Health

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.

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A somewhat more positive blog post. That may not be saying much, but take what you can get.

Well, it probably won’t surprise those of you who read my previous post to learn that I left the office early yesterday‒at lunchtime‒and came back to the house where, after eating a bit, I took a melatonin and half a Benadryl.  I’ll say this for that group of meds:  it was only a few minutes after taking them that I felt a strong pressure to sleep, and so I did.

Some of that may just be fulfillment of expectation, and I was, of course, very tired, but they are supposed to be rapidly dissolving melatonin tablets.  Benadryl never seems to act very quickly on me, so I hesitate to credit the fast onset of sleep to it.

I did wake up quite a lot during the night‒about like usual‒but at least the night was effectively longer, and I don’t mean that in the sense that it felt like it lasted a millennium, as I said yesterday about Monday night.  I mean that I was in bed for a good ten hours roughly, and that at least is something special.  I regret to have to inform you that my pain is only slightly abated, but with a bit of rest, at least it’s slightly easier to tolerate.

I’m writing this on my phone today, by the way, because there was no way in hell I was carrying anything I didn’t really need to carry when I left the office, and that meant no laptop computer.

I think I’m going to try to take just a melatonin in the evening tonight, to see if it works to help me drop off.  The fact that I still reawakened frequently throughout the night at least somewhat assuages my fear that I might oversleep if I take it.  I’m too tense about oversleeping anyway, so short of a general anaesthetic, I’m unlikely to sleep through my alarm.

That raises an interesting point for me.  I clearly have a sense of chronic tension, almost all the time.  I suppose it might be called an anxiety syndrome, but that never feels like quite the right term to me.  I don’t feel “anxious”, like I constantly want to run away, figuratively, but more that I’m constantly ready to fight.  Maybe that’s just an example of different people’s reactions to the same process‒the sympathetic nervous system function of fight or flight, which in me seems to tend powerfully toward “fight”.  Thus, in my song Breaking Me Down, I sing, “I always want to hit someone, but I never get in fights.”

I was strongly trained by my father not to get in fights unless it’s truly, absolutely necessary, and I think that’s good training.  But I always feel ready to fight (not necessarily physically, though that’s always an option).  I even keep weapons (nothing that can accidentally go off!) at my side when I sleep and in the office.

I know, that’s a bit weird.  It’s not that I actually expect to be attacked.  Of all the people I know in the office‒and most other places, really‒I am the one most likely to be inclined to violence, but I have always had exceptionally good impulse control.  I’m not even prone to act on wholesome impulses!  But if I need to get in a fight, I do want every advantage available.

In a sporting situation, fairness is important, but in “real life” I have no interest in fighting fairly.  A fair fight is one where you have a fifty percent chance of losing.  I want to bring that chance as close to zero as I can if things really matter.  I will cheat in any way I can if it’s a fight about something important, and I will feel that I have done right.  The leopard doesn’t offer its prey a head start if it can help it, nor does the prey wait until the leopard has a fair shot at it to run away.

Anyway, enough of that pseudo-macho stuff.  I just mean that, almost all the time, I feel defensive/semi-aggressive, though I strongly dislike getting in arguments (or fights, really), and even feel mortified and ashamed and self-hating if I make a heated comment online.  Sometimes I even feel nervous when I make a positive comment, as though I fear having to deal with anyone responding to me, even if that response is also positive.  It’s weird.  I suppose, to some extent, it’s probably simply the fact that I have always felt weird, like I’m crazy, like I don’t quite function like the people around me, even within my own family.  I think I’ve mentioned that here, before.

All that tension does wear you out, though, and if not tempered, or at least counter-balanced, by positive things, it can make life very unpleasant.  I’m not sure what to do about it, though.  Meditation can soften it, but as I’ve mentioned, meditation often seems to make my depression get worse.  That’s not much of an improvement, if at all.  So, I have my ongoing conundrum.

I don’t know, also, how much‒if at all‒that tension contributes to the worsening of my chronic pain.  It’s possible that it does a fair amount.

In any case, I would say that I probably have some version of chronic anxiety, but that it doesn’t present as what I would call “anxiety”.  I don’t feel worried or afraid, I just feel hostile and often even hateful.  If the Force were real and I had any affinity for it, I don’t see how I could avoid the Dark Side.

Anyway, I’m going in quite early to catch up on things I let go yesterday because I could not focus at all on anything important.  But this pain and this tension and this depression are really grinding me down, and I don’t know how much will and energy I have left.  I’m very, very, very tired.  Maybe if I use the melatonin every day, I’ll gradually feel at least a bit better.  Just because it’s not globally useful doesn’t mean it couldn’t help for certain people in certain circumstances.

If it doesn’t help, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I keep speaking (or writing) about giving up and dying, but I keep on trying to find solutions or at least palliatives to my physical and psychological difficulties.  And I keep retrying lots of things that have failed before, in a sort of desperation to do something, anything, to see if I can feel less unhealthy.  I’ve not had a lot of luck, but maybe I would have been worse without the various things I’ve tried.  There’s no way to know, since I can’t compare alternate realities.  There’s also no way to know that I might not have been better than I am if I hadn’t tried to combat my dysthymia and pain.

Oh, well.  I’m probably wasting my time and my efforts.  But, if anyone out there knows of any brilliant new ideas, please let me know…but remember, they should probably be truly new, or at least not cliché.  I’m a trained MD, and I’ve read about and tried a lot of things beyond even that extensive training and practice.

The world isn’t made for us, and certainly we were never born to be comfortable.  It’s the feelings of dissatisfaction that prod us to act to stay alive and to thrive and to reproduce.  That’s good engineering, like smoke detectors being hyper-sensitive and fire alarms being extra jarring.  But if the smoke alarm gets stuck in an active position, leaving the alarm always going, eventually you’re going to want to cut power to it, and to hell with the risk of fire.  And if you can’t shut it off no matter what, eventually, you’re either just going to deafen yourself completely or leave the house.

That’s metaphor, of course.

I hope you all have a good day.  If you’re able to get good nights’ sleeps regularly, please make sure not to take it for granted.  And have a nap in my name, if you can!  I know it does me no actual good, but somehow it seems like a nice idea.

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“…and the worms ate into his brain.”

It’s Tuesday morning.

It’s odd how a night can seem to last for a thousand years, and yet, nevertheless, the morning can come far too soon.  That’s the situation in which I find myself, today.  It’s nothing particularly new, but it has been a night that’s tending toward the bad tail of the bell curve, by which I mean, it was worse than most of my nights.

I keep wanting to write some form of the present tense, as in “it is” a worse night than most, because there has been no real boundary between last night and now.  My back and leg pain has been more or less continuous, and though my consciousness has been waxing and waning, there has been no real rest.

There’s a rather famous philosophical notion that, as far as one knows, after one has gone to sleep, when one wakes up, one might have died and been replaced during the night, and one could be a completely new being in the morning, with just some implanted memories from the person who came before.  Of course, this could also be true in any given waking moment, since all we know of our personal past is our memories of it, but there’s a definite feeling of continuity during a given day—sometimes there’s too much continuity—that is interrupted when we have a true night’s sleep.

