Health

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Weird pegs hammered into “normal” holes and spiders living in beehives

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station very early—quite a bit too early for the first train—because I was awake anyway, and there was no point in waiting around at the house.  The train station (like the office) in many ways feels more hospitable than the house does.  That’s not saying much, but there it is.

There seem not to have been very many people reading my blog these last few days.  Evidently, when I’m not focused on my mental illness—and it is mental illness, it is not mental health—people don’t seem very interested.  Or maybe there’s a change to the WordPress Reader algorithm so that people don’t see my blog pop up.  I know something has changed, because I can no longer directly comment (or see the comments of others) on my favorite website through WordPress Reader.  That may be because the person who runs that website finds me annoying.  It’s easy enough for me to imagine that other people find me annoying.  I find myself annoying, so it’s not exactly a new notion.  Still, it’s very disheartening to be ostracized, deliberately or accidentally, from my usual interaction at that blog.

I don’t have much heart from the start.

I was approached—figuratively speaking—by someone yesterday morning asking me to please get health insurance, and making suggestions about how to do so affordably.  I listened, because of who it was and, even more importantly, because of on whose behalf they were probably partly speaking (though I am convinced of the caller’s true personal good intentions as well).  I agreed, fine, I’ll get health insurance of some kind.

It’s not the money, mainly, that’s been in the way of me getting insurance.  It’s my self-loathing that mainly gets in the way.  Why would I want to maintain my health and try to live longer or healthier?  What is the point of such an endeavor?  I’m personally extremely unhappy, and in pain, and sleepless, and alone, for one thing (I guess that’s more than one thing, but you probably know what I mean).

At this stage I’m just a net drain on the world, anyway.  Surely, the whole planet would probably cheer up slightly—but noticeably—if I were gone, like a pond that’s been muddied by heavy rainfall finally clearing after the silt settles out.  Most people wouldn’t know why the world felt a little more positive, a little more hopeful, a little more pleasant, but it would still be the case.

Anyway, I said I would do it, so I will, unless something kills me first.

I was in a weirdly upbeat mood part of yesterday morning before that event, although my blog post was rather angry.  To give you an idea of how weirdly upbeat I was, I had finished writing the draft of my post and was getting ready to lie down on the floor of the office (I do this a few times a day to help my back) and I set my computer to install updates in the meantime.  And as I saw the computer message that informed me that it was “updating”, I thought, “‘Updating’…that needs to be the title of a rom-com.”

Immediately, I thought up and quickly wrote out the plot synopsis for the romantic comedy in question and emailed it via my smartphone to myself.  Later, I told my boss about it, conveying the basic story line, and he said—with some enthusiasm—that it was quite good and he thought people would really like that story, and would read such a book.

I had thought of it more as a screenplay sort of thing, to be honest.  I considered getting on Skillshare or something similar and doing a quick course on screenwriting, to write it up.

Of course, I’m not in such a good mood as yesterday morning—it went away by early afternoon, when I suddenly felt a burst of severe tension, as if someone had injected me with epinephrine while I wasn’t looking.  It’s not a good feeling, but I have it a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve pretty rapidly and persistently gone downhill since then.

So, I guess I’ll sign up for some form of health insurance.  I have some degree of inherent resistance to the idea, of course, a big one being just my honest difficulty dealing with bureaucratic matters, with paperwork and personal records and trying to fit my weird and distorted metaphorical pegs into the square and round holes laid out—quite unthinkingly—by the world.

That latter comment about things being laid out unthinkingly is important.  No one should imagine that the world as it is was ever truly planned or designed by anyone, whether out of beneficence or malice or otherwise.  Individual people and so forth have had plans and goals and ideas, but no one is big enough actually to design a society or a government or an economy or whatever.  It all just falls together, like salt crystallizing out of a strong saline solution, or rock candy forming on a string in a cooling bath of saturated sugar water.

There are tendencies to form certain kinds of patterns, of course, because of the nature of the constituents and their interactions, but if one were to arrange ten million such rock candy baths, no two of the products would be the same.

Rock candy is simple, of course, and its point and purpose are simple.  So, it doesn’t really matter what specific shapes might be formed when making it.  Societies and civilizations, on the other hand, can take all manner of forms, and these can be truly better or worse by any criteria one might choose to use to measure them.  But they are not inherently real, they are not inherently good, they are not inherently stable or ethical or fair or just, and maybe they never will be.

Justice (however one may want to define the term) does not happen on its own.  Even if one tries to achieve it, one must constantly reevaluate, reassess, tweak, and adjust how one approaches it, because it is not a simple problem, and each local solution will engender new problems.  Problems are solvable, of course, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will be solved.  Wanting to solve them is not enough, and even trying to solve them is not enough.

To achieve justice, or at least to optimize it, for even a group of a hundred people would probably be computationally impossible even using a physically maximal computer.  Even assuming one had a fully agreed-upon definition of the term, the adjustments needed to get everyone in the best possible place seem fit make the traveling salesman problem trivial by comparison.

As for achieving optimal justice for 8 billion people, well…that’s not even a pipe dream.  It’s not even laughable.  At best it could only really be achieved at individual levels or perhaps in small groups, but then again, there’s not even an agreed-upon definition of the term.  This is one of the reasons to be suspicious of people who claim to have all the answers or a “real solution” or whatever, especially if you think they are sincere.

True believers are dangerous, far more dangerous than psychopaths or the mentally ill, and they have done vastly more harm throughout history than all the most self-centered of sociopathic villains could ever do, even if given absolute power (or so I predict).  This is at least partly because anyone who thinks they absolutely have the answers for civilization or even a society is simply wrong.  They always have been, they always will be.  Finite entities cannot even fully understand themselves, let alone ultimate, complex aspects of the world around them, so they can never be mathematically certain that they have the final word on any question.  It is always necessary, in principle, to be open to criticism and testing, to updating beliefs, even if one is very close to being sure.

Anyway, I have trouble dealing with bureaucracies and forms and paperwork and everything.  It feels utterly unnatural and uncomfortable.  It always has, but when I was younger and had people in my life, I was more able to put in the effort.  But it’s always felt unnatural to me, and deeply so.

