February 23, 2024 by Robert Elessar

“Find my nest of salt”

It’s Friday, in case you didn’t already know, and since I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, it’s actually the last day of the workweek for me. Oh frabjous day*.

I didn’t write a post yesterday, because I was out sick. I think that some dip that I used had been in the fridge longer than I had remembered and had gone bad or summat, though it tasted okay. Anyway, it certainly didn’t want to stay down after a while, so that was unpleasant. I was worried that I might have caught some upper GI virus, but it was too self-limited an illness for that.

I feel as though I get sick on Thursdays more often than on other days, and especially on ones after a week in which I worked on Saturday. I’m not sure if this is true pattern recognition on my part or some form of selection bias, but it feels as though it’s at least a slight trend. I would suspect‒if it’s something real‒that it’s related to me getting worn down mentally (and physically) and becoming vulnerable to random physical insults after having had a longer week and no real recharge time.

This didn’t happen to me in the past, but then again, I was younger then**, and my reserves were deeper. Also, I had a family to come home to, and a safe environment, and friends, and books that I wanted to read. It was also reasonably quiet both at home and at school or work, and what noise there was‒even when it was quite chaotic‒was related to what was happening, what was being done, what the work entailed.

Things now are much different, and I need to find a way to recharge myself more rapidly and reliably, at least if I want to avoid total system collapse. I’m not sure that I do want to avoid that, though. Some part of me occasionally thinks that, at least if I completely fell apart, people would have to notice, and maybe someone would help me.

I doubt it. The world is not set up well for doing very beneficial things, especially to and for people who are odd. And I certainly don’t seem to be the sort of person people like to keep around for very long at a time, not in close personal contact, anyway. They’ll happily‒or willingly, anyway‒keep themselves surrounded by shallow, lazy, manipulative users, as long as they wear at least a façade of warmth and cheerfulness. But if someone approaches things differently, and is too mentally fatigued and fed up to bother trying to pretend otherwise or to force smiles all the time, they withdraw, even if that person works hard and tries hard, and is creative and smart and would never willingly betray them.

This is all hypothetical of course, but it does highlight why I think people‒indeed, the world‒are probably not worth keeping around. Or it’s not worth keeping myself around to be among them.

Case in point: for at least two days now (and it may have happened yesterday, too, for all I know) the Tri-Rail trains going north and south from my station boarded (with last-minute announcements) on opposite sides of the track from the ones they usually arrive on. Now, it can make sense for one of the trains to board on its opposite side from usual; track maintenance needs to be done from time to time. But having the trains switch sides smacks of someone just having screwed up, and then having done so again. It’s not reassuring for passengers, that’s for certain.

Of course, my own reliability is not impressive lately. I haven’t yet started work on HELIOS, though I have the blank notebook in my backpack (and another one remaining at the office). I think, oddly enough, that if I were able to find a way to work on that during the day, I might recharge a bit just from that. Then again, maybe I’m wrong. I’ve only ever really successfully written fiction consistently early in the morning in near-silence.

Well, I haven’t given up on it yet, but I’m not optimistic. I guess I’ll let you all know if I succeed in starting.

I also feel like I want to get the tabs to the Nirvana song All Apologies and learn it, and maybe do a recording of it, but I doubt that’s going to happen. My guitars are just sitting unused. Despite this, they give me no reproach‒guitars are very nonjudgmental that way. They merely sit there, fallow, waiting and gathering dust, as is my keyboard (the musical one) and my cello. It’s a shame, I know. But, as the song’s lyrics say, “I’ll proceed from shame.”***

For now, though, I won’t proceed any further than this final paragraph. I hope you who read this all have a good day and a good Saturday and a good Sunday if you’re at all able to do so. As for everyone else, well, who cares about them? They’re not like us, right? We don’t need them. They are our enemies, and we are theirs. JK…OAI.

*Was anyone else really, really bothered when, in Tim Burton’s movie version of Alice in Wonderland, they referred to Christopher Lee’s character as if its name were “Jabberwocky” when that was just the title of the poem from which it was drawn. The creature’s name, or title, is the Jabberwock. It says so right in the second stanza of the poem: “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” Yeah, I figured nobody else probably cared.

