Health

by

It seems to me most strange that men should blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m writing yet another blog post.  I’m also writing this on my miniature laptop computer, though it has seen better days and is getting a little bit laggy.

I don’t have anything in particular about which to write.  Certainly, I have no subject like yesterday’s, though I do wish to make clear that I was not joking in my previous blog post, and I am every bit as resolved today as I was yesterday to carry out my plan.  I’ve already begun, in fact, in the sense that yesterday I was very specific about what I ate.

Of course, I didn’t sleep very well last night, and I feel very, very tired, but what else is new?  I’ve been tired for almost as long as I can remember.  This fact gets tiring in its own right, which seems to be, well, not a contradiction, and certainly not ironic, but a positive (yet not positive, if you see what I mean) feedback loop.  Being tired is exhausting of morale, or poisonous to the will, or however you want to put it.

I think you probably worry too much about such things, though.  You should be like me, a catch as catch can, go with the flow, Hippy Dippy Dan sort of guy.

Ha ha, that’s a joke, of course.  I am not a laid-back person, and I don’t know that I ever have been.  I’m wound so tightly that only dogs and bats can hear me vibrating.  There were at least three times yesterday in the office when I literally jumped at sudden noises*.  It’s not such a surprise, I guess, that I get along well with cats—at least as well as most cats do with each other.

As an aside, since I’m writing this on the laptop computer for the first time in a while, might I say that if any of you have any avenues by which to address the movers and shakers of Microsoft, please tell them to do something about that stupid little icon that relates to their “AI”** which is there because, apparently, most people feel the need to have some electronic pseudo-entity hold their hands while they write something on a frikking word processor.

It’s pathetic and irritating.  If you know a way simply to turn that process off voluntarily, please let me know.  I haven’t looked for how to do it, but if it’s anything like how readily one can change from their new, horrible default font, there may be no readily available avenue.

I don’t need an AI to help me write.  I’ve been writing since before the effing TRS-80 came out.  I correct AI editing suggestions more often than they correct me.

I’m all in favor of spelling and grammar checkers, especially the ones that work after the fact, not while one is still writing (which can be quite distracting and annoying).  After all, pretty much everyone makes some errors in a first draft.  But I don’t need a machine to help create my writing for me, any more than I want one to help me come up with a tune or draw a picture from scratch.

My boss once said of me, when a few of us were discussing such things in passing in the office, “Doc is an AI.”  I guess that’s a compliment, and I took it as such, but if he was only thinking of our current generation of such things, it’s a bit insulting (though he didn’t mean it thus, I’m quite sure).

Anyway, that’s all as may be.  I got the payroll done efficiently yesterday, and honestly, I felt relatively upbeat in the office.  I haven’t yet revealed my plan to anyone there, yet; the time wasn’t really right, and I don’t want people to get distracted.  But there was a certain freedom of mind associated with having come to a decision, and having declared it publicly, that if I cannot in fairly short order get thinner and reduce my pain, I will kill myself.

Perhaps it’s just the sense of having an available escape that made me feel a bit less stressed.  As Radiohead sang in “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Yeah, I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape.  Escape.”  Hitting the bottom can be freeing sometimes, and the availability of an escape can be soothing.

It’s not ideal, of course.  It would be much better if people didn’t ever need to feel that they needed an escape.  But reality was not made for us, and we were not so much made for it as made by it, and quite by accident, as far as I can see.  In a way, if there were a designer that made us for reality, there would be more about which to complain, because that designer clearly fucked up many times.

I am surely one of those fuckups.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  I hope you all have a good day, or at least as good a day as you can.  I’m going to have a usual, typical day for me, probably, which is nothing about which to write home.  And I don’t think I’ll write about it here.

TTFN

*My recording of a sudden versus not-so-sudden noise.

**That looks like the name Al, doesn’t it?  Can you tell the difference without context?

by

I have a plan, though I have no dream

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day.  This means that today at the office will be relatively stressful, especially since the largest of the relevant weekly reports didn’t arrive until just before closing time yesterday, so I didn’t get the chance to start to work through it.  Still, that’s okay.  It’s been a weirdly slow week at the office, all things considered (even on Monday, when I wasn’t there), so it won’t be as bad as it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve come to a tentative‒well, not all that tentative, really, but like all rational conclusions it is in principle provisional‒plan or goal set or determination or whatever the most appropriate term might be.

Here it is:

Within a fairly short period of time (I don’t have a specific amount laid aside, but it will certainly be well before my next birthday*) one of three things will have happened.

1)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will help reduce my chronic pain.

2)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will not help reduce my chronic pain.

3)  I will fail to lose a significant amount of weight.

It’s not that I’m horribly overweight, but I am nearly the heaviest I have ever been, and that’s not cool, so to speak.  It certainly isn’t likely to be helping my chronic pain.

Anyway, the upshot of the plan is, if the first thing happens, I will then try to reassess my depression and anxiety and my lifestyle and my ASD and see where to go from there.