It’s a bit like a spider trying to become a member of a beehive—seeking nectar and pollen and tending larvae and warding off invaders to the hive and all.  Some of the spider’s attributes may be useful—silk and venom and potent things—but a spider does not live on honey and pollen, and it will not thrive in a hive (if it even stays alive).  A spider is an alien in a hive; it can no more live like a bee than it can grow wheat and thresh it and grind it and then bake and live on bread.  However long it lives, it will simply be suffering.

That’s how I feel about a lot of this shit.  But I’ll do it.  Maybe I’ll even try to write that rom-com.  I can write pretty easily.  Of course, knowing me, the rom-com would probably devolve into a horror story, but maybe that would be good in a way.  After all, I’ve had romance of one kind or another in all my horror stories, and there’s usually at least a little bit of joking.  Sauce for the romantic comedy goose…

At bottom, though, I really don’t want to be healthy and alive.  I mean, it’d be nice not to feel physically miserable as long as I am alive, but that desire is preprogrammed into the organism, and I cannot rewrite that programming.  I can, however, shut it down, or let it come to a shutdown on its own, since I cannot update it, despite the title of my potential romantic comedy.  Life is shit—and if you’re a cockroach, shit is life, but that doesn’t mean you can make high art with it.

Anyway, here comes my train.  Have a nice weekend.

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Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and so of course, it’s a day for my “traditional” blog post format.  I’m probably not going to be terribly creative with it today, though, because I am rather unwell.  I think I ate some bad chicken salad in a sandwich from a convenience store yesterday, and I’ve had a rough evening and night.  I won’t go into too much detail except to say, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my colonoscopy.”

Today is December 7th, a day that is commemorated or mourned or however you would want to characterize it as the anniversary of the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered World War II.

Tonight will also mark the beginning of Hanukkah at sundown.  I sent out rather lame—in the sense of being unimaginative—gifts to my kids, since I don’t know what specific things they might prefer to receive.  It’s horrible—maybe the most horrible thing that could have happened to me, as far as my personal life is concerned—that I don’t even really know my children anymore, and haven’t seen them in more than ten years.  Of course, it would be far more horrible if something bad were to happen to them; I would rather suffer and be lonely and reviled and diseased for decades than to have anything significantly bad happen to either of them.

Of course, reality doesn’t really make bargains of that sort, but thankfully my kids seem to be healthy and relatively happy, and that’s good.  I miss them a lot, but I know I have no right to impose myself upon them if they don’t wish to see me.  At least I communicate with my daughter.

I can’t really think of any scientific or philosophical or mathematical topic of any interest to discuss today.  My brain is quite foggy, and I did not sleep continuously for more than half an hour at a time last night.  I wouldn’t have even come into the office, except that I know that my coworker is off today—he has to watch his very young daughter while his wife goes and does some kind of makeover or some such to prepare for family holiday photos this weekend.

I don’t understand the point of going through all that.  I guess the family photos are a nice thing, but in the modern era, with social media platforms of various kinds and digital cameras in smartphones that are superior to any camera most any of us used to own back in the day, why not just take regular, candid family photos?  You can print them out, if that’s what you want to do.  You can turn them into cards.  You can use various app filters and whatnot to adjust your appearance, if you think you don’t look good enough.

It’s almost all silly, to me.  I mean, I like seeing pictures of people I care about, to see how they’re doing, to remind me of them, all that good stuff.  But I don’t have much interest in seeing people posed and dressed up in front of a fake background in some photo studio such as they used to have in malls all over the place.

When my kids were very little, we took a few photos like that of them, to send out to more distant family members who hadn’t seen them yet.  But it was just pictures of them, and honestly, I probably wouldn’t have done those if it had been me.  Even back in the early 2000’s, we had digital cameras and stuff to take pictures with, and we had email.

Oh, well.  Mostly I’m complaining because it’s inconvenient to have to be at the office today, which is where I already am, as I write this.  I took an Uber in very early, because I didn’t want to take any more time in the commute than necessary, given that I am still not completely over my gastrointestinal distress.  Also, my former housemate was going to try to come by the house to work on some things, and I was going to ask him to look at my air conditioning unit if I had been able to take at least part of the day off work.  Now that won’t happen.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  Maintenance of anything for me is basically a waste of time and effort.  I honestly don’t really want to maintain anything at all.  I wish I could just give up even eating and drinking, let alone working or showering or paying rent or other bills or having to wash clothes and get new ones when old ones wear out (I put this part off as much as I can, though).  I don’t see any point in it—not for me.

Hopefully, I won’t be doing it all for too much longer.

Right now, though, I’m spacing out and even dozing off as I write—heck, I drooled on myself a little, which at least means I’m not too dehydrated—so I’m going to wrap it up for today.

But before I do, for tonight:

hanukkah pic-jpg

TTFN

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So it begins, and so it goes, and so it shall end

Well, it’s been a mixed-auspices start of the first work day of the first full week of the month of December in 2023*.

I arrived at the train station almost exactly on time for the first train of said first day—that was a positive thing—but as the train pulled in, I and all the other people waiting at the station saw that it was arriving on the opposite side from normal.  There had been no announcement of the track side change, so I and all the several other people waiting had to scramble up the stairs, over the bridge and down the other side to get on.  Fortunately, the train did wait a bit, since apparently they realized that the announcement had not been given, but still, it was a bit maddening.

So far, I have no chest pains or other indicators of any cardiac event, though it is taking me a while to catch my breath.  I’m mildly disappointed in that absence of angina, because not only would it represent a potential break for me of some kind or other—temporary or permanent—it would also be only too appropriate for the Tri-Rail to face some consequences of their poor management in changing track boarding sides without informing riders who were waiting.  A lawsuit, in such a circumstances, might not be inappropriate, out of spite if nothing else.

However, I suppose I’ve been relatively protected, since I have done a fair amount of reasonably serious endurance (though not speed) exercise until about three weeks ago, when I got sick.  I’m still quite a bit heavier than I want to be, but at least my cardiovascular fitness isn’t too horrible.  Should I be thankful for that?  Maybe I should regret it.  I don’t know.

I haven’t really slept well at all this weekend, and certainly not last night, but at least I did rest, as far as that goes.  By that I mean that I did nothing that was productive, and almost nothing that required any exertion at all.  I watched the second of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials, but though it was good, as far as it went, I wasn’t as moved or interested as I thought I would be.  I fear that the huge time gap since the last special—The Power of the Doctor—was just too much, and I rather lost my momentum for the show.

