Health

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I was off sick yesterday. You’re welcome.

Hi, everybody.  I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer.  I brought it back to the house with me on Friday (when I left work early) and it seemed a shame not to make use of it.  Of course, this was my intention when I brought it.  I like typing much better than using the phone, as you all know, if you’ve been reading my blog posts for very long, and I also needed to give my thumbs a rest because of the relatively mild but nagging and persistent arthralgia* they’ve been having.

I am sorry that I did not write a post yesterday.  I was out sick; I have been sick all weekend, feeling quite crappy, I’m afraid.  I’m still far from my baseline health, but I need to go into the office or too many things are going to get into disarray and be terribly backed up.

Also, to be honest, when I’m just sitting at the house, I don’t do well.  It doesn’t help that we had the “Fall back” thing this weekend, but even without that, my sense of time’s passage was really screwed up over this slightly prolonged isolation.  It felt like a surreal sort of turbulent time flow, with me waking up, thinking it must be morning, and realizing that it was only ten thirty at night, and I’d barely dozed off (for instance).  My sleep has been deeply discombobulated.  I definitely got a bit of a feel for the notion of time not being linear but being a “big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.”**

Unfortunately, I haven’t been walking for three or four days, at least nothing of significance.  My back is absolutely killing me.  I can barely reach down to tie my shoes, even when seated.  I feel as though I’ve aged decades over this weekend.  I don’t know if this is partly from coughing a lot, or mainly from lying around so much or what.  Probably it’s multi-factorial.  In any case, though, I feel horribly stiff in addition to having what I suspect is an on and off fever (because I have intermittent sweats, especially after taking analgesics/antipyretics).

It’s interesting to note, as I just did when I pre-saved this blog post, that last year’s post for November 7th was written on a Monday.  So, we’ve shifted to one day later for the same date this year, at least at this time of the year.  I guess that makes sense, since 52 (weeks) times 7 (days) is 364, which gives one extra day in non-leap years.  I’ve probably noted this before, but it still sometimes strikes me as interesting, albeit probably not very important.

It also shows that I’ve been writing these daily blog posts instead of writing fiction most days of the week for at least a year, and almost certainly quite a bit longer.  That’s rather disappointing, at least to me, because these were meant to be therapeutic in some sense; I was hoping to get my mental health into better condition before nearly this long had passed.  Of course, I don’t know what my mental health would have been like had I not been writing these blog posts.  Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse.  Regrettably, I can only imagine the alternatives; I cannot actually carry out any form of controlled test.

I probably would have been better off if I had just either written fiction every day, even if almost no one ever read it, or not having written anything at all.  I don’t think I would have been any healthier, had that been the case.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were already dead*** in that case.  But at least I wouldn’t be facing this same daily grind of nonsense and futility.

The funny thing is, I could write fiction.  I’ve never had traditional writer’s block in the sense of sitting and looking at the page or screen and not knowing what to write.  I’ve just felt utterly unmotivated.  It’s much akin to the fact that I seem unable to say, “I love the world and I love myself” even in my own head.

I just have no will to do anything.  Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that I have no drive to do anything.  I have will in the sense of being able to resist various impulses, albeit imperfectly and not consistently.  The various portions of my frontal lobes that are involved in impulse regulation seem to be functioning reasonably well.  Sometimes I think they’re functioning too well.  Unfortunately, the stress-related parts of my brain have grown stronger over time—my amygdala is probably pretty beefy at this stage, and I don’t think it used to be that way.  I am much more tense and stress-able than I ever used to be.

I mean, I guess I’ve been through a fair amount, and chronic pain (and a stint in FSP) certainly doesn’t help to calm one’s fight-or-flight responses, though it can lead to kind of “learned helplessness” over time.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think.  My mind went wandering for about ten minutes just now, and I sort of forgot what I was doing, so I think I’ve said more than I have to say for today.  I hope you all are physically well, and that you’re mentally exceptionally good.  Why not?  Hope is hope; it’s only a bit more constrained than wishes.  I can wish for world peace to happen today, by some miracle, and I know that’s almost impossible, but I can (and do) sincerely hope for you all to have a good day.

*From athro- referring to joints or articulations, and -algia, referring to pain, as in analgesics.  So, arthralgia literally just means “joint pain”.  But it sounds more impressive in Latin (or is it Greek, or both?), and also, if it’s in a “dead” language, then it can be a term that medical professionals around the world can use without having to learn each other’s many terms for the various things.

**A quote from the 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant) from Doctor Who, Series 3, episode 10, “Blink”.

***Can dead people be surprised that they’re dead?  I suspect not, but it’s quite difficult to know, as we get no actual (reliable) reports from the undiscovered country.

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Urchins shall forth at vast of night that they may blog all exercise on thee.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, that day with which DentArthurDent always had so much trouble.  It’s the first Thursday in November, which means that (in the US) Thanksgiving will fall on the 23rd of November, since it’s celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November, which is always going to be 21 days after the 1st Thursday in November.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m at the train station, and I was early even for the 610 train today.  I’m not going to get on the 610 train, because I still want to cool down* and begin this blog post, and it looks like the 630 is running on time.  I got here early partly because I got up early this morning…but really, that was only about 5 minutes earlier than usual, and it had little relation to when I first woke up.  The main reason, I believe, for my comparative earliness is that, as I mentioned yesterday, I tried to jog a bit this morning.

After getting to the end of my block and turning, I jogged 40 paces, as I had said I was going to do.  That was so comparatively easy and bracing that, at my next 90 degree turn, I did another 40 paces (each pace being 2 steps, at least the way I define the terms).  Then again at the next 90 degree turn, then at the last one.  So, I jogged a total of 160 paces, and walked the rest, and the jogging didn’t make me feel breathless or sore (so far) because it is such a limited amount.

It’s rather curious and amusing to note that my pedometer reads as if I’ve gone slightly less far than I usually do, because of course, jogging steps are quite a bit longer than walking steps, but the pedometer still just reads them as steps.