If one of the latter two outcomes occurs, I will kill myself.

I’m not sure by what means I will do so, and whether I will make it public or not, or if I will try to make it some kind of statement; I just don’t know.  I try not to box myself in with too many specifics about things I’m going to do, because to do so would limit me; the best means and methods might reveal themselves only in the future.

I think this plan makes good sense.  At the very least, I would like to try to reduce my chronic pain, and though I doubt that all of it would go away with a significant reduction in weight, I expect at least some of it will improve.  Whatever else is the case, if I lose a significant amount of weight and it doesn’t help my pain, well, at least I will have lost weight and will not die as quite the disgusting creature that I currently am.

I intend at least tacitly to inform some of the people at the office of this plan‒at least the people who are smart enough to take it seriously.  That way I can hopefully avoid anyone unwittingly sabotaging my goals by offering me food of various kinds that will get in the way of weight loss; it can be very difficult to resist temptation in any given moment.  And, of course, people who know my intention and who for whatever reason are willing to sabotage it, will be thereby revealed to be my enemies.

Now, enemies are not as troubling a thing for someone who is depressed and suicidal (Oh, what are you going to do to me, keep me alive?) but I do not promise that, if I fail and have just to kill myself, that I will not take the opportunity to take vengeance on those who deserve it.

Of course, I also do not promise that I will take vengeance upon anyone at all.  For the most part, in my life, the opinions, nature, state of being, and other aspects of people I don’t like (or who don’t like me) are not very important.  I suppose that’s one positive aspect of autism spectrum disorder:  no one really lives in my head rent-free, as the saying goes.

People who are literally in my presence impinge upon my consciousness, but I don’t actually ever really even imagine what other people are thinking or doing when I’m not with them**.  As long as they just leave me alone and don’t bother me, I generally don’t tend to hold grudges.  Just because I consider someone my enemy, doesn’t mean I consider myself their enemy.

That may be a subtle distinction, but it’s significant.  If someone is my enemy, it’s something I may need to take into account in my dealings, depending on the situation, but then, so is infectious disease and shower mildew.  It’s not personally significant to me.

But if I declare myself someone else’s enemy, then I will do my best to merit the title “The Enemy” like Sauron and Morgoth, like Doom and Lord Foul (and worse than Voldemort).

Well, I would be worse than the wizard formerly known as Tom Riddle in general, but like him, and less like the others, I would not tend to want to torment my enemies.  There would be no clever deathtraps and torture chambers (physical or psychological) from which one’s targets can potentially escape.  I prefer the style of the Terminator or The Accountant; just wipe the subject from existence as completely and efficiently as possible.

Anyway, that’s a digression.  I wouldn’t do to others what I’m not willing to do to myself, and the only person I’m at all likely to kill is me, which seems fair.  So, that’s the plan:  Try to do something that has at least some chance of reducing my chronic pain, and if I fail, die in short order.

I’m not completely sure which outcome I prefer.

*I’m thinking of setting it at no later than what would have been my next wedding anniversary if I were still married.

**This is probably related to deficits in the so-called theory of mind that are a frequent part of ASD.

by

What shall I do now?

I wrote the beginning of a first draft of a post for yesterday (which was Monday, since today is Tuesday) before it became obvious as I was getting ready for work that something in my GI tract, something that I had eaten, was taking its vengeance upon me.

I ended up not going to the office yesterday, and I ended up not even posting the draft, which I considered posting as was*.  However, there was really not much substance to it.  I think I realized as I was writing that it was St. Patrick’s Day, so I mentioned that in passing, but it’s never been a holiday that means much to me, at least not now that I cannot eat my mother’s homemade corned beef and cabbage.

Anyway, that’s a lot of the gist of yesterday’s post, at least if I recall correctly.  Oh, right, I also mentioned that, starting yesterday morning, I am not taking St. John’s Wort anymore.  I gave it well over the 6 week potential time frame for antidepressants at least to start to make a noticeable difference.  Some enterprising reader can‒if you are so inclined‒try to work out based on mentions in my posts roughly how long I’ve been going, but clearly it’s not been making my depression diminish; I think we can all agree about that.

I was also worried, probably unnecessarily, that it might be contributing to the recent apparent worsening of my chronic pain.  I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a bit too soon to tell, and the matter is muddied by my recent GI trouble, which still leaves me feeling a bit bloated and sore this morning.

As for anything else, well, I don’t know.  What else do I have about which to write other than depression and illness and pain and insomnia?  I suppose I could write more about autism spectrum disorder, but I feel that would be a bit presumptuous of me.

Of course, I’ve learned a fair amount about autism in the research that eventually led me to seek a diagnosis, and my medical and scientific background gives me other advantages in understanding.  But I have been someone diagnosed with autism (level 2, not just level 1, so apparently I need significant support**) only for a few weeks now, so I don’t know about what even to talk.  What of the people, places, and events of my life are explained or explicated by the autism diagnosis?  Does it, or will it, help me come to terms with any of it?  I don’t know.