Well, I definitely feel a rather strong continuity now with yesterday; I have no sense of having been significantly unconscious overnight, though I know I wasn’t fully conscious the whole time.  And now I have to go to work, where my only regular, pseudo-social interaction happens, but which also tends to make me stressed much more than it makes me feel good, mainly because of noise and irregular interruptions.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are many people at the office whom I like, and even one or two with whom I can have enjoyable conversations, at least about some things, though not about very much.  I know, it’s my own fault that I have no friends anymore.  And by “fault” I mean, I know that I am faulty.  I’m a bad product, a lemon.  Any sensible consumer protection agency probably would have demanded I be recalled to the factory if there were such a thing.  I was born with both cardiac and (apparently) neurological defects.  These things should have been covered under the warranty.

I know, I know, melodrama, right?  It’s curious that I express myself so over-much here in this blog.  Apparently, in person, I’m rather wooden, and don’t smile very much—though I get the impression that when I talk about music I like or about math or science or things of that nature, I light up a bit.  Certainly, I get more energetic.  And then people’s faces soon tend to glaze over and look either confused or bored or whatever.

I used to wake up with leg aches a lot when I was little.  I don’t know what the cause was, really; they used to think they were “growing pains” or something along those lines.  I just know they hurt an awful lot, and they often woke me up.  When I started having my “new” onset of pain—it turns out almost certainly to have been related to a back injury—as an adult, I thought that it was some kind of recrudescence of the problem I had as a kid.

I underwent all sorts of tests to see if there was a neurological/myological problem of chronic, perhaps congenital, nature.  I even went through electromyography, which is a lot like getting a protracted series of intramuscular injections in which the needle is just left in the large muscle group and then you’re told to flex the muscle while it’s in there.  I don’t recommend it as something fun to do, even if you think you’re something of a masochist, which I am not.

Anyway, they didn’t find anything like that, at least nothing obvious, and I eventually learned I had a seriously ruptured/torn L5-S1 disc, and ultimately had surgery on it.  To be fair, the surgery reduced my pain, but it clearly has not eliminated it.

Sorry, I know this is all boring and repetitive.  Such is life, though, isn’t it?  It’s boring and repetitive.  At least, it’s repetitive.  I guess when one has family and friends and loved ones, people with whom one can spend time doing nothing in particular in each other’s company, the repetitive doesn’t feel boring.  I’ve been in that situation before, and for long periods of time.  I had a good, close family, with good parents, brother, sister, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on.  I had friends growing up, in school, and in college.  I was married for fifteen years, and that wasn’t boring, certainly.  I had friends in med school and residency, and I had my kids.  That was all truly great and wonderful.

I am now tired and worn down, and quite alone/lonely, but I don’t necessarily want to want to die, though I often do feel that I want to die.  I want to want to live, which is not quite the same things as wanting to live, unfortunately.  I need help.

I feel like the narrator of the song Hey, you, asking if people can feel him, if they can touch him, if they would help him to carry the stone.  But, of course, it was only fantasy, as the song goes on to note.  The wall was too high, and no matter how he tried, he could not break free.  And so on (see above).

Pink Floyd does seem to resonate for me, and it has since I first started listening to them, especially their big four albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and of course, The Wall.  I’m clearly not alone in this, which is actually somewhat ironic. Isn’t it?

Oh, by the way, based on the way I save my blog posts in the computer, I’ve just realized that the day of the week for the current date is one day later than it was last year.  In other words, July 18th (today) is on a Tuesday this year and was on a Monday last year.  This means that every seven years it should come around to the same day, except that leap years make the cycle irregular.

It will be five or six years instead of seven between returns to a given day, depending on whether there is only one leap year embedded in the course or if there are two.  There can’t be more than two, because leap years are every four years, but there are only seven days in a week.  I guess that could mean, though, that it could be more than seven years before a return to the same day, if the year when one would be returning to it is a leap year, and then that day might be skipped over again, leading to a longer course of time between.  I could try to work out the potential maximum length of time between when one date falls on one day of the week next time, but I’m already getting bored of this.  In any case, in the long run, it ought to be on average that the date falls on the same day of the week one out of every seven years.

Except February 29th, of course.  There are more than seven years between any repeated day for February 29th.

Anyway, I’m going to go.  I’m in so much pain, despite what meds I have available, that I think I’ll call a Lyft or something to get to the train station.  I hate doing that, but I’m just worn out.  Also, it’s not as though I’m saving money for some possible, imagined future retirement; I don’t see how it’s possible that I have a future of significance.

I would like to have a future.  I would like someone, somewhere, to find me some kind of answers or help or something.  But that’s pretty unreasonable to ask of other people, all of whom have their own problems and pains and troubles.

I guess the show must go on, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

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“I thought you died alone a long, long time ago”

Happy Day of the Moon, everyone.

A weird thing happened when I began this blog post.  As I was trying to write a footnote to explain that by writing “Day of the Moon” I simply meant “Monday”, the little spell-checker in the footnote marked Monday as a misspelled word.  Now, I have in the past temporarily forgotten how to spell a common word, for causes unknown—the last time I clearly recall such an instance was when I could not for the life of me remember how to spell “sure” when I was a kid—but Monday?

I tried to figure out how I could have messed that up.  And when I right-clicked on the word all the options offered to replace it were French.  It turned out that somehow, the proofing language in that section of the post had flipped to French, and I had to reset it and start the post over.

That seems truly bizarre to me.  It’s not because of anything I did, at least nothing obvious, because I have never used French in writing anything, as far as I can recall.  I know only a very limited number of words in French.  Unlike many people, I don’t find it a particularly beautiful language, and the very fact that the French government tries strictly to control the language’s grammar and lexicon by law is frankly (Ha ha) laughable.

Anyway, that’s all a weird, contingent tangent* that had nothing to do with anything I was planning to write.  That’s okay, though, since I didn’t really have anything planned to write.  That’s how I usually begin these posts.  When I do deliberately try to write about something, it’s usually a subject that not many people seem interested in.

My post from last Thursday was a good example—when I pondered whether reality is more truly described by continuous functions or by stepwise changes iterated at such a minute level and in such short intervals that we, the macroscopic, cannot tell the difference between them and the truly continuous, and how one could tell the difference.  It seems like an interesting question to me, but I don’t appear to have anyone with whom to interact who has any particular thoughts about it, or has anything to add to the conversation.

I did talk to my sister on the phone last night (not about that subject), and that was really nice.  It’s hard to find the time to do it when we’re both available, so the frequency of those interactions has been lower than I wish, but then again, a great many things in the world are quite different from what I would wish them to be.

I took melatonin and Benadryl in the evening on both Friday and Saturday nights.  I don’t know how well it helped me rest—I certainly woke up several times during both nights, but at least on Saturday morning I let myself stay in bed, though awake, until comparatively late in the morning.