**Almost by definition.

***I don’t believe that the line is “aqua seafoam shame”, as so many people seem to think. That’s merely a classic mondegreen. I think this largely because the mondegreen version is a weird, abstract, bizarre bit of imagery that doesn’t resemble anything else in the words or tone of the song, whereas “I’ll proceed from shame,” follows quite logically from the preceding “I’ll take all the blame”. Cobain’s lyrics could be cryptic and quasi-nonsensical sometimes, but their tone is more consistent than the whole aqua seafoam thing would be. End rant.

February 15, 2024 by Robert Elessar

Did you know that the official name for February 15th is “Chafing Day”? Now you know.

Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my laptop computer, but I’m already at the office. I really didn’t feel well when I finally gave up and got up this morning, and I was sorely tempted not to come to work. So, I forced myself to come in very early—at personal expense—since I didn’t want to leave things hanging for other people at the office. I hereby send out a “you’re welcome” to those people whose day I will be making slightly easier by my choice.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, though I didn’t mention it in my post, since it’s a day with little personal relevance to me. Now, it’s the day after Valentine’s Day, which as far as I know has no “official” name.

In the UK and, I believe, in the rest of “the Commonwealth”, the day after Christmas is known as Boxing Day. I have been unable to locate a reliable explanation of that term, but I personally imagine it referring to collecting all the boxes and other discarded packages that are a consequence of Christmas gift-giving.

I therefore now hereby propose that we all call the day after Valentine’s Day “Chafing Day”, because it’s mildly humorous, at least to me, and for some people it may even be accurate. I doubt it will catch on, but maybe I can post a “tweet” or a Facebook message saying “Happy Chafing Day” to everyone, and see if the idea spreads. Maybe I’ll title this blog post “Happy Chafing Day!” or similar, just to try to encourage the term.

If I’ve elected to do so, you readers will already know.

I felt pretty low at work, yesterday—even for me, I mean. I told my coworker, the one with whom I’m closest, that I didn’t think I could keep doing this much longer, that I felt like I was going to hit the skids soon. He misunderstood me at first, saying that he would miss me if I left for another job, but that I needed to do what I needed to do. I clarified that I didn’t mean that I was thinking I would need to leave the job, but that I would need to leave—period. By which I meant “to leave reality”, “to leave the world”, however you prefer to euphemize it.

He expressed his concern and said that he didn’t like to hear me talking that way, but of course, he had plans for the evening with his wife, and I didn’t feel like burdening him too much, so I put on a comparatively cheerful face afterwards. Weirdly, I felt mildly relieved and more relaxed after that.

People seem not to take such expressions of emotional rock bottom as seriously as they might, but having at least gotten some word of my distress out to someone—other than regular readers of this blog—is something of a minor relief. That way, if I go through the final exit door relatively soon, it will not be a complete surprise to everyone at the office.

I can’t keep feeling responsible for not causing inconvenience to other people at the expense of my ongoing misery, especially since so few people seem to return the favor. My relationship with reality is an abusive one, and since reality is unlikely to change, I probably should just get out.

Another coworker, with the best of intentions, gave out some candy to everyone in the office, which was certainly a nice gesture. However, being the weak-willed fool that I am, I ate mine, and then, after finally leaving the office quite a bit later than our supposed closing time—see my comment above about other people not being worried about inconveniencing their coworkers—I got some junk food on the way back to the house, and I ate it last night.

It was not very satisfying, and it probably contributed strongly to my ill-feeling this morning. I need to take that as relevant feedback from reality and just avoid all such things from now on. Snacks used to give me one of my only reliable sources of pleasure, or at least distraction, from the discomfort of life, but even they seem to be losing their power, though their costs are not likewise diminishing. Today, I mean to put up a sign above my desk reminding others not to offer nor for me to accept such well-meaning “treats” in the future.

This situation is another example of the simple but hard-to-swallow fact that good intentions are not anything like a guarantee of good outcomes.

Often, once a person is secure in their good intentions—and I am provisionally convinced that most people who do such things really do mean well—they cease to assess the likely consequences of their actions. If they mean well, they presumably think that they cannot do harm. This, unfortunately but clearly, is not the case, as anyone who has ever paid any attention to the nature of reality in any serious way will know—which is not very many people, I fear.

So, anyway, I’m physically tired and mentally tired, and I don’t feel well at all in either sense, either; I feel ill, both physically and mentally. Alas, I have no reason to suspect there is any cure, though for certain aspects of things there may at least be some treatments, even if they are only palliative.