I certainly don’t feel that I can just waltz into any discussions of or by people with autism, or communities of such people, and have anything useful to say.  I also don’t feel that I have found “my people”, though I certainly can “get” at least some of the things they discuss better than I can some of the things that other people discuss.  But I still feel very much like an alien, an outsider, a changeling, a replicant, something that doesn’t belong on this planet‒even when I’m interacting with neurodivergent people.

So, I guess we’ll see what happens with the DCing of the Wort.  I doubt it will really affect my pain, though it may pain my affect*** if my depression worsens even from where it is now thanks to stopping it.  In any case, it really doesn’t matter, because I really don’t matter, so Batman knows what will happen.  If I implode completely, or if I crash and burn, or whatever figure of speech you want to use, there will be no significant loss, not even to me.

I don’t know what else to say.  I’m not doing anything creative or artistic.  I haven’t played guitar (or any other instrument) in weeks now, and I haven’t written fiction, and I haven’t drawn.  I’ve barely read anything other than rereading my own stuff to try to inspire or at least trigger myself.  That hasn’t worked.

So, who knows what will happen?  I certainly don’t.  But in the meanwhile, I hope you have a good day.

*The past tense of “as is”.

**I don’t really have that support, but just because someone needs something to be able to thrive doesn’t mean that thing is available to them.  Reality is heartless.

***Ha ha.

by

Are you entitled to a headline?

It’s Wednesday, and I’m writing this post using my laptop computer, and here we all are again, though we are not on the Mississippi.

Actually, for all I know, some of you reading actually are on that river.  But I am not, and I don’t think I ever have been “on” it, though I think I have crossed over it at least once, on a bridge somewhere.  I’ve also had at least one dream that I can vaguely remember from long ago about driving in a car up a road that ran alongside some imaginary Mississippi (I think I was on the west side of it) but whatever it was in my dream was almost certainly not much like the real thing.  Similarly, the landscape around was also not at all like what I’m sure the real landscape along the Mississippi really is.  It was almost…compressed, and also simplified, in a way rather reminiscent of the Territories in the Stephen King/Peter Straub book The Talisman.

That was a weird digression, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s not really a big deal, though.  I have no particular agenda for today’s post, so it’s really going to be just a stream-of-my-consciousness thing.  Hopefully that won’t be too unpleasant for you.  If it is, I suppose you can console yourself with the fact that you only have to endure it for the few minutes it takes to read the post—indeed, you don’t actually have to read the whole thing, though if you’re reading these words, you’ve probably already read a substantial amount of it.

Still, least you’re not stuck inside this consciousness like I am, every waking hour.  And I have more waking hours than most people do because of my insomnia.

I had a particularly bad pain day yesterday.  I actually needed to use my bamboo walking staff to get up from my seat.  Well, I didn’t truly need to use it, I guess; I was able to do it without.  But it hurt quite a lot more to stand up without it than with it.

I’m not certain what caused this rather severe exacerbation.  Sometimes I try to do slightly different exercises or stretching or to wear different shoes and whatnot to see if they are better, and sometimes it just turns out they are worse.  On the other hand, sometimes the pain seems just to be random, or at least it’s worsened by some event or series of events that are not clear, and over which I have no apparent control.  It’s frustrating.  I keep trying, believe me; I’m still alive, after all*.  But Batman knows it’s hard to know why I try, because I see few if any potential short-term or long-term rewards.

Of course, I’m also no further along in deciding what, if anything, to do about my autism diagnosis.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe it’s enough just to know.  Supposedly there are supports and communities and so on for people with autism, but I am not good at seeking out communities at the best of times.

At least some people use this sort of situation as inspiration to make “content”, either on Instagram or on YouTube or similar.  I did do my old YouTube video “Asperger’s…or not?”  I guess I could do another one, a sort of sequel to that one, now that I have my formal diagnosis.  Unfortunately, I’m even more hideous to look at now than I was back then, so the prospect of making a video is of mixed potential at best.

In any case, I have been having a lot of trouble, largely because of the pain and my depression.  I’ve been taking the Saint John’s Wort for several weeks now, and I’m far from sure that it’s having any beneficial effects on my mood.  It all makes me want to ask “What is Saint John’s worth?”

Yes, that’s the sort of joke I think of whenever I write those words.  It’s not something I seem able to resist.  I have more of an excuse now, I suppose, but I doubt that makes it any better or more tolerable.

I don’t know what to write.  I don’t know what to do about my pain or my depression.  I don’t know what to do in general.  I’m getting lots of strong urges to hurt myself—partly just for distraction, partly to express my frustration, which I cannot seem to do in other ways, and largely because I just hate myself—and I have succumbed to them more than once recently.  That’s not a good trend.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I’ve already said more than I had to say, so the signal to noise ratio of this post is small.  But what part is the signal and what part is the noise?  I’ll give you a hint:  anything that seems whimsical and humorous and upbeat is almost certainly noise.  It’s my habitual cloak, since I know that people in general don’t want to deal with someone who is in distress.  They want to be able to convince themselves that there is nothing that needs to be done, or that there is simply nothing anyone can do.  It’s nice to be able to give those people an out.