It’s disappointing, but it’s not unique.  I’ve lost my momentum for pretty much everything lately.  I don’t play or even listen to music, anymore.  I don’t write fiction.  I don’t watch any new shows or movies.  I’m even getting sick of reading.  I haven’t read anything at all since Friday evening, fiction or non-fiction.  I didn’t watch any football games or golf yesterday (or Saturday) which I have been known to do if the urge strikes me.  It didn’t strike this weekend.

Hanukkah is coming up this Thursday night, and I’ll send my kids each a rather unimaginative present, since I don’t really have a good idea what to give them specifically that they would want, other than things I’ve already gotten them.  I don’t really know what they like or like to do.  I don’t really know my own kids, anymore.

Mind you, I don’t really know anyone else, either.  I don’t even know if I know myself.  And, I guess, if you don’t know whether or not you know yourself, then it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know yourself, because if you knew yourself, presumably, one of the things you would know is whether or not you know yourself.

Something like that, anyway.  Possibly I’m wrong.

I don’t really have much else to say today that I haven’t said a million times.  I’m still in the process of crashing and burning; it’s just happening slowly, like something that’s been filmed by an ultra-high-frame-rate camera, so when you play it back, it looks like barely anything is happening.  But it is happening.  In the end, I’m sure it will be possible to “play it back” at full speed, and you’ll make out clearly the whole sweep of the event.

But no one is watching for that right now.  No one really cares, and I’m afraid that I can’t blame them.  What use am I to the world and what cost would it be for the world to lose me?  “Vanishingly little” is the proper answer to both questions.  Indeed, I’m probably more of a net detriment while I’m around, so the loss of me would probably be to the world’s gain.

I guess I’ll never know, myself, but maybe some of you will know, eventually.  I wish I could find out for sure.  I imagine it would make certain decisions easier.  Then again, maybe it wouldn’t help at all.

Oh, well, that’s enough for today.  Have a good day and a good week, everyone.

*Hereinafter I’ll just assume you know I mean CE or AD when referring to the year, and will only put an acronym—if that’s the proper term—after the year if it is other than that era.

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I blog you give me leave to go from hence

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in three weeks, I’m writing a Thursday style blog post.  You can all start breathing again.

Yesterday’s blog post was kind of weird, wasn’t it?  I’m not even completely sure what I wrote.  I certainly haven’t reread it since editing it before finally posting it, but I feel I said a lot of strange things, and wrote about things I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about with anyone before.  Maybe I have.  I don’t think there was anything particularly shocking except that it was weird for me to say some of them.  Also, I feel it was more erratic and bizarre even than my usual posts.

It’s now the last day of November in 2023 (AD or CE).  That’s mildly momentous, or at minimum a mediocre milestone.  There shall be no recurrence of the month of November in 2023 (AD or CE) in any of our lives again, unless the ways we “define” the terms are changed.  Even if we had a time machine to come back to this day, we would not experience a new November in 2023 (AD or CE) if we were to return to it; we would be re-experiencing the same one, albeit from some different perspective.

I don’t know if returning to the same month would initiate some new Everettian branch of the universe, as in my short story Penal Colony, or if it would instead be some manner of closed, time-like loop in spacetime, which always happens exactly the same way—since it only actually exists in one instantiation—even if you were to experience it more than once.  It might be like coming to a crossroad, going through the light, looping around a “cloverleaf” in the road, and coming back to the crossroad in the perpendicular direction, then going on forward.  There’s only one route; it just happens to cross itself.

And, of course, if you did a self-Oedipus and somehow killed yourself at the crossroad, its not as though you would be changing your future in any sense;  that would “always” simply have been the way you died.  So, 12 Monkeys would be much more like the nature of such reality than, say, Back to the Future or Time Cop or that newer time travel movie with Bruce Willis that I haven’t seen.

I don’t know quite how I got on that subject.  My mind meanders morosely (and occasionally merrily), and I don’t necessarily know where it’s going.  As I noted above, sometimes I don’t even know where it’s been.

That’s why I never eat off of it, if I can help it.

One thing I’ve tentatively concluded after my thoughts from yesterday, though, is that I really am not capable of managing life in the human world.  I don’t think I ever have been; other people have helped me out in the past, and I have no such other people available now.

I have skills and tenacity and intelligence enough to survive for a time, and to create an illusion of “getting by” that’s convincing enough for people who aren’t really part of my life—which is everyone, these days—but everything is falling apart, and I don’t know how to maintain it, nor do I have the will and the wherewithal to do so.

You might as well ask a moth to maintain a termite mound.  Or even just ask an ant—maybe that’s a better comparison.  An ant could sort of get the idea of a termite mound, and if it’s already been built, the ant could sort of help maintain it to some degree for a bit.  But really, it’s not where the ant belongs, it’s not the lifestyle to which it is adapted.

Ask a human to try to live the life of an ostrich, among ostriches.  The human might put on an interesting show for a bit, and since humans are smarter than ostriches, the human might even succeed at things the ostriches couldn’t from time to time, but if the human is committed to living and behaving like an ostrich—if there are only ostriches anywhere to be found in that human’s environment—that human is inevitably, eventually going to fail catastrophically.  It may be a slow catastrophe.  Maybe it’s nothing anyone would make into and share as a video on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok.  But it would still be a catastrophe.  It would not be pleasant to experience.

Drawing closer to home, it would be hard enough for, say, a chimpanzee to try to live with and as orangutans or vice versa.  Even chimpanzees and bonobos—as closely related as primates get one to another—would probably not be able to thrive if one were placed within the other’s society.  I would guess that a bonobo would probably be abused and die before too long in the company of chimpanzees (who are notorious assholes) but a displaced chimpanzee would probably have just as confusing and frightening a time, if more subtle, trying to blend in with bonobos.  It would have a few slight advantages in strength and size, on average, and it might even be able to learn to try to fit in and make its way.  But it would be living a lifestyle subtly but profoundly different than the one to which it is adapted.

