Health

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Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky…

It’s Tuesday morning, and instead of sitting at the train station, I’m sitting at the bus stop.  It’s been quite rainy out, and after riding my bike back to the house from the train station yesterday afternoon in a non-stop deluge, I decided to walk to the bus to the train and so on instead.

I’m a glutton for punishment, obviously enough, but everything in my body aches now after the wet ride yesterday, and I was up more than usual during the night with back and hip and leg pain.  That’s not really anything new, but it felt clear that it was exacerbated by the thorough soaking, and then of course, by nearly slipping on the wet floor in my room, which is hard, smooth tile.

I say “nearly slipping”.  I guess I actually did slip, but I caught myself before getting very close to falling.  I suppose that’s a good sign of improved physical strength and agility from all my walking and biking and everything, but it doesn’t mean I don’t feel the consequences.

Even my supposedly water-resistant boots were literally squishing inside by the time I’d gotten back to the house, only five miles from the train station.

This is boring, isn’t it?  I keep realizing how boring it is that I’m writing about this stuff, and I do apologize.  I guess it’s the sort of thing about which most people talk to their friends or their spouses or their family in general when it happens, but I don’t really have any such people to whom to talk about it on a daily basis.  I suppose I can mention it at work, and people will probably listen politely, as they will when I tell the about a physics article describing the extreme roundness of an isolated electron and so on.  But no one really interacts about it.

No one really interacts much about anything I’m interested in; I bore people pretty quickly with them.  I, in turn, have a hard time getting interested in anything in which they are interested.  Certainly, typical matters of gossip or popular entertainment are pretty lost on me.

The closest thing I really have to regular, daily social interaction is reading and leaving comments and getting responses on Jerry Coyne’s website Why Evolution Is True.  But yesterday, at least, every comment I tried to leave disappeared.  I don’t know if that was a technical glitch or just that my comments were blocked or whatever by PCC(E)*.  I sometimes get the impression, on the rare occasion when he responds to one of my comments, that he doesn’t like me (this is not an unusual attribute), so he may just be disallowing my comments.  Thus, even that little outlet is fading or at least is glitching.

It’s irritatingly windy this morning, and the wind is blowing water from nearby trees even here to the middle of the bus shelter, and it’s getting on the screen of my computer some.  I may have to stop and finish this later.  It’s frustrating.  But what do I not find frustrating?

I felt horribly depressed almost all day yesterday.  In fact, ironically, I was probably least depressed while I was riding through the rain, partly because my locking mechanism for the seat of my bike had worked, and partly because it was just kind of hilarious how wet I was getting, from above and below.  I would have been less soaked if I had walked, because I could have used an umbrella.  It’s hard to use an umbrella on a bike.

There were a number of times during the day yesterday when I thought about how much I hated my life and hated the world and (mainly) hated myself, and how I wanted to just swallow all the Tylenol in the bottle I have at the desk** or slice myself open with one of the box cutters I have, or douse myself in lighter fluid and set myself on fire***.

None of these are great options, and I would prefer to find something less painful.  Of course, the governor of the sunshine state and the goobers in the legislature are, I think, working on making it so that I’ll legally be able to purchase a gun again soon, if they haven’t already.  Anyway, there are plenty of people in gun shows and so on who probably wouldn’t care about restrictions on selling guns to people like me—you know, non-violent “ex-felons” or whatever the proper term is, even though my “felony” charges were ones to which I pled guilty only because of extortion by the legal system.  I never knowingly or willingly “trafficked” in drugs; I was trying to help people with chronic pain in a society in which those with non-lethal causes of pain are expected simply to keep soldiering on despite constant misery, even though—ironically—their pain will continue much longer than will that of a person with, say, terminal cancer.

It’s hard to say, though, whether I could use a gun to kill myself.  I have too much knowledge about guns, and have used them with respect, shooting competitively and for pleasure—never once having so much as fired at another living thing, unless you count scaring squirrels or raccoons off with a low-power bb gun.  I did once play Russian Roulette, but only once, and afterwards, though I was obviously horribly depressed, my hands were shaking.  I didn’t do it again, though if I had succeeded, at least I wouldn’t have gone to prison, not that I knew that at the time.  I had no clue what was coming.

I don’t know why I’m talking about all this, or rather, writing about all this, sitting at the bus stop waiting to go to the train to the walk to the office.  I don’t have a therapist anymore, so that’s part of it.  I don’t have a personal physician of any kind, either.  I don’t have any local emotional support, and I don’t make a good friend, so I’m not likely to obtain any new ones or any other form of a social circle.

I keep wishing I would catch pneumonia or some other severe illness and be killed by it.  Maybe that’s part of why I was so amused by getting so wet when riding last night; there was just the bare possibility that my resistance would go down low enough that I would catch something.  But of course, that isn’t really how infection works, and I know it only too well.  You have to be exposed to an infectious agent, and I don’t seem to be all that susceptible.  Probably I have lots of antibodies and whatnot from medical school and then medical practice.

I’m just so tired.  I can’t sleep at night for more than about an hour at a time, then I wake up and try to go back to sleep and sleep at most another hour, and then eventually just watch the clock reach the time for me to get up.  I want to be able to sleep and just stay asleep until I feel rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  That would be like…well, I was going to say “like a dream”, but it’s not quite accurate.  That would be wonderful.  That’s what it would be.

rainybikebandw

*This is how many of us refer to Professor Coyne.

**This is probably not a good choice.  It takes a long time to work, and if it fails it can still cause terrible liver problems, and it’s a long and drawn out death even if it works.  It’s very unpleasant.

***That’s something best not to do indoors, of course, and it was rainy yesterday, so it probably wouldn’t have worked outdoors if I had tried.  Also, it’s not got too high a fatality rate, or if it is fatal, it too can be a long, drawn out, and very painful death.  My point, overall, is to try to diminish and avoid or escape chronic pain, both physical and psychological.

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It’s an okay Friday, at least, I guess

Well, as the titles says, it’s Friday, and I’m on the early train heading to the office.  I actually don’t feel terribly well this morning, and probably should just have stayed home, especially since I have tomorrow off and would thus have had a three day weekend in which to rest from whatever is ailing me.