It’s a nice feeling to have done even that very little bit of running.  It’s a good way to start a day, to have accomplished that little bit of a goal, as part of a general pattern of exercise.  It is the first time (I think) that I’ve tried jogging while wearing a backpack.  That turns out not to have been a noticeable problem.

It’s quite windy today‒which is rather pleasant‒and there was a bit of rain on and off while I walked, though it’s really been negligible.  I got my umbrella out at one point, but even if I hadn’t used it, I don’t know that I would have gotten unpleasantly wet.

I decided last night to revisit the “mantra” notion I mentioned earlier this week, but with a slight downgrade or alteration from my previous idea to make it more workable.  If you’ll recall, I had started with the plan just to say “I love myself” as a form of auto-suggestion, then expanded it to “I love the world and I love myself”.  Anyway, I found that, upon awakening the next morning, I could not even make my mind’s voice speak the words.  They simply felt too utterly at odds with my thinking.

However, only one of those phrases was really the problem.  So, starting last night, I’ve tried to repeat to myself the mantra “I love the world” when I’m not otherwise engaged.  This seems to work much better.

I have a hard time even saying that I love myself, but the world…well, I’ve always loved nearly all branches of science, and they are all about understanding and exploring the world.  And I like mathematics and philosophy, and I even like history.

It can be easy to get discouraged by the way people behave at any given moment, and certainly humans say and do some ridiculous and destructive things.  But loving something doesn’t require it to be perfect.  In most cases, the concept of “perfect” isn’t even coherent.  Indeed, loving something can entail wanting to help it get better than it already is.  If you hate something (or someone) there’s no sense of trying to improve anything.  Wanting something (or someone) to improve is a positive, beneficent emotion.

To clarify, when I say “the world” in this context, I don’t just mean “the Earth”, I mean “the Universe”, to whatever level of multiverse and/or higher dimensionality might exist‒everything, all time, all possible stuff.  And let’s be honest, when you start thinking about things like that, while they can be daunting‒since, compared to infinities, anything finite is vanishingly small‒they’re still just mind-blowingly cool.  Don’t even get me started on the uncountable infinities of the “real” numbers and “complex numbers” and functions that are discontinuous at every point**, or infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces!

So, anyway, when I woke up this morning, I was easily able to start thinking “I love the world” to myself, and that was a pleasant surprise.  Hopefully, I can keep it up.  At the very least, it would help make other things easier to tolerate, even if it doesn’t help me like myself.

Would that be a peculiar kind of dualism?  Possibly, but it’s not a formal distinction of type or substance; it would just leave me as an exception to a general tendency.

Anyway, that’s about it for now.  My coworker who had a stroke is apparently stable, and no clot was discovered, so I’m still puzzled, but I don’t have much information.  Hopefully we’ll find out more soon.

And, hopefully, you all have a good Thursday.  Thank you for reading.

TTFN

urchins on kelp

*I keep accidentally writing “cook down” when I try to write “cool down”.  It’s not a nonsense phrase, but it probably never would apply to me.

**There’s a term for this, but I’m dipped if I can recall it‒something like “continuously discontinuous functions”*** but I don’t think that’s quite right.  I know next to nothing about the subject, but just the notion of a function that is non-differentiable at every point is astounding.

***Though I heard at least one mathematician refer to them as “infinitely kinky functions” in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.

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I don’t have any vember…do you?

It’s November now, so Happy November, everyone, if that’s something that people say on any kind of regular basis.  October is generally my favorite month, and now it’s over, so at some level that’s disappointing.  On the other hand, I don’t think I can remember ever having a worse October (subjectively speaking*) than the one that’s just finished, so I guess I can’t feel too bad about it being over.

I’m quite concerned about a coworker of mine, who is one of the few people I would consider a friend at work.  She had some weird sensations and weakness (subjectively) in her hand Monday, and said she felt weird, though when I tested her grip strength it was normal.  But I guess it got worse by the end of the day and she went to the hospital.  Third-person (and thus unreliable) information is that she had a small stroke of some kind, which seems strange to me given that she is only 41.  It’s not impossible, of course, but I certainly didn’t consider it likely.  I thought it much more probable that she had slept oddly on her arm or something along those lines.

I feel bad not to have been more proactive and not recommending that she go quickly to the doctor or emergency room, but it’s not as if I’m in practice anymore, and I don’t really give medical advice one way or the other when I can help it.  Also, frankly, my own mental state is far from good, and is trending lower over time.  I can’t trust myself to care for myself; it’s hard to be able to do my best for other people (though I usually like them more than I like myself).

Still, I would wish that I could have worked some miracle of prevention or whatnot on Monday.  It would probably have been better to encourage her to go to the ER sooner…even if it probably would not have made a difference (some of this is talk is likely me just trying to make myself feel better, but I think it’s nonetheless true).

I did not walk significantly yesterday‒a total of only about one and a half miles.  Today though, I walked to the train station, and arrived nicely just as the 610 was pulling in, which I am again rather foolishly happy to say I felt no urge to try to catch.

The walking is getting easier, which is nice.  I think the spandex knee and ankle supports are making a difference, and it seems pretty clear that these shoes are going to be simply better than the boots would have been.  I’m still sad about that, but reality is that which it is; we do not have veto power over it.

It occurred to me this morning, as I was getting near the end of my journey, that I may be getting fit enough that I could throw a bit of jogging in‒very slowly and gradually‒without hurting my back.  I’ve always enjoyed jogging/running, and maybe, if I take advantage of the delayed and postponed nature of my epic quest, I can thereby turn it into something even more impressive.

I imagine myself starting by doing perhaps a brief warm-up walk‒say, to the end of the block‒and then running forty paces the first day, then eighty paces the second, then one hundred twenty the third, and so on.  I’m sweaty in the morning and bring a complete change of clothes anyway, when I walk to the train, so it would make nary a difference as far as I can anticipate.