Anyway, that’s all a bit tangential and weird.  I don’t think I’m making myself very clear, and for that I apologize.  I just realize more and more that I don’t think I’m going to survive much longer, even if I were to find the motivation and desire to do so.  It’s a slow crash and burn, perhaps, but I think I really am crashing and burning.  And I don’t think that there was ever a chance for anything otherwise to happen, with me trying to live among and adapt to the world of humans—or normal humans, or “neurotypical” humans, if you prefer those metaphors.  So, what should I do?  I don’t know.

In the meantime, though, I hope you all are having and have had and will continue to have or (if that’s the best for which I can hope) that you begin to have a very good day and week and a very good new month starting tomorrow and so on.

TTFN

Hermit or magus

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“A hideous throng rush out forever, and laugh—but smile no more.”

It’s Wednesday morning—quite a bit before five o’clock and well before when the day “begins”, at least if the day begins at sunrise.  That will come…let’s see…at 6:49 am.  So says the weather app on my smartphone.  I’m at the train station today even earlier than yesterday because I woke up even earlier than yesterday and the day before.

I occasionally entertain the whimsical—and clearly untrue—notion that a person’s lifespan is limited by the time they spend awake, and so I expect to die quite a bit earlier than most other people (on average) because I’ve spent more of my time not asleep than most people have.  I’d say I get on average at least two fewer hours of sleep a night than most people I know.

Many nights, it’s quite a bit worse than that.

In a year, that’s 730.5 hours (roughly, ha ha) of sleep deficit, which is just over 30 days.  Although, come to think of it, if we’re counting awake time as a day, and the “usual” waking day is about sixteen hours, it’s more like 45 days—which makes sense, since 24 is one and a half times 16, and 45 is one and a half times 30.

Yes, I did that figuring in my head.  It’s terribly impressive, I know*.  I did not, however, calculate the sunrise on my own, as I noted.  I don’t really know how to go about that.  I’m sure it could be done, but probably not with the data available to me this morning at the train station.  Clearly, when people started tracking and plotting the days and seasons and sunrise and sunset and all that stuff, they did not have smartphones or the internet.  Those were days even before Commodore 64s and TRS-80s!

Anyway, the point I was making is that with all those matters taken into account, if I average only two hours dearth of sleep (a conservative amount, since the deficit is often larger), given my notion of a fixed amount of time awake determining the length of a life, I’m chewing a month and half extra off my life every year.  That’s one eighth of a year per year.  Which would mean that, just since I was in my teens, when I already slept less than the other people in my family and the other people I knew, I’ve lost five or more years of my life.  And every year that I get older in real time, my ultimate lifespan shrinks another eighth of a year.  Eventually, those time fronts will collide, and that will be the end.

This raises an interesting coincidence**:  Autistic individuals are known to have a much higher incidence of sleep disturbance than the general population, and recent studies found that, in the UK specifically, the average lifespan of an autistic male is about 8 years shorter than that of the general male population.  That’s in the UK, where they have a National Health System and actual programs and support services in place to help people with autism, imperfect though those systems are.  I shudder to think what the expected lifespan reduction is in the United States; I think I have encountered estimates of ten and more years’ reduction in healthy lifespan.

Still, it would be silly (and foolish) to attribute that decreased lifespan to number of hours of sleep loss.  There are many ways in which people on the autism spectrum have difficulty optimizing their health, even when they are otherwise “high functioning”, as the term goes.

If you don’t think those difficulties really matter, consider my circumstance (and I’m not even sure that I have ASD; it’s very difficult for me even to seek out, let alone avail myself of, resources to get evaluated).

I have strengths and talents of various kinds, but I’m living in a single, modest room in an old, cinderblock house in south Florida where I sleep on the floor on a futon and eat only microwave or order-in food; I work as a sort of office manager/record keeper/verifier in a phone sales office; I don’t have a driver’s license or any of that stuff anymore, nor do I do anything socially or spend any time with friends or family.  I supposedly have an IQ in the low 160s, I graduated with honors*** from an Ivy League university (which I attended on a full scholarship), I won a National Council of Teachers of English Award in high school, I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, became a doctor and did that job pretty well while I was doing it (though the record keeping and management functions were anathema to me).

But I could not thrive in the human world for long.  My back injury and chronic pain contributed to my specific failure, but I’d already had many instances in which depression and difficulty with certain kinds of administrative and record-keeping tasks caused me to land in personal crises.

I’ve written six novels and (self) published five, as well as several “short” stories (published individually and/or in two collections).  I’ve recorded and released four original songs (poorly produced, by me, on free software and with cheap, cheap recording equipment), and have written and shared a few others.  I can draw (and paint a bit), I can sculpt (with clay), I play piano and cello and guitar, I can sing, and I can even act reasonably well (how else do you think I pretended to be human for such long periods of time?  I even fooled myself).

All these abilities just make me even more of a failure, don’t they?  “How the mighty have fallen!”

Enough.  I’m almost at my stop (the train arrived just as I mentioned the TRS-80, which sounds like an omen…but an omen of what?), so I’ll wrap it up.  I guess I’ll write another post tomorrow, for what it’s worth.  Have a good day.

1427235137816

*I know, I know, it’s not actually impressive.  It’s easy enough to figure with multiples of 2, and 2 hours a day times 365.25 days per year is simply enough 730.5.  I left the extra digit just to be silly; it’s not significant, especially since, in the very next operation, I needed to divide that number by 24 hours in a day.  Since 3 times 24 is 72, I know that 730.5 hours is just ten and a half hours more than 30 days.  I could then simply have applied the 24 = 1.5 x 16 to do the next calculation, but that only occurred to me afterwards.  Anyway, it’s more fun to note that since 9 time 8 is 72, 16 goes into 72 four and a half times, and then multiply by ten, since 730 is ten times 73.  The remainder there is the same as with twenty-four—ten hours and a half—but that’s a bigger fraction of a sixteen hour day than a twenty-four hour day.  All this silliness at least can serve to remind us that the Phoenicians or Babylonians (I forget which) were not foolish to do things in 60s and 24s and 360s and so on—all these numbers are so readily divisible into fractions that they’re terribly useful.

**And yes, it is all coincidence.  Please don’t take my “lifespan limited by time awake” notion seriously.  Though it is certain that chronic sleep loss diminishes one’s health and can reduce one’s lifespan, it is not a simple arithmetic process, and there’s not the slightest reason to think that human lifespans are determined specifically by number of hours awake.  That’s even sillier than the notion of a lifespan being determined by the number of heartbeats one has.  I’ve had sinus tachycardia all my life; I would have been dead years ago if a lifespan were determined by numbers of heartbeats.