Last night was rough for sleep, mainly because I got spasms and pains alternating down first my right side from my lower back to my hip and knee and ankle and foot, then switching over to my left side a little later.  It’s rather maddening, but I’m probably “mad” anyway, so it’s not like it’s going to make me insane in any new or different way.  It will just pound away at the gravel that’s all that remains of any monolith of sanity I used to possess, until it’s eventually turned into sand.

Related to that pounding, a rather odd thing happened yesterday, or it seemed odd to me.  I often watch “reaction” videos, especially to songs that I like, because it’s neat to see someone apparently experiencing a piece of good music for the first time.  It’s almost (but not quite) like listening to a song with a friend who hasn’t heard it before.  Anyway, after the second or third one I watched, the YouTube algorithm offered me an actual song, not a reaction.  In this case it was the original, David Bowie version of The Man Who Sold the World, and I played it and sang along with it, then with Ashes to Ashes, then with Karma Police, by Radiohead.

The weird part was that, as I sang these songs—none of which are especially sad, though they’re not especially happy, either—I started to cry.  With each one, there were several places in the course of the song in which I had to catch myself and hold back tears and even sobs, and I’m not at all sure why.  I haven’t done any singing in quite a while, really, other than rare and brief moments, just as I’ve only played guitar once or twice in the last six months or so.  But I don’t know why it felt so horribly sad and despair-inducting to be singing.

I stopped playing songs after that.  It was too weird and disquieting; I’m not sure what it signifies, if anything.  But I do feel more sad and hopeless as time goes by.  This blog—in its current form, anyway—was meant in part to be a cry for help, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might have the desire and the ability to do or say something that would rescue or at least assist me out of my downward depression spiral and my thoroughly empty life, which is devoid of anything deeper than work “friends”, commuting, and YouTube videos.

I get the impression that people don’t think I’m savable, which I guess I can understand.  Or maybe I make arguments that are too convincing, or at least too persistent, about my own lack of hope, so much that people think they could never talk me out of despair.  Maybe they couldn’t.  Maybe talk isn’t what’s needed.  I certainly think I would need something more than just talk, but my judgement is far from sound.  Still, I really feel like I’m wasting time, more and more, if what I was doing was trying to ask for, or to seek, or to wish for, help.

As far as I can see, help is not forthcoming.  And while it may seem, from the other side of the blog post, that this is something with which I’m sanguine and of which I’m coldly accepting, this is not the case.  I am not quite dead yet, even internally.

Time’s been my way when I’ve rescued other people—actually, I’ve done it quite often, and I did it for quite a while.  Still, apparently there’s no counterbalance for my having saved other people’s lives and relieved other people’s suffering—or else maybe I’m even more reprehensible than I often feel I am.  Whatever the case, I don’t seem to be eliciting any assistance from anyone who can do much of anything.

Maybe I need to be in situation where there’s immediate danger to life and limb before I can actually get anyone to help me.  Maybe I just am not going to get any help.  I’m certainly not able to help myself.  I’ve been doing it and trying to do it for years or decades, depending on how you draw boundaries and define your terms.  I’m at the end of my psychological resources.  I’m also caught in some kind of mental block, where I can’t seem to reach out (directly) to anyone in any way, or to explain how badly I’m doing, or even to call 988, which I often want to do.  I just feel like I’d be wasting their time.

Anyway, that’s already too much for today.  I’m going to head to the bus stop.  Maybe something will happen on the way to work that will bring things to a head, and I’ll either get help or get gone.

Almost certainly that won’t be the case.

*Which might be a good name for a band.

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Something for the rag and bone man

It’s Friday morning, July 14th.  I strongly considered walking to the train station this morning to try to get back into that habit, since I’ve been sick this week, but then last night I had an especially horrible night’s sleep.  I think I got maybe an hour or an hour and a half total of sleep, not continuously, but spread out over the time between 10 and 3.  Now I feel surreal and slightly hallucinatory.  I really don’t even want to go into the office, but I’ve already missed one day this week (Monday), and I’m off this weekend, so I’ll try to trudge through today.

I don’t know what to do about this.  My sleep and other issues seem to be worsening, and it’s getting to the point where fewer and fewer things keep me wanting to do anything.  Most days, honestly, I half-wish I were dead, but today it’s more than half.  I’m so tired; I don’t know what to do.  But I’m not sleepy.

I think tonight, even though it gave me some trouble last time, I’m going to take one of those melatonin, as well as two Benadryl, just to see if it helps at all.  The research apparently shows that melatonin doesn’t do much other than to reset one’s sleep clock if one is off kilter, but maybe in some people—maybe in people with weird brains to begin with—it might help.  I don’t know.  Anyway, I don’t work tomorrow, so if I have a bad reaction and get a headache and all that, it won’t matter much.

It’s not as if I have any plans for Saturday.  I don’t see anyone or spend time with anyone, though I’m going to call my sister this weekend, and that’s a good thing.  I don’t go out or do anything interesting.  I’ve sort of half-decided I want to try to replace the inner tube in my bike and retry that again, maybe go for a ride.  That might be worth doing.  I have the necessary equipment, at least.  I don’t know if I’ll have the will to do it, but I’ll wait and see.

I had plans to talk about that second topic I raised at the end of yesterday’s lengthy post.  I’m referring here to my thought that, perhaps, having big jackpot lotteries and the like for people to play legally has actually done harm to the overall work ethic and productivity of the nation, because at least some people will console and delude themselves with the dream—and yes, it is a dream, since to a good, five-sigma approximation, no one wins the lottery—that they might get a windfall and never have to work again, and then they could get and have all the joys and comforts they envision.

I imagine—and this is conjectural—that when there is no lottery available, people can’t even dream of getting ahead or getting more comfortable other than through working hard and saving their money.

Like I mentioned yesterday, this is not something I would imagine is to blame for all, or even a lion’s share, of the diminishment of the middle class and the work ethic and whatnot.  There are many factors in the equation or the program or whatever you might call it that determines the economic and sociological structure and function of a society.

But I don’t think the lottery has been a good thing in any sense.  It doesn’t appear to have benefited public education at all, which was one of the things for which lotteries were supposed to raise money.  If anything, it might have given those in government an excuse to be able to cut some of the tax-based funding for education.

Certainly the public schools appear to have gone downhill even since I was in school, and I don’t think I’m just being a typical curmudgeon who thinks the younger generation is stupider than the youth of my generation were.  In fact, I don’t think they are stupider.  Probably they’re overall somewhat smarter—they certainly have less exposure to environmental lead than people did when I was a kid, and the general knowledge base of civilization has definitely increased.  But the education system in general appears to be much worse than it used to be, and what’s more troubling is that people seem not to care as much about education as in the past.  The respect for teachers and for schools and for getting an education in general seem to have declined significantly.

That doesn’t seem like a good way to run a society with an eye toward the future.  In fact, the future seems more and more bleak by the year.  Thankfully, of course, there are smart people out there, and some of them will be able to get educated in spite of the schools they attend, and when push comes to shove, these individuals will do their best to come up with new solutions to new and old problems, and they will carry the rest of the human infestation along with them, for better or for worse.