However, I got my new bike seat post and portable tire pump with pressure gauge yesterday, and I wanted to be able to try out and ride my bike today.  So, last night I put the thing together and put it in place—more or less—and this morning I rode it to the station, getting on the second train of the day.

I say “more or less” because the seat still needs a bit of fine, and not so fine, adjustment.  For instance, the clamp that holds the seat post in place* seems to have been thrown out of whack a bit when whatever little mutant troll goblin stole my prior bike seat.  I tried to put the new seat a little higher than I’d had the one before, because they say that having your legs more extended makes for more efficient biking, but as soon as I sat on it the seat slid down into the frame pretty much as far as it would go.

Still, I really don’t like the feeling of not being able to put my feet securely on the ground, so that isn’t such a terrible thing.  Maybe, if I get more used to biking and feel thoroughly at home doing it, I’ll feel better about adjusting it higher.  In any case, I ended up having to bring the seat and post with me on the train, and to the office, because I found that my cable was too thick to fit between the spaces in the frame of this bike seat, and I didn’t want to leave the seat unsecured on this, my first day using it, especially since it’s a holiday and foot traffic in and around the station might be light, and so make the seat more prone to be stolen.

I hate the fact that I have to worry about such things.  It’s one thing to need to worry about mechanical failures and the like; things fall apart, as the poem says.  But people who do things like steal someone else’s bike seat need just a quick death and an anonymous burial.

At least, that’s how I feel about it.  Fortunately (for me and for others) I don’t consider feelings to be reliable guides to action.

It’s amazing how out of condition my legs and everything else has gotten after only a week without using the bike (and despite having walked about forty miles so far this week).  It was really a bit of a struggle to keep going at times, and I rode in low gear at least half way to the station.  I really feel fatigued to an inordinate degree.  I suppose that will go away relatively quickly, unless there is something truly wrong with me physically**.

Oh, right!  The conductor made her announcement and thereby reminded me that it’s “Good Friday” today, and will be Easter on Sunday—the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, as my sister taught me decades ago, and which I still remember in precisely those words.  I guess there’s nothing remarkable about the fact that the specific words are how I recall it.  After all, they are concise, precise, and clear.  Why change them?

Anyway, for those of you who celebrate these holidays, please enjoy them.

I hopefully will make use of my new bike a bit this weekend.  At least having the seat with me today will allow me to adjust the pitch of it slightly, because this morning it was leaning back somewhat, and I didn’t want to get out my socket wrench—which I have brought with me, oh yes—and adjust it early in the dark of the morning.  That’s one of my difficulties when it comes to getting such things done:  I am only at the house before dawn or after dusk, so it’s a pain to do anything that requires light, even though there is, of course, a good outdoor porch light in my entry area behind the house.

I still feel a little fatigued and out of breath, even as I write this, and it’s been more than half an hour since I got to the train station.  We’re almost to my stop.  I hope this doesn’t persist, because it’s annoying.  If there’s something wrong with my lungs or heart, I wish it would just go full catastrophic and kill or at least thoroughly disable me, rather than lead to some gradual, annoying deterioration.

But nature doesn’t respond to requests, unfortunately.  I was going to write that it doesn’t take them, but it takes them fine—you can request things all you want.  It just doesn’t respond.  It doesn’t know you’re making a request.  It doesn’t know you exist, frankly, as far as we can tell.

As the saying goes, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”  Of course, you cannot do anything other than obey nature.  That’s the nature of nature.  That’s why we refer to “laws of nature” rather than “suggestions of nature” or “requests of nature”.  Wishes don’t do anything—but learning about nature, learning its rules, and applying them to your best advantage can be useful.

This is what lies at the heart of the saying.  It’s not implying that you could choose not to follow the laws of nature, merely that, if you want to get things done, you should know how nature works as well as you can and apply that knowledge with creativity, with determination, with discipline.  Then you’ll be able to achieve remarkable things.

You won’t be able to revoke or waive the law of gravity, for instance, but you may be able to use fluid dynamics and chemistry and thermodynamics and the like to make a structure that will use the air to create a force powerful enough to overcome the pull of gravity, and which will let you fly through the air at speeds never achieved by any organism in its “natural” state.

Wishing won’t get you from Detroit to Florida in two hours, but science and technology can.  Science and technology can even get people to the moon and back.

Anyway, that’s enough for this week.  Have a nice weekend, whether you celebrate it as a holiday or not.  I’ll do what I can at least to get some rest and, hopefully, to get a bit more adjusted to my bicycle again.

happy easter basic

*I don’t really know any of the “proper” terminology, so if there are bicycle aficionados reading and they can give me better, more useful terms, I would welcome the input.

**One can always hope.

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Like a beard without a grizzle, like a steak without a sizzle; rider in the drizzle

Well, it’s Wednesday morning again, and I’m comparatively upbeat today, as I’m pleased to inform you and I suspect you’ll be glad to learn.  After much effort, some WD-40, and the helpful supplying of a wire coat-hanger by my coworker, I was able to get the seat post out of the frame of my new bike, and with the help of my boss and another coworker—one who does a fair amount of biking—I was able to get my new bicycle together and ready to ride.

I rode it to the train last night, and then from the station to the house, with a mild, modest drizzle pleasantly dampening the way for a bit.  That latter portion is about five miles, as I’ve said before, but on the bike it took me just over half an hour, rather than an hour and a half.  That’s decent speed for my first time riding any bike in many years, and it’s also what it took me this morning in the other direction.  It got me to the train station in time to catch the train that I used to ride back when I took speedier—yet less healthy—means to get there.

Even though I’ve been walking as much as twelve miles a day, and so my endurance is pretty good, biking is a different experience.  I suppose that’s pretty obvious, but still, coming into it is something of a surprise.  It’s clear that, on roads at least, to bike is much more efficient than to walk, and one can cover the same ground with much less expenditure of energy.  But I would definitely estimate that, while it took about a third as long, I doubt that it burned only a third as many calories.

Maybe it’s because my riding is inefficient, but my legs definitely felt the more intense expenditure that riding entails, and my breath definitely came much more rapidly than when I walk, which is a very good biological indicator of the rate of energy expenditure.  The buildup of carbon dioxide is the primary driver of respiration*, so I am producing it much more quickly when biking than when walking.  This is good, I suppose; it will improve my conditioning.