***I wrote my 50-page honors thesis in one weekend after it was revealed to me that I had misremembered the due date as being a month later than it was, and having been grudgingly given that one weekend extension to get it done if I wanted to get honors.  It turned out decently, because even then I could write very quickly tolerably well under pressure, and I knew my subject.  But this demonstrates all the more how, despite having talents (and some skills), I am rotten at navigating the ins and outs of human society (I’ve only gotten worse since then, because I’m just more and more worn out).  It wasn’t even my idea to try for honors; that was my then-fiancée’s idea.  It was something that looked good on resumes and applications.  Such thoughts, about self-promotion and seeking advancement in that fashion, have never been natural to me.  They are, if anything, worse now that I am on my own.

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It’s Monday morning, y’all.

Everyone seems to say “y’all” now, don’t they?  Or, at least online, a great many young people who are distinctly not from the southern United States say it.

I’m not complaining.  It’s actually quite a good and useful contraction—unlike those that presage the births of the vast majority of people.  It’s better than, for instance, “you guys” because the latter cannot easily be shortened to one syllable, and also, although in plural “guys” is often used to refer to any group of mixed sex and/or gender, the singular, “guy” almost invariably refers to a male.  Just try to consider referring to Jennifer Lopez as “that guy”.  It doesn’t quite work, does it?

On the other hand, weirdly enough, the term “bro” seems to be used without any reference to sex or gender or what have you nowadays, at least if one goes by various movies and shows and videos and postings and the like.  Various people reacting to various things can sometimes be heard to speak to anyone using the shorthand “bro”, regardless of gender or sex.  This is quite strange, to me, because it is only too obvious—and true—that “bro” is a shortened version of the word “brother” which refers to a male sibling, whether literally or figuratively, as in “he ain’t heavy; he’s my brother” and the like.

It would actually be rather funny if one started to hear guys referring to other guys* as “sis”, wouldn’t it?  One could remake the old Connect 4 commercial, but with two brothers playing, and the first one saying, “I win,” and the other objecting, “Where?  I can’t see…” and the first replying, “Here, diagonally,” and the second then grumbling, with barely disguised admiration, “Pretty sneaky, sis”.  And the first would not be offended!

All of that’s just a load of nonsense that came to my mind as I wrote it.  It was not what I planned to write; I know this because there is almost never anything about which I really plan write.  Rather like the Joker, I just write things.

I did, however, plan to state my hope that all of you in the US who celebrate it had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend.  I hope you ate one or more delightful meals with family and/or friends, with people you love and who love you, and were at least implicitly thankful for it.  If you did spend time and dine well with family and/or friends, with people you love and who love you, and you are not in any way thankful for it, well…fuck you very much.  You’re an asswipe.

Not that I’m not asswipe, myself, but I’m not that kind of one.  I did not spend Thanksgiving weekend with friends or family or with people I love or who love me.  I did eat a few decent meals by myself, but nothing really Thanksgiving-worthy, apart from some leftovers a coworker brought to the office on Saturday.

I watched The Star Beast, the new Doctor Who episode, on Saturday; it was not a great episode of Doctor Who, but it was a good one.  It was nice to see Donna Noble and the Doctor (and the Doctor Donna) back together again.  We have two more episodes over the next two Saturdays, and then, I believe, a Christmas special coming up in late December.  After that, I don’t know how long the delay will be before the next season, but I’m not sure I can wait for it.

I really don’t feel well, and I really don’t feel good (I deliberately used both of those words and, in my use at least, they have different meanings).  My life is just a decaying ruin, and the forces of erosion and rot and radioactive decay (to say nothing of the Red Death) and every other kind of relatively active entropy are eating away at it every moment.

I’m tired of everything.  I’m tired all the time, and yet I cannot stay asleep, even when I’m able to get to sleep.  I woke up this morning at roughly two o’clock, and I could not get back to sleep.  So I got up and caught the first train of the day, because there was no point in delaying.

I’ve been getting a fair amount of uncomfortable esophageal spasm recently, presumably from reflux, though I haven’t had symptomatic heartburn.  I would imagine it was chest pain from my actual heart, but I had some bad bouts of esophageal spasm way back in my late twenties, and this is pretty similar to that pain.

I guess I could be wrong, and it could be pain from my heart.  Still, it would probably be a good thing if I had a heart attack, I guess, so that’s not so troubling.  I do worry that I’d panic and try to go to the hospital or something if I had one—it’s hard to fight those fear/survival urges in the heat of the moment.  It’s like an addiction, or a bad dietary habit:  it’s so hard to stay on a diet in the face of temptation, and it’s so hard to let go of one’s life when one is in immediate danger.  Evolution has not left such things easily up to the control of the conscious mind.

Of course, the conscious mind can be wrong about things.  It would be supremely ironic if I were to have a catastrophic health emergency and suddenly come to the conclusion that, actually, you know what, I love my life…only to die shortly thereafter.  At least it would be funny, though.

Thant’s enough nonsense for today.  There will probably be more nonsense to follow, tomorrow through Friday, but I will be off this coming Saturday.  Of course, some would say that I’m “off” every day.

They are not without justification.

*See, “guy” tends to want to refer to a male.

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Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

…because I did warn you:  it’s Saturday, and I’m writing a blog post, because I’m on my way in to the office.

I think there was a brief moment in the middle of the day yesterday when the boss considered just keeping everything closed for the weekend, but then there were at least three people besides me and the “closer” who were planning to come in.  Since they are paid on commission (so extra work is an opportunity for them) I can’t feel too bad about having to come in, too.  As I wrote yesterday, it’s not as though I have anything better to do with my time.

Actually, today of all days, that’s not quite correct.  Today is the day of the first of the 60th anniversary Doctor Who specials, which I mentioned yesterday.  But since that is supposed to be streaming on Disney Plus, I can watch it from work (things are often slow-ish on Satudays) just as easily as at the house, and I will probably be more comfortable at the office.  My desk chair is decent, whereas at the house I basically sit on the floor.