But if people in general were better educated—if they were taught even basic probability and statistics in high school, or even junior high, for instance—there would be much less of a market for con games such as state lotteries.  One sees people lining up almost every day in the convenience stores, spending absurd amounts of money (which they cannot afford) on slips of paper that they might as well use to blow their noses or wipe their asses.

I always told my patients that they should never make a special trip to buy a lottery ticket, because they were far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident on the way to the store than they were to win the jackpot.  I suspect this might be true even if they walk to the store, though at least then they would be getting exercise.  The odds of them getting injured are even greater than the odds of them getting killed, and in the USA, people with injuries that cause persistent diminishment of ability are going to have extra expenses and decreased productivity and lower quality of life for a long time, and our healthcare system is woefully inadequate.

And make no mistake, injuries that you have do cause chronic diminishment of your capacity—“you are still the victim of the accidents you leave”.

Nietzsche’s famous quote about “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is just a load of bullshit.  Remember, the man died of neurosyphilis, but syphilis doesn’t progress to the nervous system very rapidly.  It didn’t kill him quickly, but it certainly didn’t make him stronger, neither physically nor mentally.  Exercise, practice, education, deliberate self-improvement—these things can make one stronger.  Accident and injury don’t tend to do that.

Not to say that a person can’t find wisdom and lessons even from horrible events, but to do that, one needs to be primed to look for such lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I probably could go on and on and off on tangents of various kinds related to this.  It’s frustrating to see people make excuses for why they don’t think they need to worry about educating their children, and at the same time to see people wasting their money on absurd gambles.  Gambling is only a winning industry for those who own the casinos or the lotteries (if them).  It is true that a very good poker player can make a living at the game, but only if there are worse poker players against whom they can play.  It’s a zero sum game.  There are no lions unless there are hinds; there are no wolves unless there are sheep.

Better to get educated, because knowledge can be shared and gained without real loss to the sharer.  Information can be reproduced now at very low cost—lower than it’s ever been before.  Education can be a positive-sum game, a mutual exchange to mutual benefit, which is the type of interaction at the heart of any functioning, productive economy.  If you get smarter, it doesn’t make me stupider; indeed, it often makes me smarter by feedback, for if you learn or create some truly new knowledge, then I can subsequently learn it.  More knowledge, more information, can benefit everyone.

But I doubt that it will.  I don’t have high hopes for the vast majority of humans.  As David Deutsch has pointed out, it certainly seems possible for the future of humanity to be a cosmically significant one, in the long term.  But there’s nothing that guarantees it.  It can easily go wrong, and most times throughout history, the production of knowledge has gone wrong, and has ground to a halt for centuries at a time and more.

Oh, well.  I’m too tired to do much but feel pessimistic about everything, anyway.  This blog is the closest thing to contribution to society that I do anymore.  I don’t know that it does me any good, though.

Anyway, I’m off to head to the train station now, for another depressing day of pretending that there is any point at all to continuing to strive to make a living.  I hope you all feel better, or at least better rested, than I do.

karloff-monster so tired

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

Well, it’s Wednesday morning now, as one might expect, if one lives life linearly and ordinally, which is how I do it.  I’m writing this on my little laptop computer today, because my thumbs have been getting sore from the use of the smartphone for blogging—more precisely, the base of my thumbs and my first MCP joints on both sides hurt quite a bit.  Also, I just type faster on the laptop, and It’s easier for me to express myself, though why I ever bother doing that is not quite entirely clear to me.

I feel pretty rotten still—physically, I mean.  I still have body aches and soreness and weakness (or at least asthenia) and a general feeling of being slightly breathless.  I still had a very low-grade fever as of last night, but I checked my oxygen, which was 95-96% saturation, occasionally pushing up to 97%, and my pulse rate was in the high-90s to low 100s, a bit variable with respiration.  That’s actually slightly low for me.  All my life I’ve tended to have a rapid pulse, possibly related to the atrial septal defect with which I was born, which can affect the heart’s inherent pacemaker and conduction system because of its location.

Apparently, the average number of heartbeats in a lifetime for a human (or closely related alien) is about 3 billion.  This is more than that of most mammals, which hover a little below two-thirds that many, if memory serves.  That number is roughly consistent from shrews to blue whales.  Geoffrey West discusses some of this in his book Scale, which is really interesting, and I recommend it.  As for me, I haven’t read anything in over a week, really, other than a few blog posts.

I just did a quick calculation regarding my chronic, diagnosed “sinus tachycardia”*.  If my average heart rate were 110—which my pulse can hover near, at least some of the time—I should have lived to about 51.8 years.  I’m already slightly past that, but within the realm of rough experimental error.  If 105 were closer to my average, my expected lifespan would be about 54.3 years, which would mean I have less than a year to go.  I figured the first number by dividing 3 billion by 110, then by 60, then by 24, then by 365.25.  I then did the second one by replacing the 110 with 105 and repeating the whole thing, but it occurs to me that I could just have taken 51.8 x 110/105 and gotten the same answer more easily.

So, basically, if my pulse has been steadily tachycardic—which I can only infer roughly based on the moments in which I’ve actually measured it, since I obviously didn’t measure it in between—then I’ve already lived just about as many heartbeats as I’m expected to live, on average.

Of course, there are some big “ifs” there.  There have certainly been times when I’ve been more fit, and that has tended to slow my resting heart rate somewhat.  Also, let’s not be too quasi-mystical about all this; it’s not as though there is some ethereal hourglass that measures out not seconds but heartbeats in the platonic space of life and death.  It’s just a rough average.

If the world is deterministic, then of course, one does, in a sense, have a pre-programmed number of heartbeats before one dies, but there’s nothing about that number that would determine the length of one’s life; it would, indeed, be a consequence of the various things that determine the length of one’s life, just as would the length of that life in seconds.  It wouldn’t be a dispositive fact, merely an epiphenomenon.  It would be casual rather than causal, one might say.

This is all a bit silly, but in many ways it’s reassuring to me that, just maybe, I really have come to what will be the natural end of my expected life.  I’ve read that people on the autism spectrum have shorter expected lifespans than people not on the spectrum (the range is wide, apparently anywhere from 36 to 61 years, which seems pretty imprecise) supposedly largely due to the various difficulties with self-care and social support and the like.

One reads plenty of reported evidence that a key determinant of a long and “happy” life is the degree of one’s social support network—not necessarily its size, but certainly its quality.  Well, when one of the fundamental aspects of a dysfunction is difficulty with ordinary social communication and connection, one can expect a group to tend to have a poorer social support network and ability to self-advocate.  And, of course, the three major proximate causes of death are apparently—according to a quick Bing search—epilepsy, heart disease, and suicide.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of epilepsy.  I do have a cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, which was discovered by chance on an MRI done for other reasons.  It’s a benign finding, in and of itself, but it turns out to be slightly more common in people with ASD (the neurologic one, not the cardiac one) as does ASD itself (the cardiac one, this time, which I also had).

So, I do/did have at least one form of heart disease, though I don’t know whether it counts in the measure of what they’re describing as such causes.  I think the third thing in the list is by far the most likely cause of premature death for me, if “premature” is really the right word.  After all, my “social support network” is locally all but nonexistent, and is very limited on a distant scale.