As for the prospect of finding some out for myself, one way or another, well, I guess you can only wait and see, while I try to see if I can find any answers, whether trivial or significant.  And if nothing else changes, tomorrow I will write another blog post.

Please, please, try to have a better day than I have.

*Whether or not that’s a good thing is a question on which I am far from clear.

by

When we fight reality, reality always wins.

It’s Tuesday morning now‒which, fortunately, as far as I know, has never been described as “never-ending”.  Alas, the same cannot be said of Tuesday afternoon.  However, since we are not still stuck in the last Tuesday afternoon‒or indeed in the very first Tuesday afternoon‒then we have to conclude that the line “Tuesday afternoon is never-ending” from the Beatles song Lady Madonna is a poetic figure of speech.

That’s weirdly frustrating for me.  It reminds me a bit of how I remember reading that Tolkien was frustrated with the play Macbeth because Birnam Wood didn’t actually come to Dunsinane, signaling Macbeth’s imminent defeat*.  Tolkien didn’t see why, in a play that clearly involved the supernatural, the wood could not literally come to Dunsinane.

Of course, in the fullness of time, in his own work, the Forest of Fangorn really did come to Isengard, and to Helm’s Deep.  It’s one of the best moments in The Lord of the Rings.

How did I get onto that subject?  Or, as Théoden asked, “How did it come to this?”

Now I’m suddenly thinking about the moment when Théoden, despairing, asks (in the movie) “What can men do against such reckless hate?”  It’s a real moment of doubt and pain, but Aragorn is there to support his spirit.

And that makes me think of doing a “parody” version of Sympathy for the Devil, in which we would have the line, “I was ‘round when Théoden had his moment of doubt and pain / Made damn sure that the uruk hai met our swords and sealed their fate.”  It could be called, perhaps, Sympathy for the Ranger or Sympathy for the Strider or something like that.

We could have lines like “Just as every Noldor is a kinslayer, and all the Nazgul slaves / as East is West just call me…Aragorn, ‘cause Minas Tirith I will save,” or something along those lines.  It’s a bit silly and cheesy, I guess, but that’s okay; it’s a parody.  Anyway, I don’t think I’m actually going to try to produce a whole set of lyrics for it, but who knows?  I’ve done weirder things for more frivolous reasons.

As for what to do about relatively more serious things‒i.e., my diagnosis of ASD level2‒I still don’t know.  I don’t know how I’m going to go about following the recommendations in the report, such as they are.  Knowing at least some of the explanations for many of the difficulties I’ve had in my life, including my relatively intractable troubles with depression and with insomnia and social anxiety, is a good thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t necessarily give me any idea how to approach things from here.

In some sense, it is a little discouraging, especially regarding my depression and insomnia, since there is no cure for neurodevelopmental disorders; they are a product of the fundamental structure and function of the brain.  At best, they can be managed.  This also explains why many traditional or typical treatments for such things do not work well in those with ASD; evidently, for instance, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t tend to work as well for people with autism as it does for “neurotypical” people.  And I know that antidepressants have more limited efficacy as well.

This makes sense.  We commonly hear of how many of the treatments and scientific understanding of major illness were for a long time only studied in men, and women were treated the same way as males, until slowly, gradually, the medical community realized that many diseases present differently in women, and respond differently to treatment.

Well, autistic and other “neurodivergent” people are a much smaller portion of the population than women are, and we don’t know as much as we would like about psychiatric and related disorders and their treatment even in the neurotypical.  It makes sense that we should be somewhat behind the curve in even understanding, let alone knowing how to treat, psychological and neurological disorders in those with underlying neurodevelopmental conditions.

The universe is complicated.  Any attempt to make it seem or feel less so, as by following the “ideas” of demagogues and demonizing those who might disagree, is just going to leave one vulnerable to underlying, actual reality‒which is not merely a matter of perception.

The universe at large does not care what you believe.  You can definitely be killed by forces and things that you not only don’t understand, but in which you don’t believe, or about which you have not the slightest inkling.  As a particularly gruesome example, it didn’t matter whether JFK ever knew he was being shot at, let alone that he had been hit.  A person can die before they even know that anything is happening; they can be just snuffed out and gone.  Probably most people, and nearly all other animals, die not understanding at all what is killing them or how or why or what death is.

Such is the evenhanded dealing of the world, to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge.  The only thing we can do to armor ourselves is to try to understand as much about the universe as we can.  For one never knows what knowledge will be useful or even essential before one has that knowledge.  Greater knowledge is always worthwhile, all other things being equal.

Of course, all other things never really are equal, but that’s why it pays to learn how to solve partial differential equations.