I told another coworker—one who is difficult but without meaning to be, because of his own life-long issues—that I more than half-wished I would get cancer, and that if I did I would not wish to be treated other than with palliative medicine to control pain. Why would I want to prolong my life? I’ve been undead for years already, and it’s not pleasant, and I see no reason to think that anything good will come along to change that.

It’s physically possible, in principle, of course. I’m not so foolishly and superstitiously fatalistic to think that it’s utterly outside the realm of chance for my life to turn around and get better and remain better. But as far as I can tell, the odds are very low.

I’ve waited things out for a long time, nevertheless, not wishing to be rash in drawing conclusions. But if one is going to venture the capital of one’s continued time and discomfort and despair on some possible future upturn, one wants odds that justify the investment. I don’t see any routes that carry such odds. I have looked, and looked very hard, for them. That doesn’t guarantee there aren’t some that I’ve missed, of course, but I’m not a stupid or unimaginative person—not in that sense, anyway—and I can only work with what I have and what I am, paltry though such resources may be.

So, anyway, I hope you all had as happy a Valentine’s Day as you could, and that you have a good Chafing Day today. Spread the word about that title, if you like it. Make memes and videos about it if you feel so inclined. It wouldn’t exactly be legacy for the ages, for me, but it would be amusing, nevertheless.

TTFN

February 9, 2024 by Robert Elessar

Late-arriving, futile “justice” and reminders of a life that has been all but annihilated

I read the news yesterday, oh boy. And yes, it was about a lucky man‒luckier than I am, anyway, at least in some ways.

There was a doctor in the heartland of America somewhere, I don’t recall where, who had been convicted of, apparently, inappropriately prescribing very large amounts of pain meds, the report quoting the number 500,000* (It seems unlikely that there were 500,000 prescriptions**, so it probably was that number of pills).

Anyway, his conviction was overturned on appeal, because apparently, in 2022, the SCOTUS handed down a ruling that the prosecution had to prove in such cases that there was “intentional or knowing” inappropriate prescription for it to rise to the level of a crime, and the jury hadn’t been appropriately instructed regarding that fact.

I looked up the case, and I’ve even downloaded the PDF of the case. Although I haven’t read through it yet, the summaries make it clear that, yes indeed, this is a new and specific requirement.

Silly me, I had always thought that mens rea was a crucial requirement for nearly any criminal case, certainly one that rises to the level of a felony charge. I brought that up with my (public) defense attorney, trying to point out that I shouldn’t be convicted of a crime since I literally had never intended to do anything but treat patients who had chronic pain‒which I did because I had chronic pain, and it had already severely harmed my life. I knew how hard it was for even a physician, who at the time had good health insurance, to be able to get adequate treatment and even to get his prescriptions filled by often-judgmental pharmacists who looked at him as if he were a criminal just because he wanted to try to mitigate his pain with the most effective medicine that was available.

But no, apparently, according to my attorney, the prosecutor didn’t have to prove any such thing specifically; it could just be inferred. And apparently I’m not exactly the sort of person to elicit sympathy from a jury in south Florida, because my voice tends to be monotone and my face tends to be expressionless and I don’t look like someone who is frankly worthy of sympathy.

All the charges against me were created by the PBSO, who sent in undercover people with (evidently) faked MRIs and fake complaints, who complained of chronic, severe pain and said they were in pain when I examined them***, and whose own secret recordings and records showed that there were often only one or two other patients in the whole office when they were there‒hardly what one would call a “pill mill” I should think.

Anyway, I was offered a plea bargain and I took it, because unless you’ve got a lot of money or you literally have nothing to lose, you will take a plea bargain in the right circumstances, even though you know you’re innocent. I’ve written a blog post about how the plea bargain system is an extortionate game slanted against especially the underprivileged.

The statutes involved in my charges were designed by that <sarcasm> bastion of intelligentsia and morality, the Florida State Legislature </sarcasm>, to give judges no leeway, and to grind away maximally at anyone charged with “trafficking”. If a jury decided that they should convict on at least one charge, since the state had created so many charges against me (each prescription being a charge, and twenty something having been conned out of me by various lying police officers over time) and the number seems impressive, I still could have faced a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

In retrospect, I think I would have been little worse off if I had, given the mockery and shambles my life has become. But at the time, I hoped to see my kids again, perhaps sometime before they were adults. Three years was better than fifteen (or potentially the rest of my life), and I had no one else to help me with a legal fight, and certainly no reservoir of money, so I took the deal.