Now that we are past the main temptation holidays, at least until Christmas/New Years, I need to go back onto a stricter diet.  I find that my physical energy is much better when I’m controlling my input.  This might seem ironic, given that I’m restricting input of the most easily “usable” calories, but the biochemistry and physiology of this fact is entirely reasonable and well understood.

It does sometimes have a detrimental affect on my mood, decreasing my emotional energy somewhat—which I guess makes my sugar cravings/sweet tooth a bit akin to the addiction of someone who uses illicit drugs to “self-treat” an underlying mood disorder.  This shouldn’t be too surprising, since sugar triggers activity in the nucleus accumbens and related centers of the nervous system that is very similar to what cocaine and amphetamines do.

I also should just avoid alcohol—not because I have a big problem with it or anything, but because it doesn’t actually make me feel good, even in the moment, but I kind of expect it to do so, and by the time I realize, “Hey, this isn’t even helping me relax or making me feel good while it’s on board”, I’ve already bought myself some GI and neurological discomfort later.

Sorry, I know this is all boring.  In a way, though, everyone is boring to most other people, or at least not terribly interesting.  And many people who are apparently interesting to so many other people are actually astonishingly uninteresting to me.  For instance, though I recognize her talent and skill and brilliance, I have no particular interest in Taylor Swift’s career or music—except to recognize those stated attributes—and I certainly have no interest in her love life.  Yet, since I do follow the news fairly regularly, I cannot help but become aware of these things.

To be fair to her, she’s much more interesting than most celebrities*.

I suppose it’s a small price to pay for making sure that I get my news input from a variety of different sources to try to avoid bias—or, at least, to balance the biases against each other as much as I can.  I don’t generally like to take in commentary on news, so I avoid editorials; I can decide what I think about issues for myself once I have the data and don’t need pundits to tell me what they think I ought to think.  I’m only too aware of studies that have generally shown that such pundits’ predictions on various news events are no better than, and quite often significantly worse than, chance.

In other words, if you get your news from sources that editorialize, let alone from pundits, you’re actually worsening your likelihood of getting a good take on events in the world.  Why not just get a “magic 8-ball” and save yourself the trouble, while ironically improving your odds?

Mind you, there are people with expertise from whom I might be interested in hearing (or reading) their take on particular, narrow issues within their wheelhouse.  For science and related news, for instance, I go to a few specific science-related YouTube channels like Dr. Becky, and PBS Space Time, and Sabine Hossenfelder, and Sixty Symbols and Deep Sky Videos and Periodic Videos and Numberphile and Computerphile—those last five are all channels pioneered by Brady Haran, a remarkably intelligent and curious science and math journalist who gets experts to discuss science (and mathematical and computer-related) stories.  He asks very good questions.

I find that the mainstream media does just an unacceptably sloppy job at conveying science news, on average.  To be fair to them, the standard deviation of that sloppiness is pretty big, so some good work happens now and then, but it’s well into one small tail of the curve.  Sadly enough, even Scientific American has become a severe embarrassment to itself—and it’s even more embarrassing that the editors thereof don’t seem even to realize how embarrassing they’ve become.  I used to love that magazine, but it’s dead to me now.

Anyway, enough kvetching.  My train will be here soon, and I’ll be on my way to the office.  I hope to have at least one hour of today that is quite fun—the Doctor Who special—and I certainly always get some satisfaction from writing these posts, at least when it’s clear that people are reading them.  I hope you all have a good remainder of the weekend, and I will return Monday morning, barring the unforeseen.

*Even David Tennant, for instance, is mainly interesting only as the Doctor (or as Hamlet, or in one of his other roles).  Ditto for the other Doctors, and for musicians whose work I enjoy, and for writers I like to read, and even for scientists whose work I follow.  I guess it makes sense; people are most interesting when they’re doing what it is that they do that is exceptional.

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I’m sorry about yesterday (not the song…the song is good, but I had nothing to do with that)

It’s Friday, and I did not write a blog post yesterday, because I did not go in to the office.  I also will not be writing a post tomorrow, because I am not scheduled to work then.

I’m waiting at the train station very early, by the way.  Technically, I arrived just in time for the scheduled first train of the day, but it’s apparently running about eleven minutes late.  It’s hard to hold this too much against them.  Over the past few days, the weather here has been so wet and windy and floody that it has bordered upon tropical storm level, but it’s persisted much longer than such tropical storms tend to do.

I didn’t go to the office yesterday as both a direct (I think) and indirect (I’m pretty sure) consequence of the weather.  You see, my back pain, with major radiation down my legs, especially the right one, was tremendously severe.  When I got up in the morning, I barely could move.  I don’t know if it was because of the weather directly, in that the changing humidity and pressure and whatnot cause my various injured spinal and connective tissue elements to act up—certainly my shoulders were also achy—but I also walked to the nearby gas station after taking the train to my station in Hollywood on Wednesday night.  Because of the rain and the wind and so on, there were lots of puddles, and my coordination was rather screwed up, so in trying to go over puddles and sometimes jumping them, I think I hurt myself.

I was going to try to take an Uber into the office, anyway, yesterday, but because of the weather, the Uber rates were more than twice what they would usually be.  Given that I felt very similar to crap, that would probably have been a bad decision, anyway.  I’m glad I rested, because while I am far from pain free, I feel better than I did.  I don’t ever really expect to be “pain free” anymore; I just try to get it below the threshold of interfering too much with conscious thought and effort.

I’m not going to be writing a blog post next Thursday, of course, because it is Thanksgiving here in the US, and that’s a day that more people take off than perhaps any other specific holiday but New Year’s Day.  It feels mildly weird not to have written my “classic” Thursday blog post two weeks in a row, but that’s just the way it goes.

I suppose that, if Christmas had fallen on a Thursday since I’ve been doing my blog, then I would have missed the blog posts two weeks in a row, because Christmas and New Years are exactly a week apart.  That probably did happen at least once sometime since I’ve started writing my fiction and writing my blog; it ought to happen once every seven years*.  But I’m not sure.  It certainly hasn’t been for a while.

My Thursday blog started basically as an attempt to promote my writing and to engage with potential readers of my fiction.  A fat lot of good that did me.  I probably should have known better.  I’ve never been terribly good at self-aggrandizement, or self-promotion, and I certainly should have realized that exposing people to my true personality—to the degree that such a thing is possible when writing a blog—was never going to be a good way to promote my work.  It’s a bit like an orc trying to enter a human beauty contest; unless it’s heavily disguised, it’s never even going to get in the door, and certainly no one looking for human beauty if going to give it high marks.