Of course, sleep disorders—also apparently very prevalent in those “on the spectrum”—are significant impediments to a long and happy life for anyone, and my sleep has been disordered for a very long time.  As a case in point, yesterday I was so physically wiped out from work and feeling ill that I just took a ride from the train station to the house and tried just to shut off the light, take half a Benadryl, and go to sleep.  Then—to no one’s surprise, but to my frustration—I could not get to sleep until after midnight, and then I started waking up by no later than two in the morning, awakening on and off every ten to twenty minutes until finally there was no point in delaying anymore.

I don’t know why I’m discussing all this trivia.  Maybe I’m just to try to get the message out that, if I do die “young”** in the near-future, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, you shouldn’t think of it as something sad, as some kind of tragedy.  My life is pathetically empty, and rather unpleasant most of the time.

I would never say there aren’t people who have it much worse than I do.  Of course there are.  That will almost certainly always be true, by any set of criteria one might choose.  It’s also irrelevant.  There are people who die young who, based on the quality of their lives, would have been better off having died even younger.  And there are those who live very long lives who still could have lived even longer with great happiness and well-being, and so even after a century, such a death could be considered premature by some criteria.  Futility is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I’m dragging this out, as I tend to do.  I just feel very tired, and very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any particular joy, or prospect of future joy, that makes me want to keep going and live longer.  I’m lonely and sad and uncomfortable and awkward and weird, living in a world in which I feel like an alien or a changeling or a mutant, or whatever.

Well, lets call that good for now, so to speak.  I’m going to get a Lyft to the train again today, because I’ve taken longer than I’d like to catch the bus, and anyway, I’m still just wiped out.  I’m going to try to time the train I take so that I get to my destination after the nearest CVS is open, so I can pick up some cold medicine***.  Maybe a decongestant will help me feel like I can breathe a little better.  Who knows?  But I need to do the payroll today, so at least it might help me stay awake for the time being, even if the decongestant effect doesn’t make much difference.  After that, I don’t think it really matters much.

*Nothing to do with the sinuses in one’s head, but with the sino-atrial node in the heart, the intrinsic pacemaker.  It means that one has a fast heart rate—tachycardia—but that its origin is at the usual source of the heartbeat.  It’s not an aberrant source or a reentrant tachycardia such as might occur when the conduction system of the heart develops a loop that keeps feeding rapidly back into itself and generating a truly and significantly over-fast heartbeat.  That can degenerate into more dangerous arrhythmias, whereas sinus tachycardia does not tend to do so.

**Scare quotes added because I do not feel young in almost any way, other than, perhaps, my ability to remain curious about various things in a way that seems unusual in other people somehow.  Many days I feel as if I’ve lived for centuries, but not in a cool, Anne Rice vampire kind of way.  Rather, I feel more like a mortal who has kept one of the Great Rings.  I’ve discussed that metaphor before and won’t bother going into it now.

***I did time it correctly, and the CVS was open…but the pharmacy was not, and will not be until 9 am.  Unfortunately, one cannot get real Sudafed—the decongestant that actually works without causing dangerous elevations in blood pressure—except at the pharmacy counter, and only in limited amounts, because some people have used it to make amphetamines.

This is a truly absurd and sub-moronic standard.  It’s harder for a law-abiding citizen in Florida to get a product containing pseudoephedrine than it is to get a gun, and all so the state can prevent a small minority of people from willingly taking a substance into their own bodies that no one is forcing them to use, just as some other people use beer or potato chips or Big Macs or ice cream…or tobacco.

And, of course, they aren’t actually preventing anything.  If they wanted to prevent drug use, they’d have to try to find out why life is bleak and empty enough for some people that they seek artificial sources of transient mood elevation (even though those sources are dangerous) and perhaps try to remedy or at least remediate the causes.  But, no, the same sort of people who would decry government overreach if corporate or upper-echelon income taxes were raised slightly, or if the government tried to ensure that people are vaccinated to curtail the spread of actual contagion to millions, and who would take up arms in open rebellion against any attempt to restrict gun ownership at any level, are willing to have the state keep people from using a comparatively safe medication for congestion and force them to use more dangerous ones—like oxymetazoline, which I am going to have to use, today.

The law truly is “a ass” and “a idiot”, and it’s written by people who are—and who are voted into power by—cretins and troglodytes who cannot even comprehend the nature of and the science behind the comforts and technologies which keep them alive and relatively safe.  If any readers here have any influence in this particular issue, please try to do something about it.  If necessary, just burn it all—the whole stupid planet—and let nature start over in some new state.  There are still a billion or so habitable years on Earth in which hopefully to bring an actually intelligent species into existence for the first time.

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“I wonder why I’m shivering in such infernal heat.”

Happy Tuesday, everyone.  I guess this is, traditionally, the day of Mars, since the Spanish word for the day is “Martes”, which I think harkens back to the Latin name for the god of war (Mars…duh).

At times, I find it strange that there even ever was a god of war (mythically, I mean‒I know that there never was an actual god of war).  I guess, given the human race, it shouldn’t really surprise me.  Heck, I’ve even been led to understand that the good ol’ god o’ Abraham was originally a war god, but I have less provenance for that conclusion, so take it with a pillar of salt.

Incidentally, it’s also 7-11 in the American dating system, and that’s mildly amusing, given the name of the ubiquitous, quintessential “convenience store”.

As you might have noticed, I did not write a blog post yesterday.  Unfortunately, that’s not because I was dead, in case you were wondering.  I suspect death is, if not pleasant, at least not as unpleasant as the way I felt yesterday and the few days before (and is much how I feel today, though somewhat less so).

I started feeling ill on Saturday during the day, with that general achy soreness one feels when fighting an infection.  Then by Sunday I started having a modest fever, and yesterday I was just wiped out and in pain and my back pain was also acting up worse than usual.

I still don’t feel great today, but I need to go into the office before too much stuff gets backed up with which for me up to catch.  I’m not completely sure about the grammar of that last sentence, but I think you probably get my meaning.  I suppose it doesn’t much matter.

Anyway, I’m still under the weather, but I don’t have any symptoms that suggest contagion, so I’m going in.  I may have some low-level bacterial infection somewhere, but if so, it’s difficult to tell where without more localizing symptoms.  I suppose it’s possible I could have an infection in and around the hardware in my lower back, but I would expect the character of my back pain to change at least subtly in such a case, and it has not.

Maybe I just overdid things with my walking in the morning last week‒if my calculations are correct, I walked about 40 miles total, and in the reputedly hottest week on record, or something along those lines.  Maybe I just overexerted myself enough on too short notice to have given my body time to adjust.

If that’s the case, I may regret taking the days off yesterday and the day before.  But then again, it would be rather disappointing to walk myself into oblivion just locally.  How drab and dreary that would be.

I suppose, in a sense, such a thing would be appropriate for me.

So, all that and other lifestyle changes may have affected my resistance to some ailment, and maybe I’ve just been fighting some low-level virus or something.  If so, it doesn’t seem to be too horrible a one, or at least it’s not acutely too virulent.