That’s enough for now.  Have a good day if you can, please.

*Macbeth’s reaction when he receives the news that, apparently, Birnam Wood really has come to Dunsinane Hill, is to hit the messenger and yell “Liar and slave!”  I know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s kind of funny and also is an instance of one of the cardinal failures of literary and dramatic (and real life) villains:  they discourage their own people from giving them information by punishing them for delivering accurate but bad news.

by

(ASD 2) x 2

It’s Monday morning now, and it’s a new month, and I’m writing a new blog post, one that will‒or should‒not be like the old post.  Though, of course, superficially it will look like most of the others, and for someone perusing a bunch of them who does not happen to read English, there will almost certainly be no distinguishing characteristics.  Certainly there will be no meaningful ones.

Be that as it may, as of Friday evening, I have now received my autism assessment report.  It is official; I have been diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorder, level 2.

The level 2 part of that surprised me a little bit.  In case you don’t know‒and for most of you, there’s no reason why you would‒the levels of autism, not in order, are:

Level 1:  What would be called “high-functioning” autism by the hoi polloi, though that term is frowned upon by the “neurodivergent” community by and large, because it judges the quality of a person with autism by how well they can pretend to be someone without autism.  In any case, those with level 1 are people who have autism but are not significantly disabled by it, and are able to do okay on their own with minimal or at least fairly easy accommodation.

Level 3:  These are people who are more severely impaired by their autism, and are more or less dependent upon support from others; they cannot really function on their own at all.

Level 2 is mid-range (duh!) and is characterized by needing “substantial” or “considerable” support.  Here’s a quote from a web-search:  “Autism Level 2 means a moderate level of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), where an individual requires substantial support to manage social communication and daily activities, exhibiting more noticeable challenges in social interaction and repetitive behaviors compared to Level 1, but not as severe as Level 3.”

I guess my bias was that, if diagnosed, I would be level 1, since I do live on my own and I don’t really have any support.  On the other hand, there’s little argument but that my life is a complete mess, and it’s not improving.  So I guess I really don’t do so well on my own.  But it’s not as though I have any health insurance or any other access to support services to help me improve things.  Still, at least it explains a little bit about my intractable insomnia and depression and anxiety and so on, as well as all my many failed interpersonal relationships.

I don’t yet know whether this knowledge will make any difference for me.  I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with the result.  I am still digesting it.

There is, however, an amusing coincidence, if you enjoy such things*.  I was born with an atrial septal defect (a hole between the upper chambers of the heart) “secundum type”, that was repaired when I was 18.  In other words, that was “ASD” secundum type.  So, one might say, ASD type 2.

And now I have Autism Spectrum Disorder, level 2, so:  ASD level 2.

These are both official acronyms used by the medical community.  It’s nothing but a coincidence, of course, but it is a peculiar and slightly amusing one.  I have been diagnosed with ASD 2 in two different ways.  There’s only one of the two for which there was a surgical intervention that was essentially curative.  The other is something for which one just has to adjust and deal as well as one can.  Fortunately, I’m really good at adjusting to and dealing with just about anything that comes at me.

Ha ha ha ha ha!  That was a lie, obviously.  I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly good at adjusting to things, except perforce, which has certainly happened a fair number of times.

Anyway, again, I don’t know at all what I’m going to do with this information.  I don’t know how I could possibly actually seek, let alone obtain, any manner of support and/or accommodation, other than the basic stuff that happens more or less on its own.  I’m going to tell a few people at work, I think‒certainly the owner, though I feel a bit shy about that, but also my two coworkers with whom I am closest, one of whom has a child with autism.

I don’t know how much will change otherwise.  But I figured I would share this information with those of you who read this blog regularly‒a rarefied few individuals, I must say.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, too, barring the unforeseen (a caveat that always applies).  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day as you possibly can.

*Well, the councidence’s existence isn’t actually conditional upon you enjoying it, but I think you know what I mean.  Please let me know in the comments below if you do not know what I mean.  I don’t like not being clear.

by

Udaimonic so-and-so, U.

It’s the last day of February, everyone.  It’s also Friday, the last day of the “typical” work week, and it is also the last day of my work week, since I am not working tomorrow.  It’s not as though I have anything particular to which to look forward this weekend, but I do need the rest.  I’ve been feeling exceptionally exhausted lately.

Alas, as you know, exhaustion does not translate into sleepiness for me, just weariness.  Somewhere in the neurologic centers and relays that connect such things as fatigue and sleep, I have a short circuit, or at least one that doesn’t perform up to spec.

Of course, my pain continues, though as always, I have tried to adapt my activity, my posture, my exercise, my shoes…even my underclothes to try to decrease my pain.  I have put a tremendous amount of mental energy into this over the years.  If I had devoted that time/energy/effort to the study of any abstract problem‒say, the dynamics of an accelerating near-light-speed spacecraft approaching its local Schwarzschild “radius” as length contraction and “relativistic mass” take effect and bring GR into play‒then I would have made significant, possibly really important, advances.