Mind you, of course, beauty is subjective and is relative to the species.  Peahens apparently find the peacock’s tail feathers not merely lovely—a sentiment many humans share—but they also find them sexy.  Moths are drawn to moth pheromones, Bower Bird females love a guy who lays out a brilliant-looking bower, even though it will never be used for anything, and certainly not for nesting.

That’s was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  My brain tends to do lots of weird things.  Although I laid around most of the time yesterday, it’s not true to say that I got a lot of rest.  My right leg, with its radiating pain, was so severe that it developed a bit of a “causalgia” phenomenon, in that vasomotor activity was affected by the pain process, and my entire leg felt tight as well as cold to the touch relative to the rest of my body.

It wasn’t too severe; it wasn’t as though it was going blue or otherwise discolored, other than a slight increased pallor.  However, it made it clear to me that my pain wasn’t “all in my head”.  It was certainly all in my nervous system, of course, but that’s a thing that spreads through the whole body, from the brain to the spine to all the limbs and the heart and lungs and the whole GI tract—the latter of which by some measures has a local nervous system as complex as the entire brain of a cat.

No wonder GI tracts can be so grumpy if you don’t treat them perfectly.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’ll not be writing tomorrow—barring the unforeseen—so I’ll next be writing on Monday, November 20th.  What a month it’s been since October 20th.  I didn’t expect to be here at this time, or indeed (possibly) to be anywhere at all—I don’t know what to make of it.

*Though, given the existence of leap years, there can be temporary deviations from the hard and fast pattern.  So Christmas/New Years might have skipped a year at some point within the past eight to ten years, and so I might not have missed my Thursday blog two weeks in a row for that reason.  I could check on it, but it’s not something about which I’m curious enough right now**.

**Though it wouldn’t be surprising if, later, the question nags at me enough that I go and look it up***.

***I did that (of course) and it turned out that, because of the 2020 leap year, Christmas skipped from Wednesday in 2019 to Friday in 2020.  So I have not missed two Thursdays in a row for that reason, since I did not begin writing my Thursday blog as early as 2013.

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No sleep till…

I’m at the train station quite early even for the first train of the day, today, but I was wide awake for more than two and a half hours before I even left the house.  I didn’t really sleep in yesterday much—which meant that I got my laundry done relatively early, and without having to interact with my housemates, which is always a bit more relaxing than the alternative, but it would be nice if I could just get some rest.

To be fair to me, so to speak, I did do some napping during the day, yesterday.  It’s a bit frustrating, though, that I only nap when I feel like I’m literally losing consciousness, not just slipping off to sleep but as if I’m actually succumbing to some state of disease or something.  It never just feels good to fall asleep, and when I wake up it’s just confusing and groggy and tense and weird.

One good thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression was that it made me enjoy going to sleep.  That was something I don’t think I’d experienced before or have experienced since, though I’ve known people who described feeling particularly good about going to sleep.  However, Paxil had side effects and other issues that overwhelmed the benefits, I’m afraid.

Anyway, that’s enough of that for now.  The point I’m trying to make is that I am not terribly well rested, even though yesterday was Sunday, and so if I’m grumpy and weird and unpleasant in my writing this morning, apart from it being utterly typical for me, the reason is at least partly that I’m not rested.  It’s probably  also just that my personality is grumpy and weird and unpleasant, but that’s a longer-term issue, the solution to which I do not know.  I know how I could make the issue go away, but that’s not quite the same thing as solving it, so for now I’ll wait until I’ve given up on any solution to enact that choice.

And now, I am on the first train of the day, headed north toward the office, to start yet another week of marking time until something changes my life.  In the meantime, I did buzz my hair Saturday afternoon, down to the quarter-inch length of the clippers.

It’s been months and months since I cut my hair, and it was getting quite long, but that didn’t bother me.  What bothered me was that, when I went to see about possibly making a YouTube short or something similar, I saw how unruly my hair looked and how much it made my face look even rounder and more disgusting than otherwise.  This is despite the fact that I wash my hair every day and comb it carefully and all that.  But once that’s done, I tend to forget about it, and I spend as little time looking in mirrors as I can.  So, seeing a few practice videos of my face was shocking and borderline horrifying.

Also, let’s face it, having really short hair is just easier for maintenance.  Even though I recently ranted about the weirdness of the military being into short hair, I have to admit, it’s nice not to have to worry about it except for the occasional touch-up trimming.  It’s still over-warm and humid here in south Florida, and that’s another good reason for shorter hair.  Hopefully it will cool down at least a little as the week goes on.

There’s something weird happening with the sound the train is making on the tracks, or with its air-conditioning or some other system.  For a bit there, there was this nearly-rhythmic squeaking noise coming and going, almost as though there was a big cage full of discontented birds and the occasional hamster on a rusty wheel up in the roof of the train car.  It seems to be a function of how fast the train is going and whether it’s on the inside or outside of a slight curve in the track.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I am writing this on my laptop computer, by the way.  It’s just much easier and more natural for me to write this way.  It’s been over a week since I’ve done any significant walking, because I’ve been sick, and I’m still under the weather, so carrying the computer isn’t an obstacle.

It’s not as though lugging the laptop makes my backpack that much heavier, anyway, so even once I get going back into walking—assuming I do—it shouldn’t be an issue.  When I was biking it could be a worry, because if it suddenly started to rain while I was biking that could be a situation where the computer could get wet in the backpack before I had the chance to adjust.

I haven’t been biking in a long time, though.  I haven’t even tried to replace the inner tube on my all but new bicycle.  It’s been sitting upside down on the patio near my door for months, and I have the equipment and have watched the instruction videos.  There’s nothing particularly difficult about doing it.  I just have no motivation to do it.

Anyway, that’s enough for now, I guess.  There’s nothing interesting or good or positive going on in my life, so all I have to convey is my more or less constant negativity.  Even I get tired of it sometimes (by which I mean nearly all the time), so I can only imagine how it is for all of you.  I apologize.  I know I’m terribly unpleasant.  Even people who love me don’t like to be around me much, as I’m sure I’ve noted before.