It’s a bit sad to think, but I probably will die alone, when it happens.  Of course, in a sense, everyone dies alone.  Even if you die at the same time as lots of other people, perhaps in some massive catastrophe, you die alone, since it’s not as though you can share the experience with anyone else.

Of course, by that logic, everyone lives alone too.  But maybe that’s just an impression formed by someone who is probably on the autism spectrum and who has gone through a series of reversals* that have left him sundered, at least physically, from the people with whom he used to be able to connect.

Anyway, the point I guess I’m making is that there is something non-futile, or so it seems to me, in dying with your loved ones nearby, for you and sometimes even for them.  I was very disheartened to have arrived too late for my final visit with my father, and could only say goodbye to him after he had died.  I was at least there for my mother’s final day or so, and I think she was aware that I had come.  She was quite out of it, but she interacted with me some.  I tried to start reading The Chasm and the Collision to her, which I had just published not long before…I think.  My recollection may be faulty here.  I have the impression that she just missed reading that, and I think it would have been her favorite of my books.

I don’t think I would have wanted my parents ever to read Unanimity.  It’s just too dark.

I think I may take an Uber to the train this morning.  It’s a bad habit, I know, but I’m still a little wiped, and the prospect of walking to the bus and then from the bus to the train is mildly unpleasant.  If so, I’d better leave soon.  I may write more of this once I get there.

And that’s what I’m doing, just for a short while.  I don’t want to make the post too long, but I figured I’ll let you all know that I got to the train station, and that I even got on an earlier train than I was expecting given that fact, because that earlier train was running late.  That’s a slightly amusing bit of irony, I think.  But I have a weird sense of humor.

Anyway, I’m glad I took the Lyft (not an Uber; my apologies to the branding and marketing people at Lyft) because even walking down the stairs from the bridge over the tracks kind of wiped me out and made me feel a bit breathless.  I wonder if I could have a low-grade lower respiratory infection without having a cough.  It does happen.  A low enough respiratory infection often doesn’t trigger the cough reflex; that tends to involve the upper airways.

Oh, well, who cares?  I’m probably fine, and if I’m not, well, it’s not the worst thing that could happen.  The only people really relying on me are doing so for business purposes, and those purposes can all be fairly easily adjusted.  I’m certainly not crucial or essential for anyone or anything.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I have over a thousand words of gibberish down so far, written on my phone.  I think for tomorrow I’ll try to remember to bring the laptop with me; my thumbs are getting sore.

Again, I hope you all have a happy “day of the god of war”, contradictory though that may seem.  Contradictions can be okay.  And at the same time, they can’t actually exist; they can only be spoken (or written, etc.) they can never be instantiated.

*I suppose it must have been an odd number of reversals, since an even number would have left me going in the original direction, and that’s clearly not the case.

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I’m not tiptoeing but I’m walking a fair amount

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station, having timed my walk nicely to make me just miss the 6:10 train, so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to try to rush to catch it.  When I saw it arrive at the station, which I did, I was a bit too far away to have been able to catch it even had I sprinted.  So, my timing was good.

I’ve been walking to the station every morning this week, including yesterday*, which means that, as of now, I’ve walked roughly thirty miles since Saturday.  That’s no world record or anything, of course—a person in excellent condition could probably walk about thirty miles a day, if that were all they were doing, leaving plenty of time for rest breaks and sleep.  But it’s an improvement for me, at least.  Though I’ve had to adjust my wardrobe, bringing a full change of clothes with me, because by the time I get to the office, I look as though I’ve been swimming, I’ve sweated** so much.  As I think I mentioned before, I carry those little “scent bomb” sprays so I don’t offend anyone around me with my smell, and I’m reliably told that, at least in the short term, my sweat doesn’t actually smell too bad, which is not exactly high praise.

I changed the high E-string on my black Strat on Monday afternoon***, and I even played a little after that.  Nothing serious, it was just nice to hear the sound of the new string, and it was good to feel the stupid sense of pride in accomplishment in having changed it.  That’s rather pathetic, but I guess that should surprise no one, least of all me.

I’ve been wearing bilateral spandex supports both on my knees and my ankles, as I think I mentioned earlier this week.  This seems to be helping to minimize the degree to which the walking exacerbates my back pain, which is a hugely important consideration.  The fact that it helps also raises questions about the specific things that have caused the triggering of worsening back pain at other times when I did not use bilateral supports.

I’m not using back supports, of course—when I was first dealing with my back problems, I rapidly concluded that back braces are worse than useless, at least for me.  But certainly, having a side-to-side differential in the way one walks can produce an irregular torque on one’s lower back that could easily stimulate worsening pain, especially when repeated over a five to six mile walk, which is, after all, about 13,000 steps.

Anyway, that’s about all that’s going on with me.  I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday yesterday, other than to write my related post and to get off work early.  I didn’t sleep particularly well, even for me, because I kept waking up throughout the night thinking that someone was knocking at my door, only to realize quickly that it was just the sound of moderately distant fireworks going off.  There were even people still setting off fireworks when I got up this morning and when I was walking to the train station.

I remember when I was very young that fireworks and related loud noises terrified me horribly, or maybe not so much terrified as just elicited a profound displeasure.  Some of my earliest memories are of being overwhelmed by the noise of fireworks, and of having to be carried (screaming) out of the showing of The Three Caballeros cartoon at Disney World once they started shooting their guns.  I’m still not a big fan of noise, especially chaotic noise (though I like fireworks now for their appearance), and if it were not for the fact that I love music, I think I would happily try to make myself deaf.

Of course, I am enjoying listening to podcasts and audio books while walking, so I would lose that if I were deaf, but it’s not as though such things are crucial.  On Saturday, during my 6.7 mile walk back from the movie theater, I didn’t listen to anything, and that wasn’t a problem.  In fact, thinking back to my above comment about someone walking thirty miles a day, I don’t see how one could listen to something for such a long time without their battery running out quite early in the process.  Walking thirty miles has to take on the order of ten hours (or more), and I’m not sure that anyone’s cell phone could play e-books or podcasts or music for that long, or even close.

Maybe silence is just better.

Anyway, it’s never truly silent, because I’m always listening to tinnitus in my right ear.  But that’s just one of those things.  Even if I were to develop full hearing loss I might still have that tinnitus, like an amputee with phantom limb pain.  If that were the only sound, and I didn’t hear all the stupid noise of people talking at the office and so on, I think it might be worth it.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I don’t think I’ve said or written anything of any use to anyone, but that’s pretty much par for the course for me.  I’m not looking forward to work today, nor am I looking forward to leaving work at the end of the day, nor to much of anything else.

I hope you feel otherwise than I do, though.  I wouldn’t want to try to convince anyone else to feel dysthymic or depressed or to be in despair.  I don’t admire foolish or delusional optimism, of course, but reasonable positivity is hard to denigrate if one is being honest.  I wish I were built to be that way, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case, though it can be quite irritating when one feels rotten.