Alas, when one’s problem is chronic pain (coupled, causally or otherwise, with insomnia), it is very difficult to focus enough mental acuity upon other things.  The very nature of pain as a neurological process in animal systems does not allow it to be easily ignored, or indeed to be ignored at all for any length of time.

Those creatures which can readily ignore pain for long, or who don’t experience pain*, don’t tend to leave as many offspring as those for whom pain is both present and urgent.

It’s a similar problem for those rare people who don’t experience fear, though clinically this seems more likely to happen as a result of damage to the brain rather than being congenital, possibly because children without fear really don’t tend to reach adulthood.

It’s interesting to note that, anecdotally at least, people who don’t feel fear tend to be quite frightening to would-be bullies and predators.  They don’t behave like others do in response to potential threats, and predators tend to rely on fear in others.  A person who looks at them with no more fear than they would at a tree or a rock can be quite disconcerting for someone who has become dependent upon the fear of others.

This is one of the reasons it can be good to have dogs present if you’re guarding something.  They don’t fear guns (generally) so one can’t exactly threaten them with firearms.  And if they attack, they don’t hold back.

That was quite a series of little tangents, wasn’t it?  I think they were interesting, but then again, I was the one who brought them up, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  Whether or not anyone else is interested is difficult to guess.  It’s rather akin to the way things are with humor‒it can be very hard to know consistently what other people will find funny, or for them to know what you find funny, so you might as well amuse yourself.  Then, at least, you can watch to see who enjoys your humor, and those people are the ones with whom you can enjoy such things in the future, at least in principle.

I am horribly tired, and I’m in a great deal of pain as I write this, though for the moment at least I don’t notice any fear that might be present.  Time’s been my way when I’ve been so tired and depressed and in pain that I had no reaction to and felt no fear toward things that would normally have made me quite afraid, from minor things like wasps and bees all the way up to oncoming cars and trucks.  I don’t tend to be afraid of people much, never have been‒at least, I’m not afraid of them physically.  Socially, they can make me quite tense.  In that case, though, the tension is not the same as fear, though I guess it qualifies as anxiety.

Speaking of fear, I fear this is it for this week.  I truly hope that you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful weekend and that you are healthy and safe and eudaimonic**.

*There are people who have a genetic disorder called CIPA:  congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (i.e., they don’t sweat), and they basically don’t experience pain.  They also don’t live very long, and before they die their bodies tend to be quite damaged, often by such simple things as standing in one position for too long, since it doesn’t feel uncomfortable to do so for them.  They also don’t notice infections, and they don’t tend to get fevers.  It occurs to me, however, that though their lives are short, people with CIPA might well have significantly longer pain-free lifespans than, say, I have had.  I had pain issues starting at a pretty young age, after all.  Still, if I could be cured of all pain at this stage of my life, when I am hardly worried about my longevity anyway, I think it would be worth it.

**It’s interesting to consider the prefixes “eu” and “u” in words of Greek origin.  “Utopia”, for instance, literally means “no place”, making it clear that an imagined perfect society does not exist and may be impossible.  Whereas, if one were to write “Eutopia”, one would mean “true place” or “good place”.  Thus, my middle name “Eugene” means “true born” and is etymologically related to the term “eugenics”.  Mind you, only a fool would believe that I was actually the product of some eugenics program, that I am some true-life Khan Noonien Singh***.  “Eugene” was just my paternal grandfather’s name.  On the other hand, while eudaimonia means “good spirit” and refers to a state of general emotional and mental well-being, “udaimonia” would mean “no spirit”.  That sounds more pertinent to me, don’t you think? 

***Though I suppose one could speculate that I was a failure of such a program.

by

The blog of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course, which is why I’ve greeted you as I have.

I slept worse than usual even for me last night, and yet I’m wired and tense, not at all sleepy.  I cannot go on this way.

I’m once again writing this on my phone.  I got at least a few days’ rest for my thumbs, and it has seemed to help.  But mostly, I just didn’t want to carry my mini laptop back with me yesterday, because I’ve been having a rather severe exacerbation of my chronic pain, worse than usual, and it’s just a lot of work to deal with it and with extra weight.

I suspect that the various little things I’m trying to do to improve my strength and health are actually backfiring and making my pain worse rather than better.  It’s frustrating.  I really don’t like to give up on things and I am terribly stubborn, but it’s getting to be just too much.  Every day veers between tedium and stress and exhaustion and pain, and there is no evidence of any light or even rest anywhere along this tunnel.  There certainly doesn’t appear to be any exit other than the obvious one.

I’m still waiting for the results of my autism assessment, which is not any surprise; it’s not technically “due” until tomorrow, so I’m just being overanxious in hoping for it sooner.  Still, I’m not sure what difference it’s going to make, one way or another.  It’s not as though I’ll be able to avail myself of any services for adults with ASD or anything.  This is Florida, America’s limp and syphilitic penis, and there are no real such health services of which I’m aware.  Also, I have no insurance; I cannot seem to manage to keep track of and maintain such things.

