the world.  But, alas, I am rather overdone.  The more I try to explore what’s happening in my life and mind, the more I have trouble finding much that’s positive.

I am surely an emotional drain on those near me; at the very least, I know that I am unpleasant to be around.  At least I’m not so unkind as to be willing to continue to inflict myself upon others when I know that I am almost always a net negative.

I’m really very worn out, in more than one sense.  And I don’t see much to which to look forward in the world.  Humanity in general is becoming even more disappointing than I expected it to be, which is saying something.  That’s not to say they don’t have their good aspects and individuals, just as I think most of the rest of the “natural world” is no more beautiful or inspiring or beneficent than humans are.

I’m very discouraged.  I suppose the only good thing about my chronic depression is that it would probably need to improve (perhaps due to antidepressants) for me to be able to find the energy to kill myself.  This may seem ironic, even contradictory, but it is a recognized phenomenon.

All right, that’s enough.  It’s time I stopped inflicting myself on all of you, at least for the today.  I hope you all have good days (or a good day overall).  You’ve earned it by reading through my dreck.

*I always thought of it as “Groundhog‘s Day”, but apparently it is not a possessive.

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What do we call a day on which we bread and cook things in hot oil?

It’s Friday.  It’s also pretty cold here in south Florida; it’s about 44 Fahrenheit right now.  We are now just over halfway through the month of January in 2026.  Yesterday we were just under halfway through.

Actually, no, that’s not really correct.  Since January has 31 days, the 16th (today) should be considered the median day.  There were fifteen days before this, and there are 15 days after, and there is this one day in the middle that stands alone.  So, maybe I can reasonably say that we are now rather precisely halfway through January, or at least we will be at noon.

Enough of all the date and number nonsense.  I’m probably the only one here who enjoys or even notices such things.

With respect to anything else, “enjoyment” is an even bigger question.  I did spend a bit of time yesterday watching some of the rather nutty inventors/amateur engineers on YouTube making and testing various odd devices, including some particularly nifty ones, such as various kinds of homemade flame throwers.  I’ve made homemade flame throwers myself, with varying degrees of success, so it’s nice to learn from the successes and failures of these other people.

It’s briefly amusing, but that’s about it.

I didn’t do any more problems on Brilliant dot org yesterday.  I’ll try to do some today.  But so many things distract me and get in the way, and work is not the only issue.

Mainly, I think the issue is that I am mentally exhausted.  Work contributes to that, of course, but not as much as my chronic insomnia, which is no better than ever.  And, of course, there is the dysthymia, which I think is officially designated now as “chronic depression”.  I guess that’s a more straightforward term, and I cannot deny that it is fairly clear, but I like (the word) dysthymia better.  The “dys” part carries the very sharp, ancient-world imprimatur of things going wrong, of shit not working properly, as in dysfunction, dystopia, and so on.

Believe me, there is shit that is not working properly here in this head.

Speaking of working and not working, the office will be open tomorrow, I hear, but I don’t yet know if I’m going to work or not.  That will probably depend on what my coworker(s) are doing.  I guess if I am working I will write a post in the morning.  I don’t think it will be a happy one.

I tell you, that high-rise, fancy balcony room (with king sized bed) in the fancy hotel in downtown [name redacted] near me is looking more and more enticing.  The daily rate is not very expensive, even on the weekend‒especially if you’re not going to have any expenses at all afterwards.  I guess I’ll keep that option in mind and keep checking the rates online for the nonce.

I don’t know why the nonce wants me to keep doing that, but so it seems to desire.  I do a lot of somewhat irrational things for that annoying nonce.

Okay, that’s enough of driving that particular joke into the ground.

I am still having trouble calming my mind without making myself more depressed.  Still, I have to admit, depression (in general) is somewhat preferable to extreme tension and (mainly social) anxiety, especially because, in me, anxiety presents as hostility, sometimes global and even cosmic levels of hostility.  Chronic pain doesn’t help that particular set point, of course.

I’m reminded of two different movie quotes, the first regarding fear and its consequences, from The Phantom Menace, spoken by (the criminally overrated) Yoda:  “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”  I always want to reply to that with, “Yeah…it leads to the suffering of the people who pissed me off.”  But that’s not very constructive.

The other quote comes from the (criminally underrated) movie Dragonslayer, when the old wizard, Ulrich, describes Vermithrax (the dragon) with the words, “When a dragon gets this old it knows nothing but pain, constant pain.  It grows decrepit.  Crippled.  Pitiful.  Spiteful.”

I feel you there, Vermithrax.

Incidentally, I’m not sure I understand the reason for the periodic eating of individual young virgin girls; that doesn’t seem to be nearly enough calories to sustain a giant, flying reptile that breathes fire.  I guess magic must be involved somehow.  And if the energy required for survival comes from some magical field, maybe food is only needed to provide raw materials but not to fuel metabolic activity.

I’m probably overthinking this.

I could use some magic now and then, I can’t deny it.  I don’t mean “magic” such as stage magic, though when I was little I got kind of into that stuff for a while, and I had several different books on how to perform magic tricks.  I mean “real” magic, like Harry Potter or Doctor Strange or what have you.  Of course, if such things existed in reality, they wouldn’t be “magic” except perhaps for nostalgic reasons.  They would be science.

I have long been irritated by the fact that there is no real “science of magic” in the Harry Potter universe.  They have all these classes about doing magic and so on, but as far as I can tell, even someone like Dumbledore (or Hermione) doesn’t get into the fundamentals of magic, the physics of magic, if you will.

But there has to be such a thing, of course.  Clearly the magic there has laws, it’s not just a “make a wish” kind of magic.  There must be a dynamics and kinematics and so on of magic.  But even the things they supposedly investigate in the Department of Mysteries don’t seem to have anything to do with fundamental magical laws.

Again, I’m probably overthinking things.

It’s a problem a lot of the time, and it often gets in my way.  I refer you to my point above that depression is probably better than the anxiety, tension, and hostility that seem to be my other option(s).  Maybe I should just lean into my depression, stop trying to be upbeat in any way, stop cracking jokes or even watching or reading comedy, stop trying to talk myself out of certain feelings, CBT-style, but rather just embrace and embody all my nihilism and pessimism and self (and other) loathing.

I don’t know if I can do it.  Still, it might be worth a try.  It’s hard to see it making things much worse.