The way things are now, though, I might not have been charged, or might have been offered some misdemeanor plea deal. Or I might have gone to trial and won with relative ease, since the fact that I never knowingly or intentionally mis-prescribed medicine was a fact I knew for certain, at a Cartesian, cogito ergo sum sort of level, since it was a fact about my own mental state.

I may be naïve, and I often do not understand humans. I am often easily misled and manipulated and used and misused and probably abused, because I am socially and emotionally very clueless and believe in giving other people the benefit of the doubt (to hold them innocent until proven guilty, in other words). But I have never been greedy or unscrupulously opportunistic, and I took the practice of medicine and my duty and goal to relieve suffering very seriously. I was never into making a lot of money, though it was good to be able to buy books I wanted and to take care of my kids. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and drove a ten-year-old Toyota Sienna.

Before yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d bothered thinking about what my life might have been like if things had not gone the way they did. There didn’t seem to be any point. I was a lost cause and that was that. But this has made me feel acutely once again the cut of all the lost time with my kids and my lost ability to practice medicine, and all the other losses I’ve experienced as part of this debacle of a life.

What’s more, there’s been salt and vinegar rubbed into the wound by the fact that it took a Supreme Court dominated by many justices who’d been appointed by The Donald to require courts to require prosecutors to prove something that was supposed to be a necessary element of almost any serious criminal charge: actual criminal intent.

That’s all leaving aside the un-ethics and illogic of the government of the “Land of the Free” dictating what people can put into their own bodies when it doesn’t directly harm other people in the first place. I won’t get into that because it had no bearing on my medical practice‒I was not in the business of dealing in euphoriants, I was trying to relieve actual suffering.

One cannot really apply new jurisprudence to old cases in which a sentence has already been carried out and finished, and when the consequences thereof are already irrevocable. I cannot regain the time I have lost with my children or the time I have lost when I could have been practicing medicine, or the time I spent at FSP West or in the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, where even the people who worked there frequently asked why the hell I was there, or still there (I spent 8 months in the place, on the mental health floor, because I couldn’t make bail, but finally my former girlfriend’s mother helped secure it‒at least she got all her own back after I was sentenced, and I appreciate her very much, though I might as well just have stayed in jail, since at least the whole sentence would have ended earlier given “time served” and I was basically homeless when out on bail, having lost everything I owned and relying on the generosity and kindness of friends/former coworkers).

So I am stuck with a ruined life and a twisted mockery of myself. The fruits of a considerable number of years of time and effort and thought and creativity on my part**** were all taken away by the mindless grinding of a huge stupid machine of “criminal justice” that has little to nothing to do with the latter part of the term. I don’t claim not to be stupid or foolish or not to have ever made mistakes in the whole situation. I make many mistakes. But it is maddening to see how misapplied the law can be and to experience it for oneself, especially when one is now by oneself, partly thanks to that misapplication, and then to learn that now the law is changed (or correctly applied) such that I could have been in a better situation had that change come sooner.

I often consider the possibility of going to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in various flammable liquids, and turning myself into a “bonfire of the unsanities and inanities”, to bring attention to some of the costs of misapplied “justice” and to bring an end to my own mis-called life. I even have two gallons of paraffin lamp oil and six liters of charcoal lighter fluid and a big enough backpack to carry them all, in case I decide to do it.

Death by fire is intimidating, though‒I am no Buddhist monk by any means. And I also dislike causing inconvenience to other people, even those involved in an institution that had no qualms about recklessly “judging” me and ruining my life. But it is tempting, and I feel right now even more than usual the utter pointlessness of continuing, even while stupidity in the office in which I work grinds away at me further (though, to give him credit, my boss tries hard to keep things as sane as he can).

I feel rotten enough and alien enough even at baseline, and all this doesn’t help. I have lost almost all that mattered to me, and I live alone in a stupid one-room (plus bathroom) “in-law” suite that is smaller than many hotel rooms. All my previous friends are far away, and most are doing much better with their lives than I am and don’t really have much in common with me anymore. In any case, I don’t really talk or otherwise communicate with them, though it would be nice.