Oh, well.  There’s no place to ask for a refund or replacement for the suboptimal product that I am.  All I can do is lodge my complaint, as I’m doing here, in case someone out there might be able to fix me, or at least so that no one out there is too surprised if I finally succumb to my mental issues, which could happen pretty much any day, honestly.  I’m more or less always seriously mentally uncomfortable, and it wears me out, and there’s really nothing happening in my life that compensates for it.

I want rest, or at least I want oblivion.  I guess we all have that waiting at some point.

*We worked yesterday for half a day, in case I didn’t mention that during my post.

**That doesn’t feel like a proper word.  The past tense of “sweat” feels like it should be just “sweat”.  However, Word’s spell-checking function is not highlighting “sweated”, so that probably means it’s the standard past tense of that verb.  Weird.

***That was the string I broke when I kicked the guitar in intense frustration (not related to the guitar) a few weeks or so earlier.  I tend to take my frustration out on things that I’ve created or that are important to me, largely because I feel that I have a right to do so, but also because I tend to direct my anger inwardly.  Whenever I get angry, I tend to divert much of it to myself in response to the simple fact that I’ve allowed myself to be angry.  It makes me feel pathetic and weak and that I’m a horrible person.  So I’ll tear up music that I’ve written, or drawings, or other similar personal expressions of creativity, and if I can’t do that, I’ll break things that have some importance to me, and if that doesn’t work, I may just directly hurt myself.  Of course, in kicking the Strat, I covered both of the latter—my right big toe was almost certainly fractured, because it’s still sore even weeks later.  That’s okay.  Fractured toes are just things that need time to heal (not heel).

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Viewing, walking, carrying, and planning

Well, it’s Monday again, the start of a new work week and also the first blog post of a new month.  It’s also what I refer to as Independence Eve (in the US).  Why not?  We have Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.  Why not an “Eve” for the national holiday celebrating the official founding of the country?  I encourage you all the read (or reread) the Declaration of Independence tomorrow.  It’s not very long.

I’m writing this post at the train station for the moment, though I will probably be finishing it on the train, or even at the office, since there are only about eight minutes until the arrival of the next train.  The reason for all this will become clear shortly, for those who are interested.

It was a relatively eventful weekend for me.  I decided to force myself to go to the movie theater* on Saturday morning for a matinee showing (not to be confused with a manatee showing) of The Guardians of the Galaxy 3.  I allowed myself to do this—or negotiated it and gave myself added incentive, since I wasn’t exactly keen on going to the theater per se—on the agreement that I would have some movie theater popcorn while there**, and then would walk back to the house after the movie (I took an Uber to get there…I thought it would be unkind to arrive at the theater sweaty, in case it was crowded).

I did do that walk, about 6.7 miles, in the afternoon heat and humidity of south Florida.  It was not easy, but that wasn’t unexpected.  I did take two twenty-ish minute breaks, one at a bus stop and one in a very lovely little park, where I meditated a bit in the shade to relax.  That was useful both because of the heat and the walking and because of the stress of having gone to the theater.

I enjoyed the movie, but even though there was very low attendance, I still had to deal with someone sitting in my assigned/purchased seat.  As if I need that kind of trouble.  The person/family was gracious about moving, but I don’t understand why it should have been an issue!  In modern movie theaters, the seats are assigned.  Why would one sit in any seat other than the one for which one had paid?

So, I felt very tense and stressed out by even the modest number of people around me at the movie, but at least while the movie was playing I was fine.  I even laughed out loud two or three times, since it was a funny movie.  I also thought that the guy playing the High Evolutionary looked really familiar, and then last night while re-watching a video of clips about how “The 11th Doctor is a Bad-ass”, I realized that the actor who played the High Evolutionary had played a secret service agent in Doctor Who series 6 episodes 1 and 2 (The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon).  I didn’t just trust myself, though I was fairly convinced, but I looked the actor up on IMDB, and confirmed it.

That’s kind of fun.  He was excellent in his role as the HE, and that should at least help encourage actors who are, at present, in supporting or even “background” roles.  Of course, Karen Gillan had major roles in both things, but she herself had also appeared previously in the 4th series of Doctor Who (The Fires of Pompeii) in truly a bit part, where she was so heavily made up that you wouldn’t recognize her if you didn’t know it was she***.

Anyway, it was a hell of a walk back from the theater, but my choice of boots seems to have been quite good, and I wore knee and ankle spandex supports on both sides, and I think that helped make sure I didn’t have too much of a problem with recovery.  I took it comparatively easy on Sunday (my laundry day, in any case), but overall I still walked about four miles total over the course of the day.  Then, this morning, I’ve already walked to the train station, which is about five miles, and I have another mile to walk from the station to the office.  So, I’m getting a fair amount of walking in since the start of July.

I want to get to the point where I can walk more or less indefinitely, because I have a challenge I dream of undertaking, at which I would either succeed or die trying.  I’ve mentioned it before, though I don’t recall how much detail I gave, and I won’t go too much into it now, but I will say that part of my walking yesterday involved going to buy some groceries—not many, but some—and bringing a hiking-type backpack to carry them, in order to test it out.  I’m pleased to say that it worked very nicely—if anything, it’s better and easier than my day-to-day backpack, which I guess makes sense, since it’s meant for carrying rather significant amounts of weight in challenging circumstances.

Supposedly, exercise such as walking is supposed to be beneficial for depression.  I’m not so sure it’s the case with me.  In the past, I usually only exercised thoroughly (which I often did) when I had already been recovering from depression.  It seems very clear, in my case, that the exercise was a consequence of the abating depression, not its cause, because I’ve long since been in the habit of exercising, and even now, at my worst, I still do dips and pull-ups and things five to six days a week.  Anyway, if I can push myself to walk and walk and go longer distances and maybe even undertake a great challenge, such as I have in mind, I might either succeed at treating—and maybe even curing—my depression, or otherwise, perhaps, at dying in the process.

Of course, it has not escaped my notice that I might succeed at treating my depression and then end up mortally harming myself.  That wouldn’t be so horrible.  I enjoy irony like that, and it wouldn’t trouble me to die ironically—or, at least it wouldn’t trouble me any worse than would dying in most other possible ways.  In any case, I think it’s almost certainly better to die while wanting to live than to live while wanting to die.

*I don’t think I’ll go the movies alone again in this life.  It’s just not enough fun to warrant the stress.

**I wanted to put Goobers® or Reese’s Pieces® in the popcorn, which was my personal tradition for movie theater popcorn, but alas, they did not have either of those candies available.  I was forced to make do with peanut M&Ms®, which is a worthy candy but, unfortunately, just not quite the same.  I did have a nice, “small” Mug® root beer, though.

***That’s the same episode in which Peter Capaldi first appeared in Doctor Who before returning as the 12th Doctor.

by

“Don’t think I need anything at all.”

“No, don’t think I need anything at all.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and this morning I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer, which at the moment of writing this sentence is, in fact, resting atop some form of my actual lap.  Actually, it’s more on my right thigh and lower left leg, the latter of which is crossed over the former in what’s sometimes called a “figure four” posture, rather than being a true, traditional “lap”, like you might find in Lapland (presumably at discount prices).  Unfortunately, though useful, that figure four posture puts strain on my left knee—at least if it’s in any kind of sore state, which it is at the moment—so I’m probably going to have to switch that out.