One of the advantages of such a practice would simply be the decreased time for the journey in the morning.  It takes just about an hour and a half to walk the five miles to the train in the morning, but even a light jog could bring that down to less than an hour, though that would be a long-run goal (no pun intended, but it’s slightly funny, so I’ll leave it).

It would also be quite nice to start every day with a real endorphin rush, which jogging/ running always tended to give me.  Even when I was in residency, for part of the time at least, I used to jog about four miles in the morning on days when I wasn’t post-call.  I had to use a treadmill usually, because this was in New York, and much of the year it was too cold for jogging outdoors.  But it was a good habit, and I felt good, and I looked good (for me, at least).

It’s something to think about.  Meanwhile, November is a month with a very important US holiday:  Thanksgiving.  It’s a nice, foody holiday, and even though I don’t have anyone with whom I celebrate it anymore, I still tend to get something like a turkey sandwich with cranberry based topping, which is available not far from me.  I may do that this year.  Maybe I won’t.  I don’t know what I’ll do, but there doesn’t seem to be any real reason to specify my plans, or even to have any such plans.  We’ll just see what happens.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a good month.  Thank you for reading.

*Event-wise, of course I’ve had worse Octobers.  After my divorce, and then while I was in prison, those were objectively worse months, and my chronic pain was worse than it is now.  But weirdly enough, my mood was less low.  Possibly this is is a matter of some kind of emotional erosion.  More of it was going on back then, but I’ve now been eroded to a lower level than I ever was in the past.  I’m probably overthinking things.

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Self-treats and self-tricks

First of all, Happy Halloween.  It’s my favorite holiday, but I’m not doing anything to celebrate this year.  We haven’t been decorating the office or anything, and I’m not going to dress up, though I usually do.  It’s just not very much fun anymore, and there’s no one with whom to celebrate it.

I had a brief period yesterday afternoon until evening when I decided to attempt an experiment on my mood (it’s not a new idea)*.  I had been idle for a bit near the end of the day and checked YouTube and saw that there was a video on a channel called “Mended Light” which is partly run by the guy co-runs “CinemaTherapy“, but this one is more directly mental health oriented and he does the videos with his wife, who is also a therapist.

Anyway, the reason it caught my eye was that it was about “Why don’t you love yourself?” or something along those lines.  The video wasn’t as trite as one might expect it to be, given that, and there was a linked follow-up that brought up one of their earlier, related videos, which was also not as trite as it might have been.  Thankfully, these were both less than fifteen minutes long, and I could play them at double speed and with closed captions.

The points made were focused on some simple but non-trivial ideas about how you don’t want to love others or especially yourself in a sort of “earned” or “purely value-related” way, because no one is perfect, and if you already have a hard time loving yourself, then you’re never going to be able to avoid doing things that make you judgmental toward yourself.  So the idea was that if you love yourself in a way that is more…I don’t know, not unconditional but maybe just not judgmental, you can see yourself as worthy of love even if you’re imperfect (which, of course, you are).  You can, in a sense, choose to love yourself.

That doesn’t preclude you from trying to better yourself‒it’s not to be confused with narcissism.  Even a parent that loves a child tremendously can still try to teach the child, and punish bad behavior, reward good behavior, and try to guide the child in a good direction.  Only a fool thinks someone can be born a perfect, fully-developed being with no room to improve.

That’s certainly a reasonable point of view, I thought, and it was not a new one to me.  Somehow, though, at that moment, it felt newly salient, like something I could grasp.  And since I’m in fairly desperate and perilous psychological circumstances, I thought it was worth a try.  So I went back to some old ideas of auto-suggestion that I first read about and started using way back in junior high, after reading a book by Leslie M. LeCron.  I decided to do a sort of mantra (I’ve done this sort of thing before, sometimes for years at a time, including when I was in prison).

I would just say to myself, repeatedly, while walking or when idle, “I love myself”.  Before long, I started to add another phrase, making it, “I love the world, and I love myself”.

It probably sounds silly, but again, I’ve done such things before, and it has worked for certain purposes.  I think it made a difference for me in high school, where no one could reasonably say I was academically unsuccessful.  I used to do a full self-hypnotism thing with auto-suggestion a couple of times a day for years.  It wasn’t about loving myself then, but more about self-improvement and related things**.  The self-hypnotism also helped calm my mind, I think.

Anyway, I felt pretty darn good for a few hours yesterday evening, but I suspect this was a primary fact, not a secondary one.  In other words, I think the uptick in my mood was what made me feel open to the notion of self-improvement, not the other way around.  But the words did help me focus on the good things, about the outside world, at least, and I felt less hostile and even had a slight “warm glow” feeling.

I also did some extra walking (totaling about 9 and a half miles for the day).  And I had about one and a half small mixed drinks in the evening to celebrate (the half was because a moth flew into my drink about halfway through and I poured the rest out).  I also ate some leftover Chinese food from Sunday’s lunch, because it would go bad if I waited too long.  That latter choice was probably a mistake‒I ate too late in the day, and I have some heartburn now, which is, of course, unpleasant.

Anyway, this morning I got up (though, as always, I’d been waking up on and off for hours) and could not even think the words of my proposed “mantra” to myself.  This has happened to me before when I was trying to do positive self-talk.  It ends up feeling not like I’m trying to reprogram myself or whatever, but simply that I’m lying to myself.  Of course, as the song Billie Jean implies, it is possible for lies to become true, and that’s part of the point of auto-suggestion, e.g., “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”  But so far, today, when I try to do the mental chant, the words turn to sand in my metaphorical throat.

Maybe it’s the heartburn.  Maybe it’s because I had an even worse sleep than usual.  Or maybe I’m just not able even to say that I love myself unless I’m already in an unusually good mood.  Maybe I’m amazed at the way I hate me all the time (ha ha).

I don’t know.  I don’t even know why I’m sharing this.  But at least partly I want you all to know that I’m not just giving in and imploding.  I’m trying to improve; I’m trying not to hate myself and my life.  I’ve been trying not to be depressed for a very long time‒for centuries, for millennia, and that’s despite the fact that just 11 days ago I turned 54.  [That’s the same age as Matthew Perry (well, he was 2 months and a day older than I)].