But boy, I feel it in my buttocks; I feel it in my legs**.

Still, there is, as hoped, less joint pain associated so far with biking than there was with walking, and that is huge.  I need to make a few minor bike adjustments, I think, before too long, but it’s not bad overall.  I have some issues with bike seats—when the seats are high enough to, supposedly, make pedaling more efficient, I find myself feeling very awkward, because my feet don’t easily reach the ground.  Maybe that’s just a function of me not feeling all that secure on a bicycle; my coordination is not superb, especially when my legs are fatigued.  Already, I’ve nearly overbalanced at least twice already while getting off the bike, because my legs felt quite heavy and recalcitrant when standing after pedaling.

Presumably, I’ll adapt to this, and may then find it easier to raise the bicycle seat.  We shall see.  I don’t particularly like having to worry about maintenance and adjustment of the bicycle—that’s one of the reasons I haven’t had one, and why I don’t even feel the desire to drive a car or even my scooter.  Such things not only don’t tend to stick in my mind, but they actively stress me out to the point of causing me literally to bang my head against walls.  A bicycle is more straightforward, though, and in south Florida, there are many bike shops about, since people ride all year round***.

Well, we’ll see how things go over the next several days and possibly weeks.  I suspect my legs will strengthen, and my short-term, higher intensity endurance will improve.  In any case, my available time will grow.  Last night, I got back to the house while it was still light out, and not just because the daylight is lengthening.  I arrived almost an hour earlier than usual, and that happened this morning again.

I doubt it will work very long as a boost to my mood, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  I don’t think it’s likely to push things in the other direction, do you?

No, I didn’t think so.

bike newer changes

*Not the need for oxygen, as you might suspect.  With normally functioning lungs, in typical Earth atmosphere, oxygen is basically in a constant, fairly good supply for the body.  It’s the carbon dioxide that has to be blown out, both because, as a waste product, it pushes back the equilibrium of metabolism if it remains, and also because, in the blood, it partly links with water and dissociates a hydrogen atom, becoming carbonic acid, decreasing the pH of the blood, which interferes with many functions.  In a person with working lungs (and kidneys) this pH drop never happens to any detectable level; the body is too good at regulating it, and the drive to blow off carbon dioxide is powerful indeed.  However, in people with rather severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, their hypercapnic drive can be markedly blunted by chronic inefficiency, with the kidneys taking up some of the slack.  In these patients, the respiratory drive can be shifted toward being oxygen-driven, and that creates a serious catch-22 for them, since they often need more oxygen than they can get readily from the air, but supplemental oxygen blunts their distorted respiratory drive, and they can rapidly go into respiratory acidosis.

**The original, but wisely discarded, opening lyrics to Love is all around.

***Interesting side note—when I first tried to write “round” in that sentence, I initially typed “young”, which is not conceptually much like the word “round” at all, but does have the same three middle letters.  The first and last letters are not even quite next to the correct ones on the keyboard, though they are in similar relation.  I’ve made typos like this before.  It seems that my brain encodes, or indexes, words that I type by the overall shape of the word at some level, with the middle letters dominating.  I wouldn’t have thought that, but then again, I don’t think I would have thought anything else, either.

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Dreary is as dreary does, as we say in…well, nowhere. But it’s true nonetheless

Well, it’s Monday morning again, and I’m sitting now at the train station.  I seem to be getting in better shape.  Though I left at the same time as usual, I’ve arrived at the station in time for the train earlier than I usually catch—only to hear the announcement that this particular train has been cancelled.  That means I’ll be catching the next one, which is likely to be more crowded because of the cancellation of the prior one (and I really hate crowds) though there seem to be rather few people waiting at the station than usual.

It’s not an auspicious way to begin the week, though I suppose an optimist might think that it’s likely only to improve from here.  I am not an optimist, however.  Maybe I used to be, but I’m not one now.

Anyway, I’m on my way in to the office, one way or another.  The blisters that had formed on my feet when I wore the shoes that I’ve since thrown away have mostly resolved, or are on their way out, and they certainly didn’t trouble me on my walk this morning, though my right ankle is twinging.

That’s my old injury from college, acting up.  Ithaca, New York, it turns out, can be a perilous place to play an aggressive game of catch, because the land is hilly and irregular, and if all your weight comes down on your right foot after it’s reached an unexpected dip in the ground, well…let’s just say that when it happened to me, it made a sound that my friend, with whom I was playing catch, heard from where he was, quite a ways away.  We thought my ankle might be broken, but it was just a very bad sprain.

Of course, student health was partway up Libe Slope, so it was good that I had friends back then to help me hobble up.

Today my new bicycle is supposed to arrive, so I don’t expect to be walking back from the train station this evening, but rather to be riding.  I’m sure there will be at least some minor soreness related to using a bike for the fist time in nearly a decade, but at least it’s low impact exercise, and I’ll gain some time back from my walking.

I’m still listening to The Lord of the Rings as I walk, though I also listen to some podcasts sometimes.  This morning I heard the entire chapters relating Merry’s and Pippin’s meeting of Treebeard, all the way to and through the end of the Entmoot, and on into the beginning of the next chapter, to just before Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli meet “the White Rider”.  It’s an exciting part of the story, and we’re approaching the bit that I usually like best, the battle of Helm’s Deep.

Unfortunately, I found myself feeling very melancholy as I listened this morning.  That may be partly because I’m starting a new work week, even though Saturday was supposed to be a day of portent*, and I was really hoping for something momentous or dreadful or revelatory to happen to me.  But at least part of my melancholy is just that The Lord of the Rings was a love I shared with my ex-wife, and I have a hard time still enjoying the things we used to enjoy together.

That’s rather dreary, I know, but I’m just not the sort of person to make deep attachments easily, and especially not to be able to let them go easily, and without much severe pain.  Reminders of them make me rue my ongoing life.  Certainly it hasn’t been worth much since at least the time I was invited to be a guest of the Florida DOC.  I have experienced much more negative than positive since then, and really, it was mainly negative (though with more positive to counter that) for quite a long time before then.