I really don’t feel any hope for my future.  I’m just tired and sore and tense and adrift, and I don’t fit with anyone or anything else in the world.  You sometimes hear someone talking about trying to find one’s “people” as it were‒the people who share similar interests and characteristics‒but I don’t think I have a “people”.  I’m pretty sure that anywhere I go I will be a weird outsider who never really fits in.

To be fair, when it comes to most groups I don’t particularly want to fit in.  Many things that other people find interesting don’t grab my attention at all.  I don’t begrudge people their interests, of course, as long as they’re not harming anyone else.  The more joy in the world the better, I would say, ceteris paribus.

But I can’t seem to form joy.  I am at best capable of momentary distraction.  Okay, new science knowledge can sometimes make me feel actual joy, albeit transient.  But that’s about it.  Even that is losing its charm, especially since there’s no back and forth with anyone about it.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I feel that I’m barely making it through to the end of each day.

I’m sure this is really getting old for all of you, and I’m very sorry about that.  Believe me, I know I’m a miserable person with whom to interact.  I try not to be.  I’ve been trying to be a positive presence, a useful, productive, and positive force in the world, because at least then I can justify my existence.

But it’s exhausting to try to act upbeat and funny and energetic and clever and enthusiastic when you’re just trying to make yourself stop feeling horrible, even if for only a brief time.  I know there exists the famous saying‒admired by many because it rhymes, as if that were a legitimate measure of intellectual quality‒that one should “fake it ’til you make it”.  But I’ve been “faking” it, or trying to do so, for as long as I can remember, and it has not brought about any significant change.

It’s no more effective than was my long experiment in which I applied autosuggestion to myself, repeating the mantra “I love my life and I love myself” (in my head) any time I was walking anywhere or when I was idle.

I almost always have some such message on repeat, trying to accomplish something.

But as far as I can tell, all I’ve accomplished is maybe slowing my descent and degeneration.  I don’t see any way to turn this around‒and I’m pretty smart, and I have been trying to find answers for almost my entire life so far.  Trust me, the obvious ones that tend to spring to mind have not succeeded.

The good news is that, if I were suddenly to disappear‒say, for instance, if after I post this blog entry, no one ever hears from me again in any way‒no one would really be affected.  It would not change anyone’s day-to-day life (other than perhaps a few of my coworkers).

Not to say that no one will mourn me in principle, much as Adam Smith recognized that a European person of learning would feel a rather abstract sense of mourning if all of China were wiped out by some massive earthquake.  I would certainly not be a loss for which any sensible person would be willing even to risk losing their little finger.

Frankly, I doubt that I’m worth someone stubbing their toe.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I work tomorrow, so I expect I’ll write a post then, but I am off this weekend.

TTFN

by

This is my brain, on.

I’ll bet you wish it could be turned off sometimes.  I know I do.

I’m writing this post on my laptop computer today, and at the very least, it’s going to be easier on my thumbs.

I was just about to sing the praises of MS Word, because it looked as though this new page on Word was going to start with the Calibri font instead of that new, Craptos font they’ve made their default because someone somewhere fellated just the right person.  Unfortunately, that was just the program catching up with itself, and the font changed to the new default, and I had to change it back manually.

Honestly, if anyone out there invents time travel to the past and figures out that it can change our timeline (I doubt it), then please, go back in time and interfere with the parents of each and every person involved in the decision to change the base font and in the design of the new font, so that all those people are never even conceived.

You see, I’m being generous.  I just want those people never to have been.  I don’t want them to suffer.

Actually, I do want them to suffer.  I want to torture and burn each and every one of them, to break their bodies with baseball bats and steel pipes and to wash their faces with broken glass.  But I know that’s a bit excessive, so I’m willing to settle for erasing their existence completely.

Such are the better angels of my nature.  This is me being kind.  Thanos was a pussy.

Okay, well, now that I’ve gotten a little bit of the madness out of my system, and all without hurting any actual people, I hope I can go on and write a somewhat sensible blog post.

I’ve already had some frustrations this morning, not least of which was waking up by about 2 am after less than four hours of sleep*.  Other things have happened as well, to do with transportation and so on, but I won’t get into it all.  I would come across as a truly disgruntled curmudgeon and/or just an asshole.  I’m not saying those would not be accurate descriptions of me, and sometimes even comparatively kind ones, but I would rather not come across that way if I can help it.

I haven’t received my report from my autism assessment yet, of course.  Well, not “of course”.  If something is supposed to arrive within a week, that means it could take less than a week, which this would be, if it had already arrived.  Be that as it may, it has not arrived.  There are three more days in that week (and in this month, it turns out), but I would of course rather it arrive sooner than later.  That’s not something about which I have a choice, however.  I put the ball in their court and they are the ones to return it.