There are also plain few people where I am now who have anything in common with me. Very few people have much in common with me: a disgraced physician unable to practice, with a love of math and physics and biology and of Shakespeare and horror fiction and science fiction/fantasy (reading and writing it) and of science and rationality-oriented podcasts and books and videos, who wants to learn or relearn more about modern physics at a deep level and whose brain doesn’t seem to run the same operating system as most of the people around him‒a Linux in a world of iOS, or worse.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Knowing me, I’ll probably just grind along until I’m worn to a nub and then tumble into the trash can, unmarked and largely unlamented.

I know that I won’t be sorry‒not about that.

*This sounds like an awful lot of pills, but it’s deliberately chosen to sound that way in a manipulative, rhetorical tactic as used by reporters and prosecutors alike. Let’s run the numbers, as I am wont to do, to see how impressive they really are.

Now, if there were one patient, taking one pill per day‒perhaps the person only takes one prescription, say an antidepressant or a cholesterol med or a long-acting antihypertensive‒it would take nearly 1400 years to use that many pills. Plain few patients live that long (see my recent blog post), and most pills would long since have expired and become inactive before the end of that time.

Still, the average physician is responsible for the care of 2,000 to 3,000 patients (see here and here), meaning that if, on average, their patients each only took one prescribed pill a day, they would go through 500,000 pills in 6 to 9 months. But many prescriptions call for more than one pill per day, and uninsured patients cannot tend to afford the long-acting pain meds that claim to allow for steadier doses and thus slightly less risk of rebounds and escalations and all the horrors involved in that.

Now, presently, I take three to nine aspirin a day, sometimes more, and I also take two naproxen and some supplemental Tylenol as well, all of which are more directly toxic to the body than opioids, but are nonetheless over the counter (as they should be). If I averaged ten total pills a day, then it would take me only 137 years or so to take 500,000 total pills. That’s longer than I’m likely to be taking pills, but I’m only one person (that, as Dave Barry said, is the law). An average practice of patients who took only six pills a day would go through 500,000 pills in one to one and a half months. Many ordinary, non-pain-specific patients, especially those middle-aged and older, take that many and even more prescription meds a day.

In any case, an ordinary general practitioner with a light patient load of two thousand patients, each taking only an average of two pills a day, would prescribe 500,000 pills in 3 to 5 months. So don’t be too impressed by the carefully curated numbers that prosecutors and media choose to elicit your alarm and disgust.

**Even 500,000 prescriptions, in a modest 2000 patient practice, would require only 250 prescriptions total per patient. That would certainly take quite a bit longer than 500,000 pills would take, but given an average of only one prescription per patient per month (counting refills) it would only take a bit over 20 years, a decently short length of practice. Many doctors see more than 2000 total patients and many patients get more than one prescription per month. And, of course, one cannot even apply refills on “controlled substances”, they have to be literally re-written every month, and patients have to come to the doctor’s office to get them, assuming they can even get them filled. Monthly doctor’s visits can be hard for someone trying to work a regular job while dealing with chronic pain. Thus, the whole “mill” part of the “pill mill” trope is created by the law itself, leading to greater costs in time and fees for the patients who are trying to survive after job-related and other injuries or conditions that have caused them chronic pain and make it difficult for them to find consistent, gainful employment or to sustain health insurance.

***Pain is a symptom, not a sign, in medical terms. We have no reliable ways of testing it, beyond patient report. We try to find physical correlations when we can, often to see if we can find some treatable cause, but even Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine (I think it was on page 80 or 81 of the 14th or 15th edition, whichever one I had at the time) has clearly stated that, for instance, back pain does not correlate well even with specific injuries noted on MRIs and the like. As large a number of people without pain will have nerve root impingements and bulging discs and the like seen on spinal MRIs as do have pain. NO ONE KNOWS all the wherefores of this situation, but there is no serious doubt that such pain is quite real.

****It did not all happen during medical school or residency‒one does not coast along from K-12 and undergraduate college and only then start to work hard in med school, especially if one grew up in a blue-collar, factory town outside Detroit.

February 5, 2024 by Robert Elessar

Monday’s blogger at least still likes to learn

Hurray, hurray. It’s Monday.