Alas, I have not yet been cast into a volcano, but we can always hope for something of that sort to happen.  There was a time, as I said, that I was relatively optimistic, but now I feel just worn out, and in pain, and even my attempts to get into shape cause issues for me.  And before me I face only the rolling, grinding, dreary passage of the weeks to come, doing the same pointless things, which bring no ultimate benefit to anyone.  I don’t write fiction or play music or draw or anything of that sort anymore, and I don’t have any friends, and I don’t see my kids, and the rest of my family is far away.

I really ought just to call it quits here.

Of course, I’m hopeful that I’ll enjoy riding my new bicycle enough that it’ll at least give me some fun for a bit.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too much.  But at least it should give me some extra time, and a bit of freedom to go farther in the time that I have, while still exercising, and that’s something, at least.

Of course, what I really want is to go very, very far from where I am, so far that I can never return, even in principle.  But I’m a bit of coward, and I also don’t want to be rude.  So, instead, I’m trapped where I am, hoping for illness and/or accidents.

It’s annoying.  And, again, it’s a dreary way to start the new work week—as is, no doubt, reading this blog post.  I can only apologize; but I can’t pretend to be other than as I am.  What would be the point?

glass-spilled-water

*Nothing interesting happened then, though.

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Wheels and heels and blister peels, alive, alive-o

It’s Friday day, or whatever that annoying song says, and I’m in a slightly better mood than I was yesterday.  That’s not a high bar to clear by any means, but clear it I have, for what it’s worth.

I’m at the bus stop again this morning, having arrived almost an hour before the bus is due, because I decided to give my feet one more morning of rest.  Yesterday wasn’t too bad—I taped up my most egregious blisters—but the atypical walking I did because of the blisters led my back pain to flare up quite a bit relative to its usual baseline, so I was a most unhappy camper.  However, I tolerated the walk back from the train at the end of the day, and my total mileage yesterday was right around eight, so it wasn’t as though I took it easy.  Nevertheless, this morning, though I’m wearing reliably non-problematic shoes, I figured I’d still give myself a slight break, though I’ll walk back this evening.

This weekend I’m off work, so that will help give a further comparative rest.

Given the difficulties with my tootsies, and the simple issue of time—I leave the house before five and get back after eight at night, giving me no chance to get a full night’s sleep even if I were not an insomniac of high order—I decided to break down and order a decent bicycle.

It will arrive at the office on Monday—that’s where I have my tool box—and I’ll assemble it and ride it to the train and thence to the house.  A five mile walk takes around an hour and a half, but a five mile trip on a bike, even at a relaxed pace, shouldn’t take more than about half an hour.  Although bicycles are welcomed on the Tri-rail trains, I don’t intend to bring it to work during the day, once I have it set up; I’ve done that before, and it’s a pain.  Instead, I have also bought a very good, double-lock system, and they have bike racks at the bus station well under the eye off all the other travelers, so it should be secure.  I’ll leave it at the station in the morning.

A bicycle is also good for shopping and the like on the weekend.  As I’m pretty sure you can probably tell, I’m not too intimidated by distance when it comes to walking; if it were not for blisters and time, I’d be happy to walk a marathon a day and more.  But walking takes a lot of time, especially if you want to go any significant distance.

I think, for instance, about trips to places like zoos and museums.  If traveling on foot, one would perforce simply use buses and or trains at least part of the way.  But, for instance, the Morikami Museum and Gardens, one of my favorite places, is about 40 miles from the house, and there aren’t good public transportation routes near it.  It’s in Palm Beach County, and the bus system there is a deep pile of crap, especially on weekends.

They really ought to be ashamed.

The Tri-rail trains are always good, but their stations are toward the east end of the county, and the Morikami is toward the west.  But forty miles on a bike, once one is accustomed to it, is not insurmountable—perhaps three or for hours of riding, even for a plodder like me.  Or one could take the Tri-rail to the beautiful Boca Raton station and ride from there.

I’m not suggesting that I’m going to be making regular trips to the Morikami, though that would be nice.  I’m just using it as a comparatively extreme example.  There are much nearer potential places—from grocery stores, to malls, to movie theaters and even science centers*, like the one in Fort Lauderdale—to visit.  Also, it can be good just to be able to get out and about to more distant places, like the beach and parks and so on, without having to worry about parking cars and catching buses or trains, or being in much of any way reliant on the structure of society and the acquiescence of humans.

We’ll see how it all works out.  Anyway, knowing me, the bloom will probably come off the rose very quickly, but I at least envision possible quite long journeys, once I become more accomplished at biking, as I used to be once upon a time.  As you can tell if you look back a long way on my Facebook account, before I was interrupted by my stint as a guest of the Florida Department of Corrections, I biked quite a bit, albeit on a cheap bike that contributed to two separate shoulder injuries when it went over on me.

I have to take some blame for at least one of those events—there were wet grass clippings in the path, and I took a bend far too quickly.  Also, I was using a leather shoulder bag, like a very large purse, rather than a backpack, so I was quite unbalanced.  I have much better backpacks now!  Also, the new bike has a cargo rack thingy above the rear wheel, so I can strap stuff there.

The only major downsides not already mentioned will be maintenance—which tends not to be my strong point—and fact that rain is slightly trickier to accommodate on a bike.  I’m not worried about getting wet.  I’ve ridden a 650 cc scooter on the highway in tropical storms, for goodness’ sake; I have excellent rain gear.  I’m more worried about getting my computer wet in my backpack.  But there are ways to waterproof that, so I’m not all that worried.

Anyway, on too rainy a day, I can always walk and carry an umbrella.  Walking in the rain, frankly, is very nice.  One doesn’t need to worry overmuch about sweat, for one thing.

Well, that’s enough of that, for a comparatively optimistic and forward-thinking post from me.  Sorry to disappoint you, if you enjoy the darker aspect of my personality (it is a major one, I’ll admit).  I’m sure it will return.  Why would it suddenly be cured, after all?  Still, hopefully I’ll have a comparatively restful weekend, and my blisters will largely heal themselves, and by Monday morning I’ll be able cheerily to take what may be my last regular morning walk to the train station.

And you might as well have a good weekend, if you can.

guyonbikealtered

*The trouble with science centers, for me, is that I don’t really want to go to such places alone.  Mostly, I tend already to know the stuff they are presenting, and so—though it’s at least a bit of fun to see the exhibits—I don’t get the joy out of them that I did when I was younger, or when going with kids and so on.

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A rough bot slouching through the murk

It’s Wednesday morning, and though it’s actually slightly after six o’clock, I think it’s still reasonable to add, “as the day begins”.  Certainly the sun is not yet rising; the eastern sky isn’t even lightening yet.  I’m waiting at the train station, as I was when I began writing yesterday, and I’ve already walked five miles so far today (having walked a total of about eleven yesterday).

My endurance is definitely improving over these past few weeks, which is good.  It would be puzzling and perhaps even distressing if my endurance were getting worse.  I can, however, imagine my ability to walk long distances deteriorating because of injury or arthropathy—also, blisters and similar, and indeed I’ve had to deal with those over recent months, which is why it has taken me so long to get even to the point at which I currently reside.

But I think I’m getting past that particular barrier.  In fact, this Sunday, while my clothes were washing, I walked to the local convenience store barefoot, just to see how sturdy my feet were*.  It was fine, though I walked more slowly than usual.  I also, apparently, walked quite differently, with my left foot at least, than I do when I’m wearing shoes, because my left foot and hip got quite achy and sore a bit later that day, as though I’d put unusual strain on joints and muscles.  It’s an interesting realization, and it makes me want to experiment a bit more with barefoot walking.

One good aspect of all this walking is that I can listen to audio books and, to a lesser extent, podcasts as I do it.  I like audio books; the experience of listening to an audio book is very similar for me to the experience of reading a book in print.  I tend to read books in a very “audible” way, in that I tend to sound out the words in my head as I go along.  I think they call that “subvocalization”.

Apparently the old “speed reading” concepts recommended against this habit, but I disagree completely.  I don’t read particularly speedily, though I don’t read slowly, either.  But I do read deeply.  My ex-wife was always a very fast reader—she even took speed reading courses when she was younger—but she often did not recall many details of the things that she read for very long.  At least, she didn’t recall them the way I recall them.

I think one learns better with the combination of visible and audible (even if imagined audible) processing of the information.

That being said, even when solely using audible input, I of course form visual images—not of the words, usually, but of the ideas, or of the scenes, or what have you, depending on the subject matter.  There are also books and podcasts that I’ve listened to multiple times, and I think—as I do with books—that I get more out of them because of the repetition.  It may not be super-fast or anything, but I am pretty sure that I understand the things I take in more deeply than many people do, and I make connections rather easily from one area of knowledge to another.

Today I listened to Sean Carroll’s most recent podcast—about artificial intelligence, which is of course an au courant subject.  I also recently listened to a “Making Sense” podcast by Sam Harris in which two AI specialists had a discussion with him, and I subsequently bought their most recent books:  Human Compatible, by Stuart Russell, and Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.  I’ve read the first and begun the second.  It’s certainly a fascinating subject.  I don’t think it’ll ever be as interesting as fundamental physics, but that’s not a terrible insult.  What is, after all?

It’s all pretty pointless no matter what, but at least it’s distracting.  I need something to pass the time, since I don’t have any friends or anything—other than “work friends” I guess, but that’s not exactly the same thing.  I’m still very discouraged and despondent, and I see no future** for myself.

I feel rather as though I’m walking in a metaphorical fog.  I don’t even have any image of my immediate surroundings, nor of anything that lies ahead.  As far as I can tell, there is nothing that lies ahead.  There is certainly nothing toward which I can make any deliberate path.  I know the ground about may well be treacherous, with pitfalls and cliffs and quicksand and even dangerous predators; and I am not-so-secretly disappointed that I haven’t encountered any of the f*cking things yet.  Dangerous wildernesses aren’t what they used to be, it seems.

Well, that was a wholesale slide into clunky metaphor overlapping with reality and with slightly abstract conceptual space, and it’s a bit opaque, I’m sure (though I guess that is appropriate, given my metaphor).  Sorry about that.  Even I’m not sure what I mean.  I’m not sure about much.

I need to quit this stupid world.  Every day, its idiocy seems to grow—“the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  But no revelation is at hand, I’m afraid.  There’s nothing waiting to be revealed.  Behind the curtain is just another curtain, and another one after that, ad infinitum—row upon row of tattered, moth-eaten, pseudo-velvet, gaudy and tacky material.

Wait, what the hell do I even mean by all that?  Sorry, I’m just indulging my own stupidity here.  Try not to let it bother you.

foggy road

*I brought a pair of crocks with me to put on once I got to the store, because they don’t want people without shoes to come in.

**Though I do pay rent.

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Bad ingestions and good intentions at the start of Spring (in the north)

I apologize, right at the start, to anyone who was disappointed that I didn’t write a blog post yesterday.  I was home sick, having gotten a bad GI reaction from some Chinese food that I ordered and ate Sunday night.  The food was the gastric equivalent of Rocky Balboa; it simply did not want to stay down.

I’m back now, though, and have just arrived at the train station after a morning walk, and am waiting for the train I would have boarded anyway had I taken the bus.  I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of getting a bike—not a fancy, lean-over-the-handlebars type—to go to and from the train station.  But to do that entails thinking of something long-term, as a long-term solution to the problem of time in my daily life, and I have no desire to think long-term.  I honestly don’t really want a long term.  I barely want a short term.  I barely want a single day more, to be honest, especially when I’ve been feeling sick and my back is hurting especially badly.  Oh, well, that’s nothing new.

I suppose I should welcome you all to Spring, which officially started yesterday, when the equinox happened—or autumn, in the southern hemisphere, apologies for the apparent dissing.  I’m a little sad that I didn’t get to write about it yesterday.  In many ways, the equinoxes are more global than the solstices, because (although one is heading toward summer and the other heading toward winter) the two hemispheres all go through the same equinox at the same time, and it means, roughly, the same thing.

I was listening to an audiobook while walking this morning, as I often do, but this was a non-fiction book.  The author, a highly intelligent investigator, often refers to “authorities” regarding certain subjects*, sometimes seeming a bit tongue-in-cheek as he does so.  This raised for me a notion that I think is not reinforced often enough in the world:  when it comes to matters of science, there are no authorities.  There are experts, but there are no actual authorities.  No one has authorship of nature—no human or other mortal, anyway—and so no one has authority.

Stephen King can rightly claim authority over the works of Stephen King, as no one else can.  But nature, reality itself, is not subject to human authority.  And that includes other humans.  Governments also don’t really have authority, since none of them actually made society, nor do they “run” their nations.  At best, they are managers.

I’ve said this before, but no human civilization was ever created, nor is any such thing ever run, by individual humans.  They are spontaneously self-assembled and self-organizing systems.  Each individual member of the system is responding to local incentives, and this generates the overall pattern emergently.

This brings me to another issue that occurred to me while listening to the book, and that is the notion of intentions.  We all know the cliché that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and these good intentions are mentioned frequently regarding the people who have made scientific errors or presumptions as described in the book to which I was listening.  And it occurred to me that not only are good intentions not any adequate guarantee of good outcomes; they can be actively corrupting, in many ways more so than greed or lust for power.

While a person who is greedy and self-serving can certainly do great harm, part of their very impetus is to continue getting away with what they are doing, to continue to prosper, and so they tend to want to fly under the radar—at least until they begin to feel insecure in other ways, perhaps.  But ideologues, people who truly believe that what they are doing is right and is best for the greatest number of people, can justify performing horrible acts that might put off any but the worst of psychopathic sadists.

The perpetrators of various witch-hunts and inquisitions and reigns of terror and pogroms and purges and great leaps forward and killing fields and the like—and even the less-destructive Twitter mobs—are often people who are truly and thoroughly convinced that they are acting in the best interests of everyone in the world, and possibly even in the best interests of those they torture and murder in some cases.

But the desire to do good and the question of actually doing good appear to be almost orthogonal in reality.  Certainly their alignment is not reliably one-to-one.  Thus, any person who actually wants to do good—not just to be able to tell themselves that they are doing good—must always be amendable, at least in principle, to learning that they are wrong, in their methods or even in their ideals.

Dogmatism tends to be catastrophic.  Certainty kills, in the words of a person whom I cannot recall.  Or to paraphrase another source of which I’m not certain, good intentions can be and have been used to fumigate the worst of possible deeds, even the slaughter of a continent.

As Richard Feynman** said, reality has to take precedence over politics, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  All these things apply in the long run—relatively speaking, anyway—and while I’m interested, in principle, in long walks, I can’t actually envision a future for myself, other than the inevitable one.  I have no goals or plans or aspirations, I desire no “beliefs”, and I don’t foresee any beneficial change in myself, whether beneficial to me or to anyone else.  If I could find the will to override the irritating biological drives that lead me to keep eating and drinking and all that crap, I would do so, and would consider it sensible.  But that’s not readily accomplished, so I am forced along other, sometimes potentially very long, paths.

Ah, well.  I’m stubborn at least, even if I’m not dogmatic.  Or so I believe.

It's spring!

*I’m not going into the subject matter because I don’t want to distract from my point.

**Of course I tend to remember when I’m quoting him.

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Add title – reduce heat to low – go for a walk

It’s Saturday morning, and as I warned you, I’m writing a blog post today.

I’m at the bus stop this morning, because I wanted to give my feet a bit of a break*.  They were quite achy and tired when I got back to the house last night, and I decided that, unless they felt perfect this morning, I would take the bus.  I’ve got change in my pocket for the fare**, since I let my bus pass lapse, and I have no intention of renewing it.

I suppose I shouldn’t feel too disappointed about the fact that I needed to cut myself some slack here and there.  It’s my first week of full-on walking, and since Monday I’ve already done about 48 miles.  Since last Friday, it’s quite a bit over 60 miles.  That’s not too bad.

In epic fantasy novels and such, people just up and leave home and start walking to go on some quest—I guess they might ride a horse or pony at least part of the way, sometimes—but you never really hear about them needing to get in shape as they do, and you rarely hear about things like blisters or soreness or other exercise-related troubles.

I guess, to some degree, that’s reasonable, since the people in those fantasy worlds—e.g. the hobbits of Middle Earth—don’t have cars or anything of the sort.  They walk most places they go, so they’re not at all strangers to what we would consider quite long walking in our modern, advanced world.  Hobbits always go barefoot, but then again, so would our own ancestors have done while they hunted and gathered over the course of scores of millennia.

It’s really striking to realize quite how much we’ve fallen off from our more natural tendencies to ambulate.  Humans are built for tremendous endurance in hot conditions like sub-Saharan Africa.  As I understand it, we have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other animal known on the planet, extant or extinct.  The bushmen of the Kalahari are said to bring down big game largely by running it to exhaustion—they can’t overtake an antelope on a straight run, maybe, but they can just keep following it until it drops from exhaustion and overheating, and then they can spear it and bring it back to their camp.

Meanwhile, in our more advanced societies, we’ve made ourselves dependent upon devices—like cars—that not only cause issues for the environment, but actually weaken our bodies.  In many parts of America, there simply is no good way to get to a job if you don’t have a car of your own.  Public transportation is only decent in select, quite big, urban areas.

I heard a podcast once in which someone discussed technologies that improve our abilities while strengthening us, and others that improve our “abilities” but weaken us in the long term.  The interviewee compared, for instance, the abacus to the electronic calculator.  Masters of the former tend to have superior arithmetic skills—even without their abacuses—while regular users of the latter tend to suffer atrophy of their basic math abilities.  He also compared the automobile and the bicycle.  A bike definitely allows one to go farther, faster, than one ever would have simply by walking or running***, but it nevertheless keeps a person exercising and in great shape if that person does it very much.

We all know, if we’re paying attention, that going everywhere using cars does not tend to improve our physical conditioning.

If we developed a culture of only using public transportation for longish distances, and walking or biking everywhere in between, I wonder how much the rate of insulin resistance—and therefore of hypertension, of heart disease, of stroke, of cancer, of dementia—would diminish in the developed world.  We could keep the fruits of modern technology; for instance, we’d still have all the medical care that prolongs our average lifespans despite diminishing physical fitness, but we would probably need much less of it.

How much healthier would we be?

It would probably also be good for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide.  Now, it is a fact that humans do emit carbon dioxide as a waste gas, so we’re not carbon-negative or anything.  But very few of us eat food that’s derived from fossil fuels, so the carbon we expel was recently taken from the air (by plants) before it got to us.  I suspect that, just straight food-wise, we’re carbon neutral.  However, the transportation of our foods and various other aspects of it are run largely on fossil fuels, so that’s an issue.  But that’s addressable.

Imagine if we all only used mass transportation when we had far to go.  First of all, of necessity, public transportation would be better by far than it is.  And we’d all be in better shape, and probably would have better mental health, if we walked or biked for “shorter” distances.  Getting people to give up their cars might not be easy, but making it much more expensive to drive—with various taxes, and then frankly, just with the fact that the fuels to run cars will have become rarer and thus more expensive over time—can push people toward alternatives, leading to new equilibria.

I’ve often thought that it would be nice if, in public gyms, we paid people to ride exercise bikes attached to generators, which could then feed the produced power into batteries of one variety of another.  It wouldn’t pay very much, maybe, but imagine if someone who was down on his or her luck could—instead of, for instance, donating plasma—go into a public gym and earn money by biking.  Nowadays, the ambitious pay a lot of money to get exercise into their schedules.  Might they, and others, not do it more if they could be paid?

Well, that’s enough pie in the sky for today.  I hope you all had a nice, if minor, holiday yesterday.  My bus should be here soon, and I’ll be walking back from the train in the afternoon, which should bring this week’s total to about 55 miles, not counting last Sunday.  That’s not too bad, but I’ve got a long way to go…so to speak.

walker on dirt road

*Not that kind of break.

**I ended up accidentally overpaying by 50 cents.

***As long as there are paved roads and/or paths, but then again, you need those for cars, too.  Feet are, in many ways, much more versatile than wheels.

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A surreal golf dream to launch Saint Patrick’s Day

Happy Friday and Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!  I’m working tomorrow, but that’s okay.  I feel less weary today than I did yesterday.  I went back to the house last night, and the walk back from the train was not as tiring as it had been before, after a night’s and morning’s physical rest.

I may even have a beer—perhaps a Guinness—this evening, in celebration of the day, though regrettably I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy any corned beef and cabbage, and I indeed regret not being able to have the red potatoes that often come with that meal.  But, be that as it must.

Not surprisingly, I slept pretty deeply last night, though not as long as my body would have liked to sleep.  In fact, I was awakened by my alarm, which is an infrequent occurrence.  I was, what’s more, disturbed in the midst of a dream, and that happens rarely indeed.  I don’t recall the last time I had a dream that I remembered, though neuroscience suggests that I must have some dreams most every night.

It was a strange dream (though that’s perhaps redundant).  It involved a peculiar game of golf that went through a mysterious forest along a narrow path, with low but rather steep hills surrounding a thin, mostly straight main trail, which were part of the apparent “fairway”.  There were many small trees, which were nevertheless quite “shady”, though much of the game seemed to take place at night.  I don’t think I was present in the dream as myself per se, but was if anything a spectator.  It seemed almost like a set, as if for an elaborate play, though there seemed to be open, starry sky overhead.

Then, of course, an even more absurd turn of events happened, and the final shot of the golf round before the dream was interrupted landed in a changed landscape that seemed to be the interior of some impossibly huge mega-store, spread wider and higher than any real store could surely be.  It reminded me of a Meijer’s Thrifty Acres, a superstore that I think still exists up north, and that was always much more wholesome than any Walmart has ever seemed to me.

The latter stores always feel dismal somehow, rife with disorder and despair, ill-tended and bleak, with shelves rising not into displays of plenteous goods that signify prosperity, but with stereotypical discount items, things of poor quality and bare usability.  I say that only as an impression, not an actual review of the goods available in the store.  In fact, the best dress shoes I’ve ever owned I got at a Walmart for $10; the $120 Ecco shoes I was replacing with them had caused me terrible foot and back pain.  Also, the arts and crafts sections of Walmart has often surprised me with the quality (and low expense) of the materials you could buy there.  I’ve found good quality acrylic and watercolor painting supplies at Walmart for remarkable prices in the past!

Meijer’s, though, has always felt almost like a wonderland, with almost anything a person might wish to buy all under a vast, high roof that seemed too spacious to be a structure made by humans, but appeared rather like a miniature version of the sky itself, unlike the dreary overhead of gray, bare structures seen in most Walmarts.

I like Target stores, also; they tend to feel cheerier and to have higher quality stuff than Walmart (except their groceries) and they have some arts supplies that Walmart doesn’t, including a few nice options for alcohol-based colored markers.  But they remind me too much of shopping trips with my children (and with their mother), and I avoid going into them; they make me feel very sad.  I have similar trouble with Publix, and even with Walgreen’s drug stores, though I still prefer the latter to CVS, which always seems cold and detached and uncaring.

These are weird impressions to have, I’m sure, regarding chains of retails stores, but as I’ve always admitted, I’m a weird person.

Speaking of weirdness, the last shot of the dream golf match—by the apparent protagonist of the dream, who I think was a woman, though I can’t be sure*—landed on what appeared to be a checkout counter, with nondescript impulse items, a conveyer belt, and a cash-register.  The hero (or, if you prefer, heroine) got up on the counter-top, ready to hit the ball with a truly absurd, wide and fat and tall wedge club that looked almost as if it had been crafted from a snow shovel.  She was a lefty, if memory serves.

And then, I was awakened, literally, by the sound of a rooster crowing.  My morning alarm call is the Beatles song Good Morning, Good Morning, which—appropriately—starts with a cock calling out the start of the day.

Such was the start of my day, today.  I rose and showered and walked to the train while listening to The Fellowship of the Ring, from the end of the Council of Elrond until just after the fellowship is driven back by snow in the Redhorn Gate and by the cruelty of Caradhras.