I’m really tired, even for me.

I’m tired of trying.  I feel that I’ve been trying hard all my life, and in many objective senses, I honestly have.

I was never a slacker in school.  I graduated with all “As”, I was class valedictorian, I was a National Merit Scholar, all that bullshit.  I got a full ride scholarship to Cornell, without having anyone with any kind of real background knowledge or connections about how to apply to a high-level university or anything.  We certainly had no “connections”.

Anyway, you all know all that stuff:  blue collar town, scholarship to college, heart defect discovered and heart surgery done during my first summer of college, significant mood and (temporary) cognitive side-effects from open-heart surgery, leading to switched major.

Graduated with honors*, had a temporary (but severe) estrangement from my parents** due to issues involving my now-ex-wife.  Was administratively discharged from the Navy for health reasons related to the heart defect and also to my mood disorder.  Was not able, at that age, to finish my novel-in-progress, and so decided to go to medical school.  Got the distribution requirements easily enough, went to medical school on a partial scholarship, had some pretty bad trouble with mood disorder during third year or so.  Did residency, had kids, moved to Florida to start practice.

Had a back injury, with consequent chronic pain, worsening mood disorder, divorce, “temporary disability”.  Tried to do at least part-time medical work to help other people with chronic pain, but was not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to certain things that are beyond the straightforward (i.e., trying to help people with chronic pain but not realizing that some people—some patients and people with whom I worked, as well as the State itself—had ulterior motives of one kind or another) and thus not even recognizing that there was a chance that I could be arrested or charged with anything, since I wasn’t trying to do anything wrong…I was just doing what I saw as the essence of my job (trying to relieve suffering), and had no desire even for personal enrichment.  Seriously.  I gave away most of what I made to other people.  I’ve done that a lot, and consistently, throughout much of my life.

I’m stupid that way.

Then, of course, I went to jail and prison, and I haven’t seen my kids in over ten years.  I haven’t spoken (in any sense) with my son in that time***.  I’m still in chronic pain, my mood disorder is as bad as ever or worse, and I’ve recently discovered that I’m possibly/probably on the autism spectrum, which would explain a lot of my not understanding or expecting the issues that led me to be arrested, among other things.

It probably also explains part of why I had so much trouble with (for instance) dictating charts after I went into private practice.  I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that last bit here, but that was a nightmare for me.  I had the most horrible time trying to dictate chart notes, and always ended up getting backed up—a lot—no matter where I was in practice.  It seems all the other doctors and everybody just loved dictating charts; they thought it was so much easier than writing.  For me it was like trying to build a sand castle using knitting needles.  But I didn’t understand why I had so much trouble with it, I thought I was just being lazy or weak or something, and I just had to force myself to learn to do better, so I kept on trying, and I kept on getting backed up (severely) over and over again.

It’s a stupid idea, anyway.  Writing and speaking are two different kinds of processes, and organization and recording of medical notes is better done in writing.  Also, that way there’s also not delay in getting the notes into the chart.  I couldn’t speak and say the things I’m writing here with anything approaching the speed and clarity with which I am typing them.

Nowadays, I think most medical charting is done using portable computers, which—if the system is good—is probably an excellent option.

Anyway, all that leads up to now, when I’m living alone in a single room (with attached shower/bathroom), in a house that is not my home, working at a job that I’ve worked at basically just to keep myself alive and fed while writing fiction…but now I’m no longer writing fiction, I’m no longer doing music, I’m no longer doing anything apart from this blog.

Tomorrow would have been my 32nd wedding anniversary.  Though I’ve been divorced longer than I was married, it’s still an important, or at least consequential, day to me, though I’m guessing it isn’t as important to my ex-wife.  I don’t know, I think I’m a member of a species that mates for life to a single mate (though clearly that was not the case for her).  I certainly have no desire to get romantically involved with anyone else ever again—it’s not worth the risk.  I also can’t imagine anyone wanting to get involved with me.  The few minor attempts I made after my divorce were laughably bad.

There’s nothing good coming down the pike.

And no one is going to help me, I’m pretty sure of that.  I’ve sent out coded and not-so-coded distress signals, here and elsewhere, over and over again, in various ways, some of which are perhaps opaque, but others of which I think are rather obvious.  Maybe it’s just a case of some form of “the bystander effect”, I don’t know.

I’ve tried to do therapy again**** (online this time), with limited and very temporary effects, and I’ve called 988 and spoken to the very lovely person who was there—they deserve all the plaudits and support they can be given.  (I’ve tried to call it more than once, the first occasion of which involved a misadventure due to T-Mobile’s bad service at the time).

It’s all ultimately not getting me anywhere.  I’m not accomplishing anything or contributing anymore to the net worth of civilization.  I’m certainly not contributing to my own well-being, because I don’t think that even exists.  I’m just adding my little, inconsequential bit of entropy to the eventual (probable) heat death of the universe.

I need to die.  I’m just having a hard time working up the nerve to do it.  I wish I had a drug or alcohol problem, because the use of those is associated with higher rates of suicide, and even “accidental” overdose death, but I don’t seem prone to such things.  I have large bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen and naproxen that I could take, but such means are unreliable, and the process tends to be quite drawn out.  I don’t own any guns anymore.  I did buy two helium tanks and a non-rebreather mask and tubing, but setting that up and applying it turned out to be difficult, and I didn’t have a good place to do it.  I hate the idea of leaving a mess for innocent people, though that may be unavoidable.  That’s also the main reason for not just cutting various arteries open after ensuring that I’m adequately anticoagulated—I’m not afraid of blood (and I’m demonstrably not afraid of cutting myself), but I know other people are, and I don’t really want to traumatize others more than I already have in my life, if I can help it.

I had a rather strong bourbon and diet-Pepsi last night; alcohol is supposed to help one harm oneself, but it’s just made me feel more tired today than usual because of worse-than-usual sleep.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I don’t know if or what I’ll write after this.  I hope the rest of you are feeling better than I am.

*After initially missing the deadline for my honors thesis, thinking it was due a month later than it was, and having to write the whole thing—52 pages!—in one weekend.  I might have gotten more than a basic cum laude if I’d been better able to manage deadlines and all that, but it was never my own idea to try for honors, anyway.  Not that I regret it, but it was not my ambition.

**And more indirectly, in consequence, with the rest of my family, since they were caught between.  I feel very bad about that, and about the time I missed with them and my parents, all over someone who left me in the end.

***His choice, not mine.  We have exchanged one email in that time, and he sends along his thanks via his sister for birthday presents and the like.  He’s a good person, and I love him and am proud of him and do not blame him.  He’s not much better at dealing with things like this and with other people and with radical changes of circumstance than I am, and I think he was badly hurt by everything that happened.

****I’ve gone to at least four or five therapists, and I’ve even been (very briefly) hospitalized once for depression while I was out on bail.  I’ve tried at least seven different anti-depressants with mixed results, at best.  And here I am.