Anyway, Happy Halloween, again.  I don’t know what you’re all going to do for the day, but hopefully at least some of you will have fun.

vagabond happy halloween

*Spoiler alert: it hasn’t lasted even twelve hours.

**I didn’t feel like I needed help loving myself then, though most of the time I deliberately pretended to be egotistical, in what I hoped was a humorous, self-mocking sort of way.  I already didn’t actually like myself much, but I didn’t really dwell on it.  Still, my “heroes” were usually the villains of stories; I certainly never could imagine myself as any manner of traditional “good guy”.  How could something like me be anything but an antagonist?  But at least I could be a villain who got stuff done and achieved some kind of progress or something.  Nevertheless, I have never seen myself as anything but a potential bad guy, and those were the characters in books and movies and comic books with whom I identified***.  It wasn’t until the Harry Potter books really that I found a hero that I could truly admire and find inspiring yet “real”, and a villain for whom I had no significant admiration at all, despite that fact that I did a post about him in the brief series to which I linked above.

***It’s amusing when I read or hear clichés about how “nobody sees themselves as the villain” or similar, like in The Talented Mr. Ripley.  That’s utter bullshit.  People who say or write such things have clearly never explored many potential aspects of human beings and similar-appearing but alien creatures like me (ha ha).  Many people see themselves as the bad guys in their lives…and the real bad guys, who are never very inspiring or impressive in real life, only too easily take advantage of such people.

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Sometimes every night can feel like Devil’s Night

I walked to the train station this morning after having walked less than a mile and a half total yesterday‒it was a deliberate break.  I arrived just as the 610 train was pulling in.  Indeed, I was stopped at the railroad crossing by the lowering of the gate that presaged that train’s arrival.  I’m pleased to be able to say (honestly) that I felt no urge whatsoever to try to catch that train.  It would seem that I’ve internalized the fact that waiting at the station for twenty more minutes is both useful and pleasant, giving me a bit of time to cool down and dry off a little.

It is a bit less breezy today, so I’m a bit sweatier than I was most days last week.  I also decided not even to bother wearing shorts this morning, since‒given the spandex knee and ankle supports I wear‒it exposes all of about three centimeters of very pale and faintly scarred legs to be cooled down.  I imagine that I look like some old Bavarian school child wearing weird, black lederhosen when I dress that way.  That’s not as big an issue, though, as the fact that I’m building up too much laundry.  It took way longer yesterday to clean all my clothes than it usually does.

I know that I received at least two comments on my post from Saturday, but I have not stopped to read more than the first few words of either one.  I just want right now to thank the people who made those comments‒it was obvious from the first few words that they are positive and supportive‒and let them know that I appreciate their responses.

I’m sorry to reveal that I haven’t read them fully yet, because of a very strange but intense anxiety that doesn’t quite make sense to me.  I’ve really sunk pretty low, I guess, when I find it stressful even to read comments on my blog that are obviously positive.  I don’t get it.  What is wrong with me that I get intimidated by even that level of interaction?  It’s absurd, but not in a pleasant or funny way; it’s frankly rather contemptible. Those people deserve a better response from me, and I do intend to make some reply soon, hopefully today.  Sorry it’s taking so long.

I wish I could tell you that I had a good weekend, or that I feel less depressed, but it really wasn’t any kind of restful time or anything.  Mostly what I did Saturday evening and Sunday was eat a few indulgent things and watch “reaction” videos on YouTube.  I may have noted this before, but watching such reactions is, in some ways, almost like watching a show or movie with a friend who hasn’t seen it before.  Even that fact, though, is rather depressing.

Speaking of friends and reactions and comments, I just want to make it clear again that I don’t really respond to Facebook comments about my sharing of my blog posts on that venue.  I don’t even necessarily read them.  Dealing with Facebook and the like is more stressful than dealing with comments here.  TwiXter would probably be even more stressful, but I don’t really ever get replies to anything on that venue, though I share each post there.

I finished Sapolsky’s new book, and it was good.  I can’t help but recommend it highly.  I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t say more about depression.  In the end, what he mostly said (apart from reiterating that it was, like all else in the brain, a purely biological process) was to relay some facts about depressive people being more accurate in their assessment of many things rather than being irrationally negative‒whereas most people are irrationally positive, especially about themselves (I’ve known about this research for years).  So, to paraphrase Sapolsky, depression in certain circumstances can be seen as a pathological dysfunction in one’s capacity for self-deception.

Maybe.  Certainly it is possible that simply to face reality in as unbiased a fashion as possible is inevitably depressing‒which is a further depressing thought in and of itself‒and that all optimism entails delusion at least at some level, or at the very least, it entails ignorance.

This is related to the fact that I ask for people to give me (hopefully) new ideas when trying to offer their support against my depression, because I don’t want to feel better by means of self-delusion or even via neurological manipulations (though the latter may be a bit better).  But maybe ideas alone can’t help against my depression‒certainly CBT didn’t work that well for it‒since it’s more about the tendencies of the state of the system than the outputs of any particular thought processes or program or whatever.

What I should probably do is just give up on trying to feel better.  As those who read Saturday’s post can probably tell, I often get close to that.  It certainly can be hard to keep trying; I’m ever more discouraged.  And now we’re approaching the end of my favorite month, and we’re getting deeper into the longer, darker days of the year.  I didn’t really want to make it this far, to be clear, but I derailed my momentum for my previous plan for the sake of coworkers, and I haven’t yet regained it.  But that can be corrected, at least mostly.

Meanwhile, I continue to tread water, but the ocean gets colder at this time of year, and the waters get choppier.  It wouldn’t be surprising if a particularly big wave drove me under for the final time soon.  It wouldn’t even be really unwelcome.

I’m also constantly, if half-heartedly, seeing if I can lure in some sharks.  That’s a further metaphor, of course, but it has a specific meaning in my mind; it’s not just a vague notion.  I won’t get into it more for now, but maybe I will, later.