It’s probably hard to tell from the printed words, there, but I was being sardonic with that opening pseudo-exclamation. I’m not excited that it’s Monday and the beginning of a new work week. Then again, I’m not excited by much of anything. Staying at the house doesn’t seem likely to be exciting, either. There’s not much I can think of doing or any place I can think of going that seems exciting. Nearly all the things in the world are on some spectrum from boring to stressful.

I don’t recommend this as a way of being, not even to myself. I’m trying to find ways around it, or rather, to counteract it, but all my previous attempts have not succeeded in any durable fashion, as should probably be obvious. Various medications, various therapies, lifestyle changes, exercise‒none of it has worked. Some time ago, I had some hopes that trying marijuana that a former friend had would at least help my pain, if not my depression, but it did neither after two tries, and when I tried too much when I was in particularly bad pain, it made me quite sick to my stomach. I was throwing up for a few hours (not continuously, of course, but it was still pretty bad).

It’s ironic that THC is used to treat nausea in many cases. Evidently, my nervous system is too atypical for such things.

I recently happened upon some videos about psilocybin, specifically that there’s a study beginning on using it to try to treat some of the negative symptoms of autism spectrum disorder. I know it has been used to treat recalcitrant depression and related disorders, including depression in people facing terminal cancer. Psychedelics have always sounded intriguing, and people make much of them, but I think, given my experiences with other meds, I would be very frightened to try any of them. My mind is not my friend, and I worry that I would be particularly prone to a “bad trip”, and there’s no way to abort such a thing once it has started; one just has to go through it to the other end.

Speaking of being anxious and frightened of things that many people find beneficial, I had meant to retry riding my new bike yesterday, and perhaps to ride it to the train and then into the office today, but I find myself subtly terrified to do so. The beginning of last week was just so exceptionally painful and horrible that I am frightened of reinitiating it. I wish I could know that it’s something that would resolve after a time, but it seemed to worsen over the course of the three or four days I was riding, until by last Monday I was bed-ridden, and I was even grumpier and more cheerless than usual on Tuesday, if you can imagine such a thing.

I think I’ll have to forgo it. My boss really liked the bike, and offered to buy it from me if I can’t use it, but then I need to get it up to the office, which would mean riding it. I don’t see myself carrying it.

My train is coming in five minutes. I’ll pause and then return to this once I get on the train.

***

Okay, I’m on the train now. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, the bike. I guess I could have it shipped up to the office. I think Uber even provides services like that, or I could try to see if there’s a way to set up an Uber in a vehicle that can carry the bike. It’s a thought. I don’t see my boss making a trip all the way down to my place to pick it up.

I guess I should stick to walking, even though it’s slower. At least I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts and such while walking. Nothing beats The Fellowship of the Ring as walking accompaniment, since it’s all about a journey on foot. Even walking has its troubles, of course‒I have spandex braces on my left knee and right ankle to address the little bit of walking I did yesterday, and the right side of my back is in moderate spasm. But that sort of stuff is par for the course. If/as I lose weight, some of that will decrease, and some of it may even disappear.

Life is annoying on so many levels. But at least there are lots of videos on things like hyperbolic geometry and computers and tensors and matrices and Einstein’s field equations and things like that. It’s often the case that if I find several different people explaining the same thing I end up with a much deeper understanding. Each teacher or author or whatever approaches things in a slightly different way, with different emphasis. When one sees a subject from multiple angles, one tends to get a more complete and thorough understanding of it. In this, I guess it’s analogous to binocular vision, which gives us depth perception.

I really want to read Zee’s book on quantum field theory, but although these new glasses are better for such smallish print, I think maybe I should have gone even higher on the strength. Maybe I’ll go to the drugstore over lunch and pick up a stronger pair. It would get me a bit more exercise, at least.

Please don’t emulate or internalize my negative outlook on things; I have no desire to see a world where more people are depressed. Do try to keep learning. Try to build as accurate a map of the world‒in all senses‒as you can. Be ruthless with yourself in that process. Your biases will try to trick you, and they will never stop trying, so you need to apply active countermeasures against them. It’s a pain, but it’s important (and often satisfying and even thrilling) to work toward as accurate a map as you can get, not one that shows a world the way you would like it to be or you believe it to be. A poor map will be less likely to get you anywhere you might want to go.