I just wish I could rest and sleep and feel refreshed and rejuvenated at some point.  Life can be unpleasant enough as it is, but it’s worse when you don’t feel like you ever really get a break or a respite.  Oh, well.  I guess I’ll continue to continue, at least for today.  We’ll see what happens by tomorrow.

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Roaches and live-streams and lightning, oh my!

I did not have nearly as good a sleep last night as I did the previous two nights.  I don’t know if that means I’m getting worse—with respect to my current respiratory illness—or that I’m getting better.  I certainly don’t feel better, and indeed, I am wearing a mask today because I’m coughing quite a bit still, and there’s no need to spread illness to other people in a petty way.

It would be one thing if I were doing it on purpose; I can imagine myself doing that in certain circumstances.  There are occasions in which I feel that there are simply too many humans for anyone’s good, including their own.  This has nothing to do with any silly, movie-Thanos concept of environmental correction or anything stupid like that.  It’s much more a spiteful, hateful, vindictive kind of thought, rather like the way one feels when one steps on a cockroach that has wandered into the kitchen when one was trying to have a nice meal or snack.

One is not really expecting to make any overall global gains by doing this, and one certainly doesn’t consider oneself to be aiding the cockroach population’s well-being by doing so.  Nevertheless, it is momentarily satisfying to act on that feeling of disgust and revulsion and just to crush out of existence that little, annoying thing that bothers you.  There’s no need to dress it up and give oneself “excuses”.  This is just how living things sometimes behave.

Incidentally, I actually think roaches are quite impressive creatures in all their many species.  They are obviously extremely adaptable, their “design” is simple and consistent, and in one form or another they have been on this planet for about three hundred million years.  Some of them can even have a kind of sleek aesthetic appeal, when they’re not encroaching (no pun intended) upon my personal environment.  Nevertheless, if they intrude on my living space, I will kill them.

I’m working tomorrow, so I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, unless the unexpected occurs in some fashion.  Perhaps some giant cockroach will step on me, or my illness will progress significantly, and I simply will not be able to go to work.  Maybe I’ll die.  But unless something drastic happens, I’ll be going to work.  If I were to switch weekends, it would mean that I would have to work the next two weekends in a row, and I really, really, really don’t want to do that.

I wish I had just left on September 23rd, like I’d hoped to do.  If I had done that, I would almost certainly been most of the way to my destination by now.  That would be 48 days at this point, and even at a very modest walking rate, I could have gone a thousand miles in that time.  I would have been able to see the changing colors of the leaves of deciduous trees in person again.

Or I would be dead, of course, in which case I would be at my destination, albeit in a different sense.  That was one possible point of the venture.  Now, even if I were to leave today, I probably would already have missed most of the changing leaves by the time I reached an environment in which they actually change.  Instead I’m stuck here, where it’s still muggy at five o’clock in the morning.

I was thinking yesterday of trying out live-streaming to YouTube, so I opened up the app on my phone to look into the process.  But, apparently, to live-stream from one’s phone, one has to have at least 50 YouTube followers.  YouTube suggested that I make and share some “shorts” to grow my audience—apparently because that tends to grow one’s audience—but when I started practicing a bit of video, I was reminded of the fact that I do not like my face.  That partly informed my decision to wear a mask today (though not as much as did my cough).  A mask and glasses improve my visage, and frankly, they feel more like me than does my actual face anymore.

So, I may soon be doing YouTube “shorts” and similar things, and if I do, I’ll possibly embed them here.  I’m not the hugest fan of such things, but at least they don’t hide or disguise the fact that they’re made on phone cameras.

It would be nice to get to the point where I could live-stream things onto YouTube from my phone, because there are things I sometimes consider doing that might be worthy of live-streaming—though the terminology could become amusingly ironic.  But, of course, one doesn’t need 50 followers or more to live-stream from a computer, and I do have a portable laptop computer.  I’m writing this blog post using it, and I have been using it for such writing all week.

Technically, the computer needs to have a Wi-Fi connection of some variety to be able to upload, but my smartphone can be used as a mobile hotspot.  I’ve tried it before, and it’s been quite effective.  The phone gets literally hot before too long—the processing of information does produce waste heat and increase local entropy, after all—but that wouldn’t be too big a concern.

Anyway, further bulletins about all that as events warrant.

In the meantime, I hope most of you don’t have to work tomorrow, and that you have families and/or friends with whom you can spend the weekend doing things that are at least somewhat enjoyable.  I’m unlikely to be lucky enough to be gone or incapacitated or otherwise prevented from doing whatever it is I do by tomorrow, but over a long enough time, even the vanishingly improbable becomes almost inevitable.

For instance, if you had a 1% chance of being struck by lightning in any given day*, your chance of being hit by lightning by tomorrow would be, of course, 1%.  After a week, though, your chances of being hit on some day would be about 6.79%**.  After 30 days, your likelihood of having been struck by lightning at  least once*** would be 26.03%.

After 100 days, your odds of having been hit by lightning would not be 100%, of course, but they would be high:  about 63.40%, if my calculations are correct.  And after a full (non-leap) year, your chances of having been hit by lightning would be…97.45%.

They never will truly reach 100%, no matter how long you try—that’s just the way probability works.

It’s a bit like trying to get a massive particle to go the speed of light.  No matter how small the mass, even though you can get closer and closer, to reach the speed of light would require infinite energy.  This is related to the fact that the ratio of 1 over the square root of (1 minus (the square of the velocity of the particle over the square of the speed of light)) goes to infinity as the velocity goes to c, the speed of light.

energy

That’s not why probabilities never reach 100%, but it is mathematically reminiscent.  One has to wait an infinite time for a low probability event to become, effectively, certain.  But for practical purposes, it can quickly become so likely as to make other considerations irrelevant.

And now, I’m at the station before my destination—not metaphorically, alas, but literally.  So I’ll sign off for today.  I hope you have a good one.

*Because, apparently, you live in a ridiculously lightning-prone area and enjoy playing golf in thunderstorms using iron golf clubs.

**NOT 7%.  Odds of independently occurring, repeated chances do not add in a simple way.  If they did, then after 101 days, one would have 101% chance of having something happen, which makes no sense mathematically or logically.

***And when it happens once, you’re unlikely to get a chance to go for a second hit, so I’m leaving that possibility out of the equation.