I hope you all have a good day, and have a good week.  For those of you who recognize the pseudo-holiday, have a Happy Devil’s Night.  Try not to burn down any inhabited buildings or anything, okay?  No need to give Devil’s Night a bad name.

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“No, I mentioned the bisque…”

Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, it’s Wednesday, I walked 5 miles to the train station, the weather is decent with strong wind for the walk.  The 610 train is just arriving, and now I’m waiting for the 630 one so I can cool down and dry off a bit.

That just about summarizes current events.  Oh, also I can honestly say that walking a total of 8 miles yesterday in the New Balance shoes seems to have worked well.  My left foot is essentially fine‒though I woke up once during the night to realize that, lying on my side, I had the arch of my left foot pressed almost aggressively against the ball of my right foot.  It made me wonder if that strange posture was a regular sleep habit and if it contributed to the foot arch pain I’ve been having.

Evidently, though, based on the fact that the foot is fine now after my five miles so far this morning and eight miles yesterday and that sleepy posture, it didn’t contribute much, if at all.  So, alas, there seems no saving grace for the boots.

I had the temptation to retry the other, slightly larger pairs that I had stopped wearing because they had caused me trouble before, just to try to rescue the boot-wearing.  This is how stupid I can sometimes be, it seems.  I really need to get rid of all of those so that I’m no longer tempted.  I wish I could give them to a good home or something, but I don’t see how I would be able to work that out.

It is good, at least‒I guess‒that I’m able to have gone so far over a couple of days without my ankle or arch or knees or hips acting up at any atypical level.  I am, on the other hand, at least a bit surprised and even slightly disappointed that there was no trace of any of my old, typical endorphin thing yesterday‒my mood wasn’t even briefly bolstered by the long walk.  And, so far, I don’t notice any sign of it today.

Maybe it’s just that the seasonality of my affective disorder and my ongoing, generally deteriorating mental health is overpowering any tendency to get a boost from exercise.  I’ve never really been one of those people for whom regular exercise effectively treats depression*.  Indeed, even when I was running six miles at a time and was in great shape, I still had the same trouble with depression.  Well, it was not “the same”, I guess.  It’s evolved over time and is worse now in some ways than it was when I was younger, though now I’m at least more familiar with it.  In fact, it’s one of the few recurring constants in my life since I was a teenager.  No wonder people don’t like to be around me too long if they can help it.

Anyway, that’s that and it is what it is, and all those other tautological bullshit phrases.  Speaking of which, a whimsical question just occurred to me:  “Is slackology the opposite of tautology?” That’s a very silly and stupid thing to say, I know, but what are you gonna do?  I’m stupid.

I must say, the 630 train is noticeably busier than the earlier ones tend to be, which makes sense, I guess, since it’s getting closer to the typical time for a workday to start.  However, the Tri-Rail people have adjusted for that, and this train has an extra car compared to the usual ones (the others all seem to have 3 passenger cars, whereas this one has 4).  Thus, though there are more people, it’s not more crowded.  Well done, Tri-Rail!

Okay…well, I think that’s that**.  Nothing interesting is going on, really.  I’m still reading Sapolsky’s book, and I listened to some LotR this morning.  It’s a good story to hear while walking, since it’s about a great journey (among other things).  God knows how many times in my life I’ve either read or listened to The Fellowship of the Ring, specifically.  I had read it more than 20 times even before I finished high school.  I almost surely must have passed 50 at some point in the more than 30 years since.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing much does.  So I’ll call that enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Though, of course, I cannot know that I would not have been even worse had I never engaged in regular exercise in the past.

**To repeat the tautological cliché from before.

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“Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor?”

I didn’t walk to the train today, nor did I walk from the train yesterday evening.  I just felt too mentally fatigued‒no worse last night than this morning, and no better.  Also the weather is still just disgusting.  It’s almost as hot this morning as yesterday, and it’s just as muggy.  I am, however, saddled up (so to speak) for walking back from the train this afternoon.

We’ll see what happens.  My current self thinks it’s a pretty good idea, but my afternoon self, faced with his immediate set of metaphorical force vectors, may arrive at a different vector sum than the one at which my current self wishes to arrive.  It’s always easier to discount future costs than present ones, even if those future costs might be extreme.

For good, sound, biological reasons, we’re “designed” to weigh present costs and benefits far more seriously, to find them much more salient, than future costs.  But things like game theory and other decision theory matters can make it clear to us that, sometimes at least, we should override those weightings of present cost/benefit relative to future ones.

However, knowing what we “should” do and doing it are not the same.  And then, of course, there’s always the is/ought separation, pioneered by Hume, which some people find worrisome, but which I think doesn’t make much difference in most cases.  Anyway, we all know that a person saying, “Starting next week, I’m going to give up desserts” (and really meaning it when they say it) is much different than someone actually turning down an offered slice of one’s favorite cake (or whatever) in a given moment.  Different parts of our brains dominate at different times.

The urge for cake is a strong one*, especially if it’s a habit, and to suppress it in the moment requires effort, what one might call willpower.  But willpower, in some senses, is like muscular strength and endurance.  It has limits, and it can be fatigued.  For instance, it’s harder to resist temptations at the end of a busy day, especially if one had to concentrate and think and focus a lot during that day.  There are likely to be exercises that one can do, so to speak, to make one’s willpower stronger and improve its endurance, but they will not engender perfect willpower any more than weightlifting can give one limitless strength and never-ending endurance**.

This is one of the reasons it pays to have the people around you on your side if you’re trying to break some bad habit you don’t like.  Make sure no one offers you dessert, or drinks alcohol in your presence, or smokes near you.  And for gosh sakes, stay away from the crack dens if you want to break that habit!  Eliminate temptations as well as you can, unless and until you’ve broken that habit for a long enough time that your new habit of not having that old habit is consistently stronger than the old habit.  This can take a long time.  Sometimes it can take longer than one’s remaining life, and in such circumstances, one should never be complacent while one is alive.

Are the dead complacent?  Are they indulgent?  I suspect the answer is that they are neither, and that to ask such a question is a kind of category error, or at best something like a Zen koan.

How did I get onto this subject?  Oh, yeah, I was talking about my hopes and dreams for my future actions.  They’re not exactly inspiring or impressive future hopes and dreams.  But then, I’m not a particularly inspiring or impressive person, so I guess that’s appropriate.

My own personal future horizon, at least as far as I can see‒which I guess is sort of what horizon means‒is starkly limited, and often seems obscured by an impenetrable fog.  I have no feeling, no intuitive sense, of any real future for me.  I don’t really have any dreams or goals or wishes right now, other than negatory ones:  I want to stop, I want to escape, I want to cease having to try.  I’m tired 

I have thought, at times, that depression and dysthymia are, in some sense, disorders of the will, perhaps analogous to some type of muscular dystrophy or ALS or similar.  They can be progressive, relapsing/remitting, ebbing and surging, and yet overall persistently degenerative, depending on the individual and upon variables many of which are not well known.

In neuromuscular or related illnesses, one can probably improve one’s function or slow deterioration by doing physical and occupational therapy, including exercise of various kinds, taking appropriate medications, and so on, and this can make a real and substantial difference in the life of a person with a given disorder.  But unless one can correct or remove or even reverse the cause(s) of the disorder, assuming that cause is not an isolated event, then deterioration will continue, and the disorder will progress.

The rate of progression and its ultimate outcome will surely depend on many variables, and that rate might in some cases be brought to such a slow progression that it becomes irrelevant on the scale of one’s remaining life.  That’s the situation of someone whose depression is successfully controlled by ongoing therapy and medication.  It’s not cured, but it is held in check, and the result can at least be satisfactory, even if not ideal.

Some people don’t have that luck.  Some people have faster and more persistent progression.  It is not by their own doing; it is not something for which they can be blamed.  I think I can fairly say that no one ever made a fully informed choice to suffer from depression‒the disease itself affects one’s ability to choose rationally, and this is part of its corrosive power.  So cut them some slack if and when you can do so.

That’s about it for today, I think.  Have a good weekend.

foggy road 3 with fuzzy border

*If cake and other desserts don’t do much for you personally, then substitute some other less-than-perfect habit.  If you’re a smoker, consider the process of quitting smoking.  If you have other drug or alcohol problems, that will surely be a pertinent related concept.  If you just waste too much time on your phone rather than doing things you would have preferred to have been doing in hindsight, consider that.  There are probably at least some analogous situations that apply for everyone.

**Sorry, fans of One Punch Man.

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Here we go again, it seems

Well, here we go again, as I wrote above, starting another work week against all of our better judgments.  I walked to the train station and arrived relatively early today, but I’m letting the 610 train go‒it’s just now arriving‒and I will get on the 630.  That way I have time to cool down a bit.  I will use the extra 20 minutes to write this blog post, such as it will be, here at the station.

I don’t know what I’m really going to write about‒though I’ll begin with the annoying fact that “what to write about” feels like a phrase that ends with a preposition.  I don’t think the word “about” actually is a preposition, but it acts sort of as one here, and its object is “what”.  I want to write something to the effect of “I don’t know about what I’m going to write”, but even I feel that’s more awkward than the more common alternative.  It does bother me, though.

On a different subject, I think that maybe I should just give up on talking about the fact of my worsening dysthymia/depression and suicidal thoughts that I wish I could escape.  The combination is what I wish I could get away from, I mean.  Either one, even without the other, is nearly just as bad, and it’s honestly not too easy to imagine the latter without the former.

I often present my intermittent desire to die as if it were a philosophical conclusion arrived at merely through thought, but those ideas are at best motivated reasoning and at worst sophistry.  I just happen to be good at such things, so it’s going to be difficult to argue around me.  And though I have arrived at some conclusions through more and less rigorous means, I am open to new and convincing reasoning and discussion and ideas.  Such things don’t appear to be forthcoming, alas.

Maybe, since my depression precedes and/or is orthogonal to my reasoning about the value of my life, I shouldn’t expect any counterbalancing notions to be arrived at by reasoning or conversation.  I’ve undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy before, which is keyed to targeting the disordered reasoning associated with depression, but it was no more successful‒with or without meds‒than other approaches.

However, it doesn’t mean that certain forms of response are welcome or even remotely useful.  For instance:  being berated is not useful.  I once had a former coworker/friend berate me for being depressed and feeling suicidal*.  They even compared my situation to theirs:  they had (and still have) some form of slowly progressive cancer, which remains under treatment, as it has been for years now.

To me it’s a rather foolish comparison, and not one to make to someone who is alone and feeling suicidal.  For one thing, though I would never dismiss or belittle that person’s suffering, that person did and does continue to share info about the course of their treatment on Facebook, with pictures of them at the hospital, for instance.  When they go, they are always accompanied by their spouse, their children,  their grandchildren, and so on.

I’m not saying their situation is enviable in general terms, but in some ways‒sometimes‒I do envy it, reprehensible though that may seem.  I’m fairly certain that, if such a thing were possible, I would gladly take that person’s illness upon myself if, by my doing so, they would be cured.  It would bring me joy to be able to make their life better, and to give them more and better time with their loved ones.

I would not then fight the illness, most likely.  I would simply ask for palliative care, and let the disease run its course.  Maybe‒but maybe not‒if my kids knew I would be dying soon, they would want to see me again.  I don’t know.

Maybe, even if it were possible, I would not actually go through with the disease transference.  It’s easy enough to think one would, but It’s just an idle thought as long as it’s an impossible thing to do.

But it was infuriating to be berated for feeling depressed and actually judged about it, as though I simply had chosen to be depressed and could choose not to be at a whim if I just stopped being…what?  I don’t know‒mentally lazy or something along those lines.

I am not my own biggest booster‒I’m more likely to be my own detractor and even derogator‒but neither mental nor physical laziness have been hallmarks of my life or character.  And failure to grasp simple concepts or recognize facts is not one of my major failings, though I certainly am capable of it.  I try very hard not to fool myself about things, but of course it’s always conceivable that such trying may lead me to fool myself in other ways.

Still, for instance, unless someone is going to perform some convincing miracle that would persuade even a disinterested extraterrestrial, then supernatural or mystical or religious arguments are not going to convince me of much of anything.

I’ve read the entire Bible (original and sequel) some of it more than once (and a tiny bit of it in Hebrew), and I’ve read as much of the Koran as I could get through, and I’ve read the Tao te Ching many times, and various other works of religion and philosophy.  I’ve tried to read both high and low religious apologia and statements and philosophy as much as I could without puking on myself, but even such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins and Descartes seem to lose their grasp on what it even means to have convincing reasons for something**.  If my discussions about depression and pointlessness and death involve motivated reasoning and sophistry, I’m far from alone in those things.

Of course, my depression and suicidal urges don’t really come from reasoning about my situation.  This is clear if for no other reason than that I had them even at some times in my life when everything was going objectively well for me.

It seems they are tendencies baked into the circuit boards of my brain in some fashion, possibly related to possible ASD***, or possibly orthogonal to that possibility.  Rather than a lack of joy or a surfeit of sorrow, they seem to be associated, at some level, with a setpoint issue‒perhaps a defect in one’s capacity to feel or sustain joy, or an overactive solemnity and dreariness perception circuit.  Certainly I have great difficulty with belief (as opposed to being provisionally convinced about something).

Maybe there is no help to be had, given current states of technology and knowledge.  It might be interesting to try psilocybin-based therapy or trans-cranial magnetic stimulation or some such other, but I don’t have real access to those things.  I’m also not able to advocate for myself.  That’s one of my problems.  I don’t like myself, and I have no real capacity to seek out anything on my own behalf.  I haven’t gone to see a doctor of any kind for some years now.  What I need is probably not argument or reasoning but rescue, and that is not forthcoming.  Why would it be, for such as me?

Anyway, writing this blog is about my only form of self-advocacy and help-seeking, but it seems to suck for those purposes.  Oh well.  I guess it’s something for me to do until my time is up‒which, for today at least, it is now.

*As if it were perhaps some form of “lifestyle choice”.

**And Augustine and Aquinas are frankly often embarrassing.  I suppose one must give them some slack given the fact that they lived many centuries ago‒but then again, Marcus Aurelius lived even longer ago than they, and he was able to write things that make a great deal more sense than these two.

***There are strong associations between the two noted in the literature, and people with ASD have much higher rates of depression and suicide than the general population, and an average lifespan, even among “high functioning” individuals, in the 50 to 60 year range.

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“…no one here but me, oh.”

Hello, everyone.  In case you were wondering, no, I did not write a blog post yesterday.  I did not go to the office.  I wasn’t sick, exactly, unless you want to count “sick in the head”, which was most certainly the case, in the sense in which it’s usually meant.  I more or less literally did not sleep at all on Wednesday night, and I was exhausted, but still not really sleepy, by the time arrived for me to get up on Thursday.

I almost wish I could say that I’d gone on some indulgent binge‒alcohol, drugs, casual or even not-so-casual sex, whatever‒or, better yet, that I had been feverishly pursuing some new invention or potential scientific discovery.  Even working on a poem or a song or a short story would have been great; I’ve told you all about how I wrote my short story Solitaire over the course of a deliberately sleepless night, and it is probably my darkest story, though I was pretty happy at the time.

No, I simply could not seem to quiet my mind enough to go unconscious.  There may have been snippets of sleep, such as when I would play some compilation comedy video on YouTube that I’ve seen dozens of times before.  That sort of thing often is able to lull me down into at least a temporary bout of slumber and is much more effective than any rain or forest sounds recordings have ever been.  But Wednesday night they didn’t seem to make me sleep even past the end of the video most times.  Anyway, I was usually too restless even to try one of those.

I don’t know for sure why I had so much trouble sleeping.  I can speculate, of course, and I can come up with hypotheses which are unlikely to be the full story‒for instance, Wednesday was my Dad’s birthday, and I miss him and my Mom (and my former Father-in-law) a lot, I think*, and maybe that was hard to process and kept me awake.  That’s unconvincing, though.

I admit that, in some sense, I often “envy” my parents‒sometimes prosaically, as in admiring the fact that they all had lifelong, successful marriages, but often envying the fact that they are dead.  I’ve said sometimes, mainly to myself, that I want to go be with them, but that’s figurative language.  I don’t actually believe in an afterlife.  To visit them would require a time machine, or a memory that is even better and more concrete than mine is.  But I envy them that they no longer need to try.

I don’t consider death to be a state of rest exactly.  Death is simply oblivion, a final cessation, the end of whatever could experience either rest or toil.  A computer isn’t resting when its power is cut, it’s just off.  Actual rest has a rejuvenating quality, and that would be preferable to mere temporary (or permanent) oblivion.  Maybe if I was able to rest in that way, I wouldn’t feel the yearning for a more final solution.  I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep or relax or let go or rest, so at least oblivion seems like an escape.

It’s not an escape, of course, for escape implies a subject that is escaping, and death makes the subject simply cease to be.

It nevertheless often seems preferable to endless exhaustion without anything else in one’s life to provide a counterbalance.  At some point, there’s got to be a surrender to the notion that, while there will always be momentary fluctuations in the state of one’s well-being, the overall trend is showing no signs of upward movement and, if anything, is sloping downward.

What is one to do, then?  Seeking help, of course, is a major (and probably good) option, but the very thing I discuss in the footnote below seems to make seeking help extremely difficult.  It’s evidently impossible for me to convey to others my sense of true and horrifying (and yet horrifyingly bland) desperation.  I can’t even really grasp how to go about asking, or begging, for help, nor indeed to imagine what anyone is going to be able to do to help me.

I have certainly tried therapy and medications of many kinds, and meditation and self-hypnosis.  I’ve used the crisis hotline in its old and new forms‒once, that led to a very brief hospitalization.  I’ve even tried to find some comfort in religious notions, but the ideas one encounters there tend to be so staggeringly incoherent and manipulative that they make me feel even more depressed.

So, here I go again, “sendin’ out an SOS”, but there’s no one on patrol and certainly no search parties.

I think the worst thing would be if my own kids ceased to be “real” for me.  They are among the only people for whom I have a strong sense of existence, even when they aren’t near or around me.  I think about them every day.  But my son is still, in my head, the young boy with whom I last interacted about 10 years ago.  I’ve seen recent pictures of course, but that’s a form of him that I don’t know‒and I fear I never will.

My daughter is more updated, so to speak.  I interact with her somewhat regularly through texts and emails.  But though I dearly wish I could spend time with them again, I don’t have any idea what I would do if they suddenly came back into my life.  I have nothing‒I am nothing‒worth sharing with them.

Anyway, I got something like my usual three to four hours of (frequently interrupted) sleep last night, and I was still wide awake so early that I decided to take the first train of the day to the office.  And here I am, at the office, finishing this post.  I don’t work this weekend, so I guess I’ll bother you all again on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

*Though perhaps not in the way that most people seem to miss people, at least if you believe their words.  I think I’ve said before that, when I’m not with someone, literally, they don’t feel precisely real to me.  It’s not that I think they actually cease to exist‒I’m far from being such a solipsist.  It’s just that I don’t really feel them when they’re not around.  I can’t imagine what they might be doing, and it doesn’t occur to me to try.  The concept of them is out there, implicit, I suppose, but there’s no “theory of mind” simulacrum of the other person running in the background processes of my brain.  I’ve read some hypotheses that the concept of an afterlife may have arisen from people still having a model or sense or image of a person operating in their mind even after the person dies‒that it still feels to them that the person is present somewhere, somehow.  I don’t seem to function that way.  People are certainly very real to me, and when they’re in my presence they can even be overwhelming, with all their emotions and noise and everything battering away at me; they are all but impossible to ignore or not notice.  But then, when they are not present, they pretty much go away, other than intellectually.  I sometimes wish it were otherwise, but I’m not sure.  This may be part of why I have never wished I could somehow trade places with someone else.  Other people really are other to me, and it’s hard to “feel” them with any depth, though I can write people decently enough.  But then, in a sense, I am in their heads.

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Apologies in advance for the subject matter

I’m writing this at the office this morning, because I came in quite early.  I had a bad night, secondary‒apparently‒to having eaten something that didn’t really want to stay in my GI tract any longer than it absolutely had to, so I’m kind of wiped out.  I decided to take the most expeditious, if not most cost-effective, way in and just kind of take it easy here while waiting for the day to start officially.

I don’t expect I’ll make this post very long, and I’m probably not going to write it all in one sitting, because I feel very tired.  Probably I’ll intersperse it with a nap or two.  I seem a bit dehydrated and volume depleted after last night, but at least I have what appears to be an effective dose of Imodium in me, and that’s good.  It’s a very clever product:  an opioid that doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, so one doesn’t get high from it, and it has no real abuse potential*.  It is, however, particularly prone to produce one of the inevitable side-effects of opioids‒shutting down (or at least turning down) the motility of the GI tract.

So, I’m feeling a bit poorly on the physical level, and my mental level is blunted by a combination of worse sleep than usual and the loss of some of my fluids.  The latter are, at least, easily enough replaced.

The schedule for my coworker is more or less set now.  He will work next weekend, then he will take his trip on the following Monday through Wednesday, the ninth through the eleventh.  Unfortunately, I will be working the weekend of Friday the 13th (though, to be fair, I enjoy the day and its subsequent weekend, as I think I’ve mentioned) but the following Friday is a personally significant one‒though one that, in many ways, I had hoped not ever to see again.

Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that I have some more dangerous GI bug than seems to be the case‒I give this very low odds‒and that will take the whole situation out of my hands.  That would be okay, as I think I’ve said before.  In many ways, it would be nice to have something happen for which I could not, in practice, be blamed or held responsible.  It’s at least not too terribly painful.  In fact, it mostly is just slightly unpleasant but very fatiguing, in that I really want to try just to go back to sleep.  I think I will take a brief nap before finishing the first draft of this blog post.

***

Okay, I haven’t taken a nap yet, but I think I’m going to draw this to a close.  I don’t really have much to write about today.  I certainly don’t have much to say that’s new and/or interesting.  I apologize.  I would just add, by way of exculpation, that I really didn’t expect to be writing this now, today, or this last week, and so on.

Tomorrow begins October, which has often been my favorite month for various reasons.  Even in my current mental state, I can’t completely resist the appeal of the Month That Used to be the Eighth and Is Now the Tenth.  I’m hoping that the weather will soon begin to cool down a little, or at least to become a bit windier.  It would be nice to be able to walk without becoming more dehydrated than I am right now.

I guess I can tolerate my delays of time when I think of the fact that, though Frodo left Bag End on his birthday, he arrived at Rivendell on my birthday (which he rudely neglected to celebrate).  So perhaps the latter can make as decent a boundary point as the former.

Anyway, it’s all silly and pointless when you get right down to it.  In reality, every day is like every other, and the differences between them from a human point of view are trivial, arbitrary, and inconsequential.  Any day will do.

I hope you all have a good one.

*Except rarely, very desperate addicts to some forms of opioids‒so I have read‒will sometimes take ridiculous amounts of Imodium, sometimes ground up into a kind of milkshake, when they cannot get their drug of choice.  I can only imagine how constipated they must get.  Well, no, I can more than imagine it, because I’ve treated people with bowel obstruction/shutdown due to opioid abuse.  They’re often very skinny people, but their bellies are bloated and distended by way more digested and partially digested material than they were ever built to handle, but which cannot be expelled correctly because the whole GI nervous system has been stunned into somnolence.