January 30, 2024 by Robert Elessar

The title of this blog post is unrevealing

It’s Tuesday morning, and this is my first post of the week‒which I guess is not so bad, since a few weeks ago I had said I might not write any more at all. I’m not sure why I am still writing, other than simply as a matter of habit, which tends to be strong with me. Perhaps that really is the only reason.

I was not out “sick” yesterday in any traditional sense, but was instead out with a severe exacerbation of pain in a slightly unusual distribution: left foot, knee, and hip/iliosacral areas in addition to a bad flare up in my back. Every kind of movement was painful for me, so I mainly just laid around taking aspirin and Aleve and Tylenol and trying to give my body a break. It’s a bit better now, though by no means ideal.

I fear this pain was because of riding my new bike, even though I didn’t ride it very far or very long over the weekend, and it felt okay while I was riding it. That latter bit is typical, though. Things that trigger exacerbations often don’t do so right there at the moment. They take time to build up and catch one by surprise, so one is never quite sure what the real cause of the flare-up is.

For instance, a cold front came in over the course of Sunday afternoon, and the temperature dropped by nearly thirty degrees (Fahrenheit) by Monday morning. That brought it down to about 50, which is quite chilly for south Florida. That may have contributed to the increased pain, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the main cause.

I did at least get a bit of rest yesterday, napping whenever I could, which is nice. But I’m quite frustrated to get pain flare-ups from riding the bike. It’s very discouraging. I was hoping the bike would give me more freedom of movement, not less.

I did get to talk to my daughter on the phone on Sunday. We’d been planning to talk for a few weeks but stuff kept getting in the way on her end, but finally she was able to call me yesterday. It was very nice. I hadn’t heard her voice in about 8 years or so, and it has changed, since she was a teenager the last time we spoke. We had a nice conversation, at least for me. She seemed to be enjoying herself, also, but one can never easily be sure, especially when someone is talking to me.

Also, I spoke to my sister last night, but it hasn’t been nearly as long since I last spoke to her‒about a week, in this case. We had a nice conversation, though, as always. As for everything else, well…there is nothing else, really. I haven’t written any new fiction or played any music or drawn any pictures or anything else of value.

I’m taking an Uber to the office because it’s still pretty painful to move and I want to keep it to a minimum. It’s also hard on the bases of my thumbs, writing this in the back seat using my smartphone, but I don’t know what else to do about that.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about much of anything. I’m still very much at a loss about life in general. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to look into health insurance. I don’t have any future plans, really. I’m basically empty‒except for pain, obviously, but I already mentioned that.

I also have a lot of free-floating anger a lot of the time, I guess that’s something. At least, it is if you like being angry. I never really have enjoyed it, though; it makes me feel guilty, even if I don’t act on it. It’s not pleasant. Maybe I should learn to embrace it, and all that. At least it’s slightly energizing, temporarily.

Oh, well. It doesn’t matter, I guess. I’m not sure that anything does matter. I guess that’s all a matter of perspective, so to speak.

That’s it for today. Try to have a good one, if you can.

January 24, 2024 by Robert Elessar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 23, 2024 by Robert Elessar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****Or maybe I already have.

January 19, 2024 by Robert Elessar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 18, 2024 by Robert Elessar

No blog post today

This is just a little announcement to everyone that there will be no blog post or audio blog today*. I just don’t feel up to doing one. There are reasons, and maybe I’ll discuss them tomorrow if I write (or say) something, but for right now, I’ll just say that I feel like being idle. I will give a minor hint at least in the categories and possibly the tags.

Thanks!

*Other than this announcement, of course, which I guess technically counts as a blog post.

January 17, 2024 by Robert Elessar

Thoughts on confident statements about scientific fallibility

This is some audio I recorded this morning trying to follow up on the subject I brought up near the end of my last “audio blog”. It relates to overconfidence about scientific pronouncements and so on both by the experts and by those who think they know the “real” motivations of the experts, particularly relating to the issues in the pandemic and so on. It was triggered by a snippet of a conversation between Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlane, but I’m not sure where to find the original snippet.

As you will note, I did NOT make it shorter than my last audio.

[There is an interruption in the middle–presaged and followed by three chirps–in which I say what I had meant to say upon bringing up a particular subject, but then distracted myself completely by discussing some excellent YouTube channels about science and math.]

Here are some links to the YouTube channels I mentioned (along with one or two I did not) and which distracted me. I heartily endorse them: