Health

by

So we profess ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies of every wind that blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, against almost everyone’s better judgment.  Indeed, it’s the first Thursday (and the second day) of March, which is a new month (though the name is, of course, not new).

It being Thursday, it’s time once again for my traditional weekly blog post, which differs from my now-daily blog post only in that it follows the old pattern of a Shakespearean title and usually a picture…and, of course, this little introduction in which I note all these points, which is frankly rather tedious.  I should probably just quit doing it.

The trains were having severe troubles yesterday morning and yesterday evening.  In the morning, there was temporary suspension of the trains northbound from my usual station, due to what the fellow at the station referred to as a “train versus vehicle* event”.  The RTA was supposedly providing a “bus bridge” from that station to the next one north of the accident, and indeed, at long last, two full buses arrived bringing passengers from the station north of the event so they could continue south.  However, only one of the buses was heading back north, oddly enough, and that bus got full literally just as I was about to get on it.  I was the very one at whom the driver held out his hand, palm forward, and said, “No more passengers.”

So, grumbling, I stepped back, and I and the other remnants waited, asking when the next bus would be.  The fellow at the station did not know, though he guessed about ten minutes (ha ha).  After a while, he received notice that normal service was resuming.  This probably means no one had died in the “train versus vehicle event”, which I suppose is a good thing**.  I ended up being about an hour late to the office, and this was on Wednesday, which means there was payroll to do.  Also, we’re setting up and putting into practice a new program that I am heavily involved in, and we had two new people starting on a trial basis, who needed to be processed…and of course, meanwhile, we had at least three people out sick.  I was pretty stressed out, even relative to a normal day.

Then, last night, as I waited at the train station, the southbound train was announced to be late, and then announced to be later, and then that train was cancelled, and then the next one was announced to be late, and then later…

Eventually, it got to the point that, even if that next train got there at its announced later time, by the time I took it, then the two buses***, then walked from the stop to the house, it would be quite late.  And, honestly, I didn’t have anything (and certainly not anyone) waiting for me at the house, so it didn’t seem worth it to bother going.  I walked back to the office, and I slept here overnight.  And here I am writing this.

Such is my life—if you can call it that.  I hate it.  There’s nothing in it that’s of any real worth.  I’m still in chronic pain, I still have insomnia.  Obviously, I still have my dysthymia/depression, and of course, if I do have any neurodevelopmental difficulties that have hitherto gone undiagnosed, they certainly haven’t gone away.  I remain at least slightly uncertain in that latter category, because though I think the evidence is good, I do not quite trust my own judgment.

Can you blame me?

So, anyway, again, here I am, though metaphorically I am nowhere.  I also have a headache, which is probably at least partly tension related.  And I’m tired.  I’m not sleepy, but I am tired, almost all of the time.  I honestly don’t know what to do.  I mean, I know what I think I ought to do.  But it’s hard to get an “is” from an “ought”—though all “oughts” come from “ises****” contrary to what humeans seem to think—and I don’t have quite the will yet to overcome the activation energy wall created by biological drives/resistances to get to the other side.

I’m working on a way around.  There are things one can do to reduce one’s resistance in the short term, to lower that activation energy barrier.  But I’m not really interested in drugs, nor am I willing to deal with people who deal in illicit ones, and alcohol just tends to make me sleepy (and yet not to stay asleep or feel rested).  I do step swiftly into crosswalks when the lights change, hoping someone will not pay attention to traffic signals and will just hit me; they would deserve to have to deal with it, since pedestrians in the crosswalk have the right of way when obeying signals.  But so far—though many seem tempted—even when I tell them to hit me, none of them have.  I don’t know whether to feel irked about that or to be slightly pleased that so many people are more careful than one might expect.

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter.  I suspect I’ll find a way to get back where I came from one way or another before too long, blisters and biological drives notwithstanding.  There must be some kind of quantum tunneling that can eventually get me through that mental barrier*****.

There’s no reason to expect things to head in the opposite direction, though, so I don’t really have any sense of optimism or even of possibility.  But in the meantime, I’ll keep writing these daily posts on days when I work, which will include Saturday this week.  You can continue to look forward to them, if you do, but for a limited time only.

TTFN

tri rail

Golden Glades Tri Rail Station – no trains present

*Is a train not a type of vehicle, though?

**Although, honestly, given the trouble the driver of said vehicle had caused—presuming that it was that driver’s fault, which is not certain but seems more likely than not—I can’t help but wish that they at least could have been injured badly, and if you had asked me at the time, I would almost certainly have said they ought to have been killed (but not their passengers, of course, unless the accident was caused by such a passenger).  After all, given the number of people whom they inconvenienced, and the economic, social, and psychological losses they thereby engendered, and the physical stress they created among many people (me included) it seems likely that their escapade led to diminished health and even premature death in one or more than one person.  But they probably didn’t do it on purpose, so perhaps the death penalty would be excessive.  Still, I don’t hear about such accidents happening in countries where commuter trains are much more common than here in the US, whereas something of the sort happens almost monthly just during the times of my commutes.

***I probably wouldn’t have walked.  I’m trying to rest the healing blister on my right foot, at least from more than a mile of walking at a time.  It seems to be doing well.

****That’s a plural that doesn’t want to be spelled.

*****I think this was Dylan’s original first line of All Along the Watchtower, but it just didn’t scan.  It turned out fine when fixed, though, and Jimi’s version was even better, as Dylan himself is said to have admitted.

by

Some blistering insights into soles like hobbits’ (and holes like ants’)

It’s Monday again.  Yippee ki yawn.  Aren’t you all just so excited?

I don’t have much interesting to report or discuss today, because I haven’t really done anything interesting to report or discuss, nor thought anything interesting to report or discuss since my last blog post.

I have continued trying to sort out different shoes and related footwear.  I walked home from the train station on Friday, but it turned out that the new blister on my right foot had not resolved itself very well during the two weeks since it had happened, which is quite annoying.  The blister on the left foot was fine; I had very carefully, and under effectively sterile conditions, poked a pin-hole in it the day after my very long trek, to drain the fluid, and it basically has now become just a thickened area of foot sole, and it gave me no trouble over the course of my five mile walk on Friday evening.

On the right foot, for reasons I don’t recall clearly, I had elected not to drain the blister—I think it just didn’t seem to have as much fluid in it—and a little more than halfway through my trek on Friday, it started to give me more trouble, as if I had something sharp stuck in my shoe.  I didn’t have any such thing; I checked.

Anyway, I rested on Saturday, during which my right foot was sore still, and I decided to drain that blister as I had the other.  I then walked about six miles (total) yesterday, and though the blister is still irritating, it’s better than it was.

Here’s my off-the-cuff hypothesis for why the course of the left and right blisters was different:

By draining the fluid from the left blister, I allowed the two layers of affected skin to re-adhere to each other, and through that process to become firmer and tougher—at least tougher than they were when the fluid of the blister was present.  On the right foot, however, even as it was recovering, there was still fluid in the blister—it never got completely reabsorbed, and the skin layers thus never re-adhered.  So, once I walked a long enough distance, those two layers of skin were effectively separate and lubricated, and began to rub back and forth against one another.  Just as pertinently, at the edges of the former blister, shearing forces pulled the aforementioned layers of skin further apart, causing new damage.  So, it was actually therapeutic to drain the fluid—as long as I protected rigorously against the risk of infection—than to allow the other to retain its fluid in this case.

As I thought about this, I wondered why such a thing might be the case.  Why would our evolutionary heritage saddle us with a process, on the base of our feet of all things, that would be counterproductive to healing?  Then it hit me*.  Our ancestors throughout almost all of evolutionary time did not wear shoes or boots or any such thing, and they certainly didn’t walk for long distances on paved roads.  They would have formed calluses on the soles of their feet, starting at an early age—presumably as soon as they were able to walk—and repetitive shearing forces, such as are produced by the rubbing of the sole of a shoe, would not apply.  They would have had the soles of hobbits, if you will, and those are pure, tough soles indeed.

So, in some senses, our footwear is detrimental.  Of course, in other ways, it’s extremely useful, and does protect us from sharp and hard objects on the ground against which even thicker skin wouldn’t have defended adequately.  Broken glass is certainly something one wouldn’t want to encounter with bare feet.

Then again, I recall that once, quite a while back, a Kenyan athlete won the Olympic marathon in bare feet, so there aren’t severe disadvantages.  It’s got to be pretty hard to do on pavement, though, and the next time that athlete ran, and won—if memory serves—he did wear shoes.

And you wouldn’t want to go walking through a snowy landscape without something on your feet, at least for warmth.

Still, it makes one wonder how many of the things we wear on our feet are relatively unnecessary and even counter-productive.  If I had gone barefoot a lot over the years, would I not even require footwear much anymore, living as I do in south Florida, where there is almost never anything close to snowy weather?  It’s certainly likely that the risk of fungus would be lower!  It’s interesting to wonder whether even the problems I have with my right ankle, due to an old severe sprain, would be fewer if I had not worn various types of footwear.

It’s also interesting to think about how much of the footwear industry is just a self-sustaining fiction, like so many other industries.  Just to be clear, though, I would not claim that this is any kind of conspiracy or evil plot by malevolent capitalists at Nike and Adidas and Reebok and New Balance.  That’s just a stupid thought, and if you seriously entertain it, you should probably slap yourself.

I’m sure there are worse and better people (by whatever criteria one might specify) at nearly all levels in such companies, as there are in the ranks of social services, as there are working in governments, as there are in charitable organizations, as there are in hospitals.  No, the footwear industry, at all its various levels, is just a big, spontaneously self-organizing system, like everything else about civilization.  There is no master plan, and there is no master**, any more than there is a planner, architect, CEO or Personnel office in an ant hill or a termite mound or a bee hive or a school of fish or a flock of birds.  Things happen, and the things that tend to be self-sustaining tend to sustain themselves***, while the things that don’t tend to do so simply fade away with relatively little fuss.

This is part of, or at least related to, why I hate people calling elected officials our “leaders”.  They’re not leaders, nor should they be, and they certainly don’t “run” the country or state or city or whatever.  They’re employees, managers, servants.  And believe me, they are just as fundamentally clueless as everybody else about what’s happening in the world and what to do about it.  They just sometimes pretend otherwise, even to themselves.  But just because they fool themselves, doesn’t mean you have to let them fool you.

That’s about it for today.  It’s been a weird progression of thoughts, but that seems appropriate, given the eventual topic of discussion.

caveman walk

*It’s just like what happened when I was standing in a park and wondering why a frisbee appears to get larger and larger as it gets closer and closer.

**Except the Time Lord called The Master.

***Duh.

by

This was the most unkindest blog of all

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday!  You know what that means, right?  It means it’s time for my traditional weekly blog post, the format of which antedates these ones I’m doing now on every workday.

In these Thursday blog posts, I generally include a picture of some kind, whereas that’s very much a matter of whim the rest of the week.  I also title the posts with some relatively (to me) “pertinent” Shakespearean quote that has been altered to include a form of the word “blog” in it.  The biggest problem with that is finding a quote that I haven’t used before, since all the best, most recognizable, most memorable quotes tend to get used early on.

That’s how the sausage is made, I guess, in case you wanted to know and hadn’t already figured it out for yourself.

I’m back at the bus stop this morning, by the way, which is cool.  Well, it’s not literally cool—it’s already about 73 degrees Fahrenheit at 5:20 in the morning, and a comparable number in relative humidity.  It makes walking to the bus and whatnot just a little bit unpleasant, if only because I sweat.

I mentioned yesterday (I think) that when I get up really early I consider walking to the train station, and that’s just shy of five miles.  The walk isn’t intimidating; it’s good for me, and I have more than enough endurance to deal with it even first thing in the morning.  But I don’t like getting to the office all sweaty first thing in the morning.  That’s one of the reasons I didn’t keep biking to work, way back when.  I always ended up smelling like mildew, at least to myself, though I learned to buy big cans of Lysol to deal with that, which worked pretty well.  Still, it’s a bit annoying.

That’s all relatively boring.  Sorry.

However, on a related note, I’m planning on trying something new today.  I use two main brands of walking shoe, chosen mainly because of their price to star-rating ratio, but with the absolute criterion that they must be black.  They are all the same official size, of course, but the newer brand—to me, I mean—has a tendency in the right foot to rub against my big toe, though it’s not as bad in the left foot.  So, I ordered an extra pair one half-size bigger in that type of shoe, to see A) if it makes a difference, and 2) if it’s comfortable and stable enough for me to wear in that size.  This is apparently a recognized phenomenon, this tendency for different shoe manufacturers and even different designs of shoe by the same manufacturer to have different sizes even within the same “size”.

That’s why I originally started wearing New Balance shoes, way back in the day when they were still trying hard to become competitive, and so were lower priced than the other big brands.  They were designed in such a way as to be slightly roomier, width-wise, which was more comfortable for me than other brands.

New Balance is the “older” brand I described above.  If the newer brand in half a size larger is good, though, I may focus on it a bit more now, because the design and model—if that’s the term—in question is slightly lighter and has a breathability that the Noobs don’t have.

Okay, that’s not just relatively boring, that’s thoroughly and completely boring.  Again, sorry.  I’m being most unkind.

Still, if I can find the right shoes and make the rest of the arrangements, I mean to try to do something that will be less boring, and perhaps even slightly interesting.  I’ve been working my way up to it for quite a while now, and I’m getting closer, step by step*.  If I do last long enough to try to carry it out, I imagine I’ll be announcing and detailing it here, so watch this space—so to speak—for further updates.

As for other things, well, I think I’m mainly over my little gastrointestinal bug.  I suspect that was related to some frozen, pre-cooked burgers I had that must have thawed during shipping at some point before being refrozen.  Thus, when I ate them they were slightly contaminated by some bacterial pathogen, which would explain both the quite painful enteritis and the low-grade fever.

It wasn’t anything too severe, thankfully.  But I’m not going to be eating any more of those for a while!

I didn’t do any calculus “homework” yesterday.  I did have a chance, since even though I had missed a day, I caught up and then did the payroll and everything else with surprising speed, because I’ve done it for a long time, and I prepare things relatively in advance, and I start working on it all early in the morning before anyone else gets there so there aren’t any distractions and it’s quiet; it’s especially nice not to have the loud background noise playing as it is during the workday.

The fact that they have to have “music” blaring all day because that’s just what is done in this business is maddening.  I don’t understand it.  I don’t respect it.  I think it’s pathetic.  But I don’t have veto power, and I certainly don’t have Vito power**.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and indeed, it’s probably more than enough—for today, for the week, for the year, for my life—and so I’ll close with the wish that you will all try to have a good day and then a good weekend and so on, and to be kind to your family and friends and to enjoy their company.  It’s a bleak old world and universe out there, and it does not owe you anything.  Get the good of it where you can get it, in the time you spend with those you love and who love you.

TTFN

unkindest cut

*This is a joke to myself related to the idea I’m not fully revealing, but you can also relate it to the discussion of shoes.

**Ha ha.  A reference to The Godfather.

by

This is today’s blog post

Well, yesterday morning I wrote a blog post—the first draft thereof, anyway—that I didn’t post, because I ended up being forced to make my way back to the house as my abdominal pains became rather worse, and I ended up staying at the house all day, which is quite frustrating.

Weirdly enough, though I often feel very unmotivated to go in to the office, I’m even more unmotivated to make my way back to the house at the end of the day.  It’s not as though there’s anything at the house that’s more exciting for me than the office, or anything that I do in my spare time other than lay around and watch some random YouTube videos while I wait to be able to go to sleep.

Helpful hint—or, at least, hint, helpful or otherwise—if you’re trying to get to sleep, it can be useful to put on a longish YouTube video that you’ve seen several times before, preferably something you enjoyed, but which now holds no surprises for you.  That way your mind can be engaged enough to keep from wandering onto distracting topics, but not so engaged as to keep you awake.  Indeed, you may perhaps be able to connect to something familiar enough that it feels comfortable and so actually helps you get to sleep.

I don’t know whether that’s good advice or not, or if it will work for anyone but me.  For all I know, it’s a terrible idea, even for me, but it does seem to help me get to sleep when it occurs to me to use it.  But getting to sleep has never been my major problem.  Staying asleep is my difficulty, which gets worse as the night goes on.

Anyway, that’s all neither here nor there.  Returning to what I mentioned in the opening of this post, I’m going to post yesterday’s post as well as today’s, since I might as well post it, though I’ll have to edit it at least a little bit before I do.  I’m sure it’s quite rough, being a first draft.

As for today, there’s little to say, though at least the first part of that sentence has a bit of a rhyme in it, which is always nice.  I’m going to the office, of course, because Wednesday is the day I have to do payroll, and there’s going to be some catching up to do since I was out yesterday.  I hate taking days off, since the next day always feels more than twice as stressful, especially since payroll adds to the issues.

And, of course, they just announced that the train for which I’m waiting is going to be ten to fifteen minutes late, though on the tracker site it’s listed as 19 minutes late, so they’re lying, or underestimating the issue in their overhead announcement.  I don’t understand why there are so many delays, and so often, on a commuter train.  It’s not as though the weather is bad.  It’s sixty-nine degrees out at five-fifteen in the morning, and there’s essentially no wind.  There’s certainly no rain.

Oh, well.  The world is frustrating.  Unless you’ve got some vested interest in it, I can’t say I could recommend to anyone that they come here, let alone stay here.  Maybe it’s just south Florida that’s the issue.  Maybe I should try heading back up to Michigan.  It’s a long walk, so it would take quite a while, but it might be worth the trip.

I guess we’ll see.

by

This is yesterday’s blog post

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m back waiting at the bus stop, which in many ways is preferable to the way things were yesterday, and so many days before, though I won’t get into the specifics.  I had a rather significant exacerbation of my insomnia last night/this morning, by which I mean I woke up extremely early, even for me—and I’m writing this at 5 am, so “extremely” early is early indeed.

I came very close to just getting up when I couldn’t sleep and walking the five miles to the train station (rather than waiting for the bus to go the other one) and getting the first train of the day.  The only thing that really stopped me is that I didn’t want to start the day all sweaty*.  It’s not so bad to end the day that way—there’s no one to whom I’m coming home who has to deal with my sweatiness, and I can just doff my clothes and get a shower and get ready for “bed” when I get back to the house.

Other than that, there’s not much going on in my life.  As you all know, I’m not writing fiction anymore**, and I’m not writing any new music, nor learning any new songs.  I think the last thing I did that was “new” on the guitar was figuring out the tune to Baker Street, especially the sax riff.  That might have been before New Year, though, so it’s been a while.  It didn’t take very long, though it was quite satisfying for a moment.  That sax riff is amazing, and almost everybody recognizes it when they hear it.

Otherwise, everything is mainly empty, and it’s harder and harder for me to distract myself.  I wish I could just go catatonic or something.  But I don’t think my psychopathology is of that type.

Everything is also very noisy, and that’s irritating.  I don’t wish I were deaf—or deafer than I already am—but I do wish everything were quieter.  I particularly wish people did less loud talking, and especially less loud talking about nothing at all.

I started trying to read and work through problem sets—at least all the odd numbered problems, so I could check the answers after doing them—in my old, used copy of Thomas & Finney’s Calculus text, which was the one I used in my undergrad days.  I’ve completed one problem set, very early in the book.

It’s easy stuff, of course, at that point in the text, but I figure reviewing and practicing isn’t going to hurt.  I knew someone in college who literally did every odd-numbered problem in the textbook so he could master the material, and when test times came, he got terrifically high scores on exams that everyone else found difficult.

Obviously he’s inherently very smart—that made him fun, because it’s nice to be around someone smarter than yourself, so you can learn things—but as with many people who are very smart, he also worked quite hard.

I think it would be nice to try to master some more mathematics so that I could actually do some of the calculations related to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics at more than a rudimentary level.  I’ve also tried to restart reading Sean Carroll’s Spacetime and Geometry, which was really good as far as I had gotten before, but which I stopped partly due to limitations on my mathematical skills.

I think I should probably just try to muscle through things this time, and just file away the bits I don’t understand yet—mostly mathematical formalisms, since the concepts aren’t that difficult—and maybe then get them more and more as I come back to things later.

Of course, all this is really just a fantasy, an idea of me trying to “recapture my lost youth” by attempting to complete some version of a Physics degree on my own.  It’s a pipe dream.  I don’t think I have the will to carry it through, because I really don’t have the will to do much.  The only advantage the idea has is that all the other things I do for fun are steadily losing their charm, so maybe I’ll be able to focus on it by default.  I doubt that will be enough, but who knows?

I suspect it won’t be, though.  I feel like everything is coming to an end for me.  That’s all right, I guess.  It’s not as though I’ve really brought much joy or happiness to anyone in the world, and the people I love don’t tend to find me tolerable over the long term.  I think I’m probably a net loss to the world, and the loss of me would not be a net loss.

I would like to go out in a unique and semi-dramatic fashion, though, as long as it doesn’t cause too much unnecessary inconvenience for other people.  It can be slow and drawn out, and may even, in the process, lead me to some new personal insight or adjustment or revelation.  I don’t know.

That’s all probably a fantasy, too.  I’m not sure exactly what I’m thinking or what I’m getting at.

I’ve just passed 800 words or so, and someone once told me that about 800 words is the best length for a blog post if you want people to want to read it.

I’m sorry, I don’t think this has been very coherent at all.  I’m not feeling well in general, in case it’s not obvious; I’m having some GI** trouble, the cause of which is uncertain.  I’ve taken medicine for it, and that’s obviously done at least some good—after all, I’m waiting for the bus so I can head into the office—but it’s not completely taking care of it, and I feel the temptation to just head back to the house.

The trouble with that is, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of just not going in at all, and not doing anything at all, and just withering away.  Which, I guess is not necessarily that bad.  But, as always, I don’t want to inconvenience people.  Heaven forbid that anyone should be inconvenienced by me.  I already hate myself; I’d like not to add too much fuel to that fire.

However, my belly pain is actually starting to increase somewhat, and I think I’m going to have to go back.  The last thing I want to do is have a “crisis” on the bus or the train and have to make my way back from there.

Further bulletins as events warrant, I guess.

*It turned out that I had some form of enteritis, also, including a low-grade fever, so it was probably just as well that I didn’t even try that walk.  Perhaps the developing issue contributed to my worsening insomnia, now that I look back at it.

**Which I guess is no loss, since no one seems to care about the fact.

***That’s gastrointestinal, nothing to do with the military.

by

Pursuing it with eager, weary feet

It’s Monday morning again.

Hooray…

It’s the second Monday in February, though it feels like it ought to be the third, at least to me.  That’s because the first was on a Wednesday, so it feels like the work week is slightly askew compared to the length of the month.  And, of course, because this is February in a non-leap-year, that means that March will also start on a Wednesday, as I know I’ve mentioned on this blog before.

I’m writing this on my laptop, because this weekend I was forethoughtful enough to bring it with me when I left the office.  I had a potent reminder all day Friday from my severely sore and aching thumbs, and we didn’t push past usual closing time, since everyone gets their checks on Friday, and no one wants to delay things.

I had an adventure of sorts this weekend.  I had realized on Friday, after walking home from the train instead of taking the bus, that I had walked just shy of nine miles that day, and I felt pretty good, physically at least.  So I decided on Saturday to take a longish walk and at the same time try out some new hiking shoes/boots I had recently bought and had only worn twice to work.  They had seemed fine, but they were designed for hiking, so I figured I might as well do a bit of a hike.

I first walked two miles to a nearby 7-11, where I picked up some snacks for later and a bag of cat food for the cat I leave food for outside, and put the items in my backpack.  Then I decided to go out west along the road I’d come from in the east, just to see how long a walk it was to the turnpike crossing, and then—if that was a reasonable distance—on to the next major north-south walkable road and up to the crossroad that would eventually come back to where I live.

Well, the turnpike wasn’t all that far away, or so it seemed, though it had been a steady if shallow uphill walk of nearly two more miles.  Then I passed the Hard Rock Stadium, which I had never seen in person before.  Then I finally got to a north-south road, recommended by Google Maps.  It wasn’t the one I thought it was, but it was okay.

I was feeling pretty hot by then; it had been 80 degrees out when I started, and the skies were at least half clear.  I’d already had a small bottle of Lime Perrier—not nearly as good as the orange or the pineapple, and miles away from the peach!—and decided to stop in the next convenience store for water.  They had no fizzy water, so I got two one-liter bottles of Aquafina®, which was probably a bad idea.  They were heavy, and my backpack was already none too light, nor is it really a hiking backpack.  It’s more of a student-oriented backpack.

Anyway, heading back I tried to use Google Maps to pick the most direct walking route, but it led me around behind a casino and toward what it thought was an accessible road, but which had been blocked some time in the past, said blockage including big signs telling everyone that all copper had been removed from the facility.  Was it ever a public walkway?

So I had to reconfigure and reorient, trusting my own judgement a bit, though I’d been wrong about the distance to the road past the turnpike.  I backtracked to the proper road before too very long, but I did rest in the shade in the casino parking lot—which was huge and grassy—not caring if anyone thought I was weird, since people tend to think I’m weird, anyway.  I’d been drinking the water steadily, but I was starting to feel more and more fatigued.  I only realized it later, but I was also getting a bit of a sunburn.

Anyway, I had to stop and rest for about ten minutes at a time on a few more occasions, including one where I sat against a wall with my shirt off, no doubt looking like an overweight homeless person.  I thought I must be dehydrated, so I kept drinking water, and pouring some on my back and head.  I also walked up and over the turnpike this time, on an artificial hill much steeper than any natural one in south Florida.

Finally, I decided I’d come far enough that it was okay if I took a bus for the last leg of the trip; I had rested at bus stops a few times.  I waited for the Dade County bus, having put my shirt back on, and then rode only about a mile until the stop just before where I live.  I got back to the house and, not too long after, felt queasy (actually, I’d had hints of it before), so I grabbed a Tupperware container nearby—because I had laid down and didn’t want to get up—and then promptly threw up copious amounts of water, pretty much all the water I had drunk.  I had to switch Tupperware containers in the middle.  I guess in my worry about dehydrating, I had overcompensated, and my stomach was just irritated by the water, and almost none of it got absorbed.

That didn’t last long, though, because there’s only so much one can throw up when one has drunk two liters of water but hadn’t eaten yet that day.  I did get a cramp in my upper abs from the heaving, which was not fun at all.  I was pretty wiped out, and I recognized my sunburn at that point; most of my usual walking is early morning and later evening, so I haven’t walked in the sun for a while.

It turned out, based on my pedometer, that I had hiked almost exactly twelve miles (it had taken almost six hours, but that was with a lot of stopping).  So, that was quite a trek for a Saturday—longer than I had planned for it to be, but my shoulders were far more troubled than my legs, and indeed, they were the most common reason why I took breaks.

I did get a few new minor blisters, because of the combination of the long distance and the new boots, which were quite good in general, but which are, of course, going to rub in different places than my usual shoes.  It was a good starter hike, though, and I mean to keep working my way up, because I have a goal/plan in mind, and I don’t want to be hindered by silly things like blisters and sore shoulders, and other things I can condition myself for ahead of time.

Anyway, it’s probably been a boring blog post, and my sister has already heard the story, so she’ll probably be really bored by it, but it was a bit of an adventure, and was not without its own minor perils and pains.  I’m going to try to work in more walking during my typical days, though I may take the bus home from the train today, just to let the blisters rest.

Further bulletins as events warrant, or probably even as they don’t.

Picture1

by

Brief thoughts on habits, and locality of points of view, and the causes of headaches

I’m going to try to make this short today.  Of course, it won’t be as short as yesterday, when I didn’t write a blog post at all; my apologies for that if you were disappointed or concerned.

I was “at home” yesterday with a migraine headache, which I suspect was triggered partly by the tension from my sore thumbs, though obviously that’s not the whole story.  Then again, when is anything the whole story?  If the universe is infinite, and especially if there are multiverses‒of various levels‒then even describing everything in our visible universe would not be “the whole story”.  We’re left relying on some analog of perturbation theory to try to make sense of most things in the world.

I’m also going to try to make this short because‒stupidly enough‒I’m writing this on my phone again.  I had intended to bring my laptop with me when I left work on Wednesday, but I was stressed out, and (ironically) distracted by the pain in my hands, and by the usual person who keeps us late, who kept us late.  So, I was a bit rushed when leaving, and I screwed up and left the laptop behind.  Habits are things of powerful inertia, which is a good reason to cultivate useful ones.

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day lying in my room with the lights out, listening to some YouTube videos with the sound low.  My brain still feels rather soggy and squishy, like a wrung-out, beat-up old sponge, but I doubt that comes across as being any different than how I usually come across.

Hopefully no one was too worried about me when I didn’t write my usual blog post yesterday.  Honestly, someone who reads my blog regularly enough to notice that I didn’t write one as usual would probably long since either have seriously started to worry about me in general or would simply have given up on me as a lost cause.  They would not be unjustified in either case.  I don’t know what to say to such a person, since I don’t really know what to say to myself.

I’m not sure what topic readers might be interested in discussing, today.  I’m too frustrated to want to get into politics, because frankly, most politics seems to be a panorama of billions of apes who could easily get together and come up with workable solutions to their problems, or at least with working solutions, things that could be tried and adjusted and tweaked, but they simply are not in the habit of rising above their immediate monkey natures.

It’s not so much a problem that they respond to local pressures and incentives‒that’s the nature of reality itself, and me indeed be a good definition of locality; it can’t be avoided, any more than a closed system can choose to ignore the conservation of momentum or the 2nd law of thermodynamics.  It’s that they don’t even try to lift their heads up and look out beyond their own habitual points of view, their own emotional reactions and pre-digested judgmentalism, to try to get a bigger and deeper awareness of objective versus subjective reality.  Ironically, this would have the effect of potentially making those more distant pieces of information into local pressures and incentives, because they would be in their heads.

I don’t have high hopes for the human race, though there are occasional glimmers of promise here and there.  Unfortunately, it seems that too many people think that anyone who doesn’t agree with them about all matters other than purely aesthetic taste‒and sometimes even that becomes a dividing line‒is not merely wrong but is actually evil.  But no two people will agree on absolutely everything, because the phase space of possible thoughts and values, if not infinite, is vastly larger than the space of all thoughts that have ever been.  So, this attitude effectively balkanizes the whole human race into 8 billion individual instances of solitary versions of “Us” set against a vast sea of Them.

Maybe we should take a hint from George Harrison and have all people who so “proudly” display their pronouns on various social media* simply use “I/Me/Mine”.  Most of their little proclamations appear‒to those of us observing humans from the outside‒simply to be akin to the non-functional constructions of bower birds or the dances of bird of paradise, not the well-considered but provisional positions of creatures with sophisticated minds.  They might as well pin a leek on their lapels or put a sign in their shop windows reading “worker of the world unite”.  Or they could just whistle “Dixie”.

Okay, well, I guess that’s what I was going to write about today.  Who would have guessed?  Who would have bothered to make a guess?  Probably no one.  Why would anyone bother thinking about a creature like me?  I wish I didn’t have to think about me, frankly, so I can’t hold it against you if you don’t want to do it.  I’m tired of the whole mess already.

Oh, and incidentally, my pronouns are “It/it”…other than first person pronouns, obviously.  Those are “I/Me/Mine”.

*Which, I suspect, most of them do as a badge of fashion‒like wearing a ball cap with the emblem of a sports team‒not as any deeply thought out statement about the importance of such tags and identifiers.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

by

She told me to walk this way…

It’s Saturday.

I say that just in case you didn’t know.  I hope most of you are relaxing at home with your family and/or loved ones as you read this.  As I write it, I am of course sitting at the bus stop.

You may recall that yesterday my back was acting up especially badly.  It did so all day, pretty much without relent, despite copious use (probably to toxic levels) of OTC meds.

In the evening, after I had ridden the train back down south, I was waiting for the bus and watching the app that tracks arrival times at any given stop, with real time updates on delays or earliness.  The timing of the train’s arrival had been such that there was a bit of a wait (about twenty minutes or so) before the next bus.

But the bus didn’t show at the predicted time, and when I looked back at the app, it had just skipped ahead to the next bus time, half an hour later.  It seemed they had simply canceled that bus without notifying anyone.

I waited about five more minutes before getting fed up.  My patience was far from its peak in the first place, after a day of significantly elevated pain, and the lack of notification‒much more so than the apparent bus cancellation‒irked me mightily.  I figured, “You know what, I don’t feel like waiting for the next bus,”  So, I started walking.

Of course, as I’m sure you could have predicted, within another five minutes, the bus on which I had given up went rolling past me.  I guess it had just been ten minutes late, but its transponder, or telemetry, or whatever they call them, wasn’t connecting with the system that updates the app.  That’s irritating, but I suppose it sometimes happens when you put naked house apes (i.e. humans) in charge of technology.

It wasn’t too bad, though.  I decided I would just continue my walk for the 4.5 to 5 miles back to the house.  I took a route through the neighborhoods, some of which I had never passed before, though I knew the way.  It was just after sunset when I started; there was a fairly stiff breeze, and the temperature was in the sixties, so it was a pleasant walk.  It felt almost reminiscent of being out trick-or-treating back up north in my childhood.

Regrettably, of course, there were no Halloween decorations, and no kids in costumes‒I was mainly by myself on the sidewalks, listening to my shuffled “favorite songs” list on YouTube Music‒but I did see, through the large picture window of a third-ish floor “luxury” apartment building, that someone still had their Christmas tree up, and it was fully lit.

That was actually rather nice, although slightly odd and certainly unexpected.  I can understand why someone would want to keep a festive, brightly lit item around even after its traditional moment had passed, especially during the comparative holiday desert that follows New Year.  Sorry, Valentine’s Day does not count as a festive holiday!  And Saint Patrick’s Day, in America at least, is mainly a drinking holiday‒though corned beef and cabbage can be a quite wonderful dinner if one has it!

Returning to the original topic, though, I found that, as I walked, my back began to relax a bit, and before a few miles had passed, the pain had reduced to a much vaguer sensation, then finally it became insignificant relative to my normal tendency even to notice it.  My right Achilles tendon began complaining slightly* by the end of the walk, but it tends to do that anyway, almost since college, after I badly sprained my right ankle while playing catch.

Sorry, I know, this is all rather boring for a blog post, but I felt like having a mild celebration of the fact that I had soothed my back some by walking.  It hurts more again, now, starting as soon as I woke up, but it’s not as bad as it was yesterday, and hopefully it won’t become so.  If it does, I guess I know what to do about it at least.  Just having that degree of available control makes things a little better, even if one doesn’t use it.

I keep thinking about better types of subjects about which to blog‒as you know‒including medical topics and physics and philosophy and psychology and whatnot.  I still owe you all a blog post or audio blog/podcast about sugar.  I haven’t forgotten.  I just have to decide to buckle down and do it.

But motivation, or executive function, or whatever they call it, is apparently often difficult for people with ASD, as I suspect I am, and also, of course, for people with dysthymia/depression, as I know I am.  That’s not an excuse, so to speak, though both are things I certainly didn’t choose.

Who would willingly choose to be depressed?  It’s truly a thing of horror, but it’s not even exciting or interesting or even disgusting horror.  It’s just a lack of any connection, a sense of learned helplessness that precedes any learning.  And, of course, it includes an inability to be optimistic or to feel certain of anything other than how horrible a person one is.

Maybe everyone, if they could see themselves without filter, without excuse, without delusion, would grow weary of themselves, would be disgusted, would end up hating themselves, and hating the world by reflection or projection.

I’ve read that the modern Catholic conception of Hell is not Fire and Brimstone, but merely a state without any connection to God, a complete removal from God’s presence, cut off from the source of life and light.  It’s rather like the Void in Tolkien’s universe, where Melkor wandered and first began having thoughts unlike those of his brethren, and to which he was consigned after the War of Wrath.  Anyway, that Catholic notion feels like a good metaphor for depression.  It’s not fire and brimstone; that’s all too dramatic, even melodramatic, and interesting in its own way.  Dysthymia and depression are much drearier and more dismal than that.  And yet there is pain.

Oh, well.  Maybe even in the Void, a good long walk can help temporarily ease some kinds of pain.  That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

*You wouldn’t think that something named for the mightiest warrior of the Iliad would be prone to whine, would you.  Then again, he was a bit of a snotty character, and he was invulnerable other than his heel in the original story, so he probably would have moaned a lot when in pain.

by

This is a virtual, placeholder title that has become “real”. Can an event horizon be far away?

Yesterday, as I noted when I started my post, I wasn’t sure if I was going to bother to find a Shakespearean quote to alter to make my title, nor to find a picture to add to the post, both as I usually do on Thursdays.  Then, near the end of the post, after I had spontaneously quoted King Lear, it just felt appropriate to find something a little later in that same speech to use for my title.  So, I did.

Once I did that, I figured I might as well find some picture of King Lear in the storm to use at the bottom of the post.  But most of the ones I found had the Jester there next to him, and various other sorts of bric-a-brac, so none of them suited.  Therefore, I did what I often do, which was to find bits and pieces of images that I could throw together and manipulate with the GIMP program to turn into what roughly suited my purpose.

My pictorial version of Lear, if you will, got transplanted to what looks like south Florida, based on the palm trees and the apparent hurricane.  This seemed appropriate, since I was channeling King Lear by quoting him.

I don’t know why I’ve decided to go into the mechanics of those processes, but it was a pretty good way to jump start today’s post.

I forgot to mention yesterday that it was Groundhog’s Day.  Or should that be Groundhogs’ Day?  Is it the day of some Platonic ideal of a groundhog?  Or is it a day named for‒and belonging to‒all groundhogs collectively?  Or is there some other apostrophe convention that applies?  Also, how much ground would a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground?*

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Anyway, it’s Friday, but I’m working tomorrow, so it’s not as though today is anything to celebrate or feel particularly good about for me.  On the other hand, it’s not as though time off is any more engaging for me than work time‒actually, it’s less so, though the physical rest can be useful.

As long as I can remember, I’ve always only socialized, if that’s the right word, with people in places where I was present for some other, underlying purpose, like school or work.  I liked my school friends a lot‒and then to a lesser extent my work friends‒but I’ve never been able to socialize with people purely for socialization’s sake.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a friend just for the sake of making a friend, though I’ve had friends who were very important to me.  But when I’m not local to them, not seeing them semi-automatically, I don’t know how to keep in contact or maintain friendships; I don’t even know how to try, really.  It feels awkward, and I feel intrusive and idiotic; I can’t seem to figure out what to say or do.  Also, I don’t really have anything to add to anyone else’s life, particularly from a distance, so I feel like I would just be a taker, or at least a beggar, even if I were able to reach out to people.

I’ve also never had a romantic relationship with someone who hadn’t approached me, really, and again, someone from “school” or work.  I have no confidence along those lines, frankly‒and no real impetus, either.  I wouldn’t even want a relationship with someone with whom I didn’t share a lot of interests and attributes in common, and whom I didn’t know well.  What would be the point?

My attitude is, generally, that having sex with someone with whom you’re not truly close, and whom you don’t know and care about a good deal, is just complicated masturbation.  And most of the time, I think people can do that better alone, and without risk of STDs and arguments and heartbreak and infidelity and all the potential nightmares that can come with a relationship.

I don’t know, I guess that’s one of the areas in which I’m particularly weird.  I am lonely, of course, but I’m not really able to do anything about it.  And I don’t think it’s that irrational to be “once bitten, twice shy” about romantic relationships, especially when one is neurologically ill-equipped for making such relationships work, and when the previous instance(s) in which one was “bitten” were severely painful, with deep and chronic ill-effects.

Better to die alone than to try to seek out a life partner when one is constitutionally ill-equipped to bring anyone joy, and when one’s previous attempts have all exploded catastrophically in the long run.  Who needs that extra-spicy, sour and caustic pain, enhanced by the fact that you thought your significant other would be as loyal to you as you were and would be to them?

Speaking of pain, my back is really killing me this morning.  Just in case you were wondering.  I’m not really sure what made it flare up.  I mean, it hurts pretty nearly all the time, but the amount isn’t constant, and I’m always trying to discern patterns in things that make it worsen or improve.  It’s the single most consistent aspect of my life, but I certainly wouldn’t miss it if I could cure it.

Still, I think there’s ultimately going to be only one escape from my pain, and though it couldn’t be called a cure, at least it’s an erasure.  Pain can be endured when one has reasons to endure it, or things that counterbalance it.  I’ve lost most of those, however, if not all of them.  All that’s left are attempts at distraction, and those are rapidly losing efficacy.  All the while I’m stuck between the poles of trying to find the courage to end it all and wondering if it’s even conceivable, let alone possible, for me to find any convincing reason to continue.

Oh, well.  I’ve got nothing on either pole right now, though I think I’m much closer to the former than the latter.  I guess I’ll “talk to you” tomorrow.

*Credit to James Acaster for that joke.  He’s very funny, in a purposely bizarre way.  His version of Pinocchio is priceless.

by

I blog not you, you elements, with unkindness

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, February 2nd, and the day of the week on which I’ve long done my semi-traditional blog posting.

I don’t know whether I have the energy to hunt for a Shakespeare quote to alter and/or a picture to put at the bottom, both vaguely related to whatever “subject” I address in the blog.  But, of course, by now, you readers will know what decision I, the writer, will have made, even as you read the words I’m writing while I do not know.

It’s a bit wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, isn’t it?

Of course, the biological experience of time is much more malleable and irregular than the actual nature of time, but time is not a simple, straight, linear dimension.  It’s warped by the planet beneath your feet, among many other things.  Your physical body’s tendency to want to follow the most “direct” path through it‒and the fact that the planet is in the way, preventing you from following that path‒creates what we call gravity, locally.

When you’re free-falling, you’re coasting through time (and space, of course), and it’s the ground that actually accelerates you once you reach it.  It’s a hell of an acceleration if you’ve been pursuing your geodesic unimpeded for long by the time the ground throws itself into your path.  Human’s aren’t built to withstand that kind of acceleration.

I’m writing with my smartphone again, today, by the way.  It’s just too annoying to deal with the laptop at the bus stop.  I also wrote more words than I really had meant to write yesterday, probably because I type faster on the laptop, but I don’t think the increased number of words was associated with an increase in actual content.  I think the signal-to-noise ratio, if you will, of my blog post yesterday was lower than it has tended to be with the phone.  That’s not an objective measure, however, and others may disagree.

As for my thumbs, they already feel a bit better than they did, and they’re not giving me too much trouble now.  I have some Voltaren cream (or is it an ointment?) that I can apply to the joints if necessary, though I already take round-the-clock NSAIDs every day for my chronic pain, so it’s not really recommended that I add the Voltaren, a strong NSAID in it’s own right.  It increases the risk for kidney damage and liver damage and stomach issues and so on.  But I’m already at risk for those things (though I take Omeprazole for my stomach protection) and I don’t see easy short-term solutions to the problem.

This is one of the conundrums (conundra?  Probably not) that make opiates and opioids both necessary and yet culturally difficult‒our non-psychoactive pain medications are literally toxic to our bodies above a quite low threshold relative to their analgesic powers.  Yet pain does not easily just go away on its own in many cases‒biology is subject to much stronger pressures for pain to persist than to allow it easily to be relieved, and those incentives will remain so in any evolutionarily stable form of life.

Opiates and the like can work against nearly any degree of pain with limited direct toxicity, but with diminishing success and tolerance, requiring increasing doses over time*.  But they do affect neural circuitry, reward, and motivation, among other things, and so their use is complicated‒and it’s additionally complicated by the fact that the treatment of pain, physical and psychological, is somewhat taboo in our society.

The use of various substances in one’s own body is even criminalized, and so black markets arise to take advantage of the inevitable demand.  And without matters being out in the open and subject to expert scrutiny and monitoring and education, various abuses and issues relating to lack of access to appropriate guidance and treatment and support arise and worsen.

And they will persist.

Do you think continuing to criminalize the use of drugs of various kinds will decrease abuse and death and even violence related to the drugs?  You hypocrites!  I say to you that it is the criminalization of that use that created the black markets and abuse and danger and sordidness‒and, indeed, the majority of the deaths‒in the first place!

You punish people for trying, however imperfectly, to treat chronic pain and those who suffer from it from addressing it, and are surprised that sufferers turn to the market you have created for illicit meds.  You have the temerity to be “shocked” that people die from the unmonitored, unregulated, inexpert use and manufacture of these things which you have removed from the bailiwick of expert awareness and oversight and monitoring.  You took an area that should have been medical and made it criminal and are stupid enough to be surprised that opportunistic criminals (whether they be gangs or governments or otherwise) are not as careful and caring as actual medical professionals.

And sometimes you are so hopelessly moronic as to imagine that further punishments of both producers and suppliers‒and even users‒of drugs will change the problem or decrease it or make it go away.  As if making an already suffering person’s life even more difficult and miserable is going to diminish their urge for relief and escape from at least some forms of pain, and their willingness to risk the permanent end to their pain that is death by overdose.  I’d need to exist macroscopically in all the ten spatial dimensions of M Theory to be able to give that the eye roll that nonsense deserves.

Phew.  That was a heckuva tangent.

I don’t actually use opioids or related medications, though I have been prescribed them in the past.  They interact with my rather peculiar nervous system in ways I find truly unpleasant, though they can help with pain.  So, instead, I suffer constant daily assaults on my kidneys and GI tract and my liver, and I accept that.

It’s not as though I will seek treatment if my organs fail.  I have no insurance, for one thing, but also, I just don’t see any point in trying to preserve my existence.  Heck, I’ve been told I have a possible recurrence or deterioration of my congenital heart problem‒I’m not fully convinced that it’s really any kind of recurrence‒for which I had heart surgery when I was 18, but I have no interest in pursuing possible further exploration or treatment of it, anyway.

Let my kidneys fail, let my liver fail, let my heart fail!  Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks!  Why would I try to preserve or prolong my existence when I don’t even like myself, let alone have anyone else nearby who likes me and spends time with me***?

Anyway, that went off the rails pretty quickly, didn’t it?  It also got longer than I expected.  Sorry.

I still don’t know the answer to my initial wondering about titles and pictures‒but you all do.  And I love you for it.

TTFN

windstormandmanscaled

*Though at least they don’t directly poison livers and kidneys, and the needed doses don’t keep going up without limit, though they are nevertheless often higher than most doctors are willing to prescribe.  This is largely because doctors fear having what happened to me happen to them, and who can blame them?  The only exception to this general hesitancy is with cancer.  People with cancer are allowed to be treated with whatever level of pain medicine it takes to reduce their pain, because in the typical human “mind” having cancer pain is different, and people with cancer are special.  They’re allowed to be dependent on pain medications, because surely they have the only type of pain that can go on and on without resolving and can steal all the joy from their lives, eventually killing them.  Anyone else is just a disgusting drug addict, a scum of the Earth, and deserves merely contempt**.

**The latter portion of the above paragraph is sarcastic.

***I cannot blame them, so don’t be defensive on my behalf.  I find myself infuriating and disgusting.