It’s a brilliant story to listen to while walking, as I think I’ve written before.  One can almost feel that one is on a great adventure oneself, a quest of deep and heroic import, even though I’ve read the book so often that I can frequently recite it along with the recoding even as I walk.  And certainly, the style of the writing (and thus the reading or listening) influences the style of my own writing, as might be evident from this post.

Well, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a nice day, and enjoy a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration if you celebrate it.  It’s Friday, so if you like, you can even have some beer (green beer, if you must, though I think that’s perhaps a bit silly), and a lovely, appropriate meal, ideally with family and/or friends.

I’ll be writing a post tomorrow morning, barring the truly unforeseen, so, you’ll be “hearing” from me then.

saint patrick day

*I guess this isn’t surprising.  LPGA golf has always been more interesting to me than PGA golf—I’m not sure why.  It’s not just because the ladies are nicer to look at for me, as a man, than the men are.  I feel there’s less ego and snootiness among the ladies.  Lydia Ko is one of my favorite sports figures of any field, gender, time, or whatever.  She’s as enjoyable to see play—as are her competitors—as ever was Tiger Woods in his prime (though his first Masters win was amazing!), or even Michael Jordan playing basketball with the Chicago Bulls.  I’ll admit, however, that few sporting events were better than seeing the Pistons live, playing—for instance, given that this is St Patrick’s Day—the Celtics, back when they played in the Silverdome, and tickets were obtainable and reasonably priced.

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Though it’s Wednesday morning again, I’ll avoid quoting from She’s Leaving Home…

Though it’s Wednesday morning again, I’ll avoid quoting from She’s Leaving Home, or referring to my tied-for-favorite of Charles Addams’s characters.  I’m back at the bus stop, just as I was yesterday and the day before, of course, and I still feel very tired.

In fact, I feel a bit more tired than I did yesterday, though I had a nominally better sleep last night—almost five hours (it wasn’t uninterrupted, though).  For me, that’s middling to decent, but it’s very clear from the inside that it is not the amount of sleep my body requires for optimal, let alone maximal, function.  It may, however, be the most sleep my nervous system is able to accomplish without pharmaceutical intervention.

But, of course, with such interventions, I always feel more tired even after a long sleep than I would normally.  Actually, come to think of it, last night I took half a Benadryl™ before going to bed, so I did have some slight pharmaceutical influence, perhaps accounting for the fact that I got all of five hours of sleep.

Jeez, that’s all really boring, isn’t it?  I’m so sorry.  My life is boring, unfortunately, so if I talk about my life, things are generally going to be boring.  I appreciate your patience.

I also appreciate the people who commented and responded and so on to my previous two blog posts.  You’re greatly appreciated, I want that to be very clear, even if in supporting me I fear you are throwing pearls before swine.

I’m considering going back on Saint John’s Wort, which is an “antidepressant” that worked for me in the past, when I first took it (along with therapy, so it isn’t easy to separate variables).  I wouldn’t expect much from it.  I’m actually almost hoping to get that little bump in motivation that sometimes comes at the beginning of antidepressant treatment and puts a depressed person at increased risk for suicide, because before, they were too crippled by lack of energy to take action, but now that the will is growing, they can do it.

The last time I took it, though—which was far from the first—I just felt worse overall in general, even after several weeks, so I don’t even know that it’s going to do anything if I take it.  I can hardly be certain that the first time I took it the beneficial result was anything more than a placebo effect.

I’ve been on other antidepressants, of course, from Paxil to Celexa and Lexapro, to Effexor and Wellbutrin, as well as more old-school ones like Amitriptyline.  They clearly had effects (including benefits), of course, but I don’t know that they were for the better.  Coming off Paxil led me to experience the only two episodes of sleep paralysis I’ve ever had, which were utterly terrifying but still quite fascinating, at least in retrospect.  So in that sense it was worth the course of treatment.  The side-effects weren’t good, though.

I can’t really take prescription antidepressants now, though, because I don’t have a doctor to prescribe them, ironically enough.  I have neither a general practitioner nor a psychiatrist (nor psychologist or social worked, either, but they can’t prescribe anything, anyway*).  I don’t even have a dentist.  My only interaction with any medical care since 2015 or so has been the time I went to an urgent care place with a respiratory infection/complaint and was sent to the ER and admitted because I was de-satting, and they thought maybe my congenital heart defect had reappeared a bit (based on an echocardiogram, not just my symptoms and the drop in oxygenation).

That was maybe five or six years ago.  They wanted me to get follow-up, obviously, but I have no interest in pursuing it, and certainly cannot summon the motivation to do so.  For one thing, I’m unconvinced that they’re correct, though that in itself is not a good reason not to pursue more information.  For another, I have no health insurance, and I certainly have no money to be able to get involved in paying for significant healthcare myself.  Also, I don’t want to have any more cardiac interventions of any kind, frankly.  I went through all that when I was 18, and I don’t want to go through it, or anything like it, again.

I also don’t have the mental resources—in terms of will, executive function, whatever you want to call it—to be able to seek out any kind of state or federal healthcare assistance.  I’m in Florida, anyway, and the public programs here suck.  Anyway, I’m no good at taking care of myself; I see myself as a nuisance, and I really want me to leave myself alone, but that’s obviously difficult.

Yeah, Florida really doesn’t make much very easy.  But, hey, at least there’s no income tax, so people like the Donald can enjoy living here.  The government is dicey at best, of course, at state and local levels, even relative to many other states and the national government—though our representatives there also aren’t exactly the cream of the mental or moral crop.  We really are the Mordor of the United States, in many ways, and not merely because it’s down here in the southeast.  Unfortunately, there are no volcanoes, and though we have big spiders, none of them are Shelob-scale ones.

Anyway, I probably won’t take any antidepressants, and I don’t expect to seek out any healthcare or mental healthcare.  It’s too much trouble, it’s too difficult, I can’t focus or concentrate on things like that.  I’ve been dealing with that shit too often in my life, and for too long, and despite my best previous efforts, I’ve ended up here in Mordor, all by myself.  I’m sick of it.  It’s not worth the effort.

I’m not worth the effort.

*I did get on BetterHelp for a bit, and it was okay as far as it went, but some difficulties arose, not anyone’s fault, certainly not my therapist’s, and I was off it after a little over a month, I think.