Is that a tennis metaphor, the whole “ball in your court” cliché?  I suppose it could refer to volleyball or other “court” sports (but not badminton, since they do not use balls, they use shuttlecocks—why do these terms lend themselves so well to sophomoric jokes?).  I guess it could even have something to do with jurisprudence, but I don’t know what one would be doing with a ball in a court of law.  Maybe it originally referred to a masked ball, or even a formal ball, for all the lawyers and judges, and we’ve all been misunderstanding the metaphor as referring to a physical object, a ball, such as are used in many sports.

I doubt it.

Try not to be too bothered by my nonsense and gibberish.  I’ve always been mad, and I think I’m probably going madder.  That feels like it should be “more mad” but I think “madder” is more proper.  I don’t know for sure.  It doesn’t really madder much, though.  Ha ha.

Anyway, I’ve already reached my target word count for this bouncing bullshit, so I’ll call it quits.  I know I’m joking about it, but my mind really is falling apart.  Or, rather, I guess it’s more that it’s decaying, it’s rotting from within, it’s rusting, it’s crumbling, it’s finally succumbing to all of its design and manufacturing flaws.

I guess I was just a lemon, after all.  Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of lemon with which you can make lemonade.  Sorry about that.

*It’s proper to use “less than” here instead of “fewer than” even though hours are, in a sense, discrete, countable units, because I am referring to an overall measure of continuous time—an integral amount of sleep if you will—and I am giving an estimate, rounded up to what is perhaps the nearest whole hour.  It’s rather akin to saying you have drawn less than three buckets of water from a well; though buckets are discrete, water is continuous, so to speak.  On the other hand, it’s not sensible to say “there were less than ten people in the room,” for instance.  People are not a continuous variable.  They come in quanta, if you will, in indivisible** chunks.

**Well…you can divide people into smaller bits—much as I would like to do to the people behind the Aptos font in Microsoft Office apps—but then they cease to be people pretty quickly.

by

“…my mind is on the blink.”

It’s Monday.  I almost don’t know what more needs to be said.

I’m probably going to make this relatively short, because I’m having quite a bit of pain in the bases of my thumbs as I write this on my smartphone.  I took three aspirin* already this morning, but it certainly hasn’t kicked in.  If it’s not going to help my pain, I wish at least the anti-platelet action would make me have a massive GI bleed or something.  I know, it’s kind of gross, but it’s one of those things where no one can claim you’re malingering or lazy or whatever.  If you’re vomiting blood, only a fool could say, “It’s all in your head.”

Speaking of it being all in your head, though, it’s of course a worry that aspirin could cause a hemorrhagic stroke instead of a GI bleed.  Obviously, since my brain is my greatest strength, I would prefer not to have that happen.

On the other hand, it’s not as though my brain is my friend or anything.  It’s where my greatest difficulties lie, as well as my strengths, and those difficulties dominate most of my days and‒to say the least‒my nights.  I’m depressed and “anxious” and angry and pessimistic, and I cannot sleep properly, and I am in constant pain, and I also have all these attributes that led me to have my assessment done last Friday to try to determine if I have the second kind of ASD or not.  So I can’t exactly feel too worried about my brain.  I don’t even wear a helmet when I ride my bicycle.  If I get brain damaged, it seems like the least my brain deserves.

I’m tired.  I’m so tired.

I know there are people out there who are able to try to put the best possible spin on events, and who can honestly say that they love themselves, and that’s great.  I envy and admire that.  And I have tried very hard to develop those habits, through self-hypnosis and autosuggestion and meditation and even pharmacology, but I have not been able to alter my programming so far.  Maybe I need a factory reset or something.

Anyway, I’m supposed to receive my report about my autism assessment within a week, so I should have it by this Friday at the latest.  I can’t say I’m not nervous about it.

Well, I can say it, I guess.  “I’m not nervous about it.”  See?  But saying it doesn’t make it so, no matter how loudly you say it, or how often you repeat it, or what oaths you proclaim, or what authority you cite.  It doesn’t even matter if you really believe it, even if you believe it so fervently that you’re willing to die for the belief.

If that were any measure of truth, then suicide bombers would be more likely to be right than Nobel Prize winning scientists, and such people are not more likely to be right.  They are almost certainly wrong about everything important that led them to blow themselves up.  In fact, certainty of anything beyond literal mathematical and deductive, logical conclusions is the hallmark of a mind less likely to be right than would be a mind that is full of doubt and willing to criticize itself.

So, I am nervous, but there’s nothing I can do for now but wait.  In the meantime, I really should start writing on my laptop computer again.  This phone writing is losing what charm it had, since it’s making my thumbs hurt worse over time.

With that said, I’m going to end the first draft of this now.  I don’t have more to say that I’m sure I haven’t said elsewhere, before, probably eight-thousand times.  I tend to repeat myself a lot.

I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Sometimes I feel that the plural of aspirin should be “aspirins”, but I think it’s generally just “aspirin”, like “deer” and “fish”** being both singular and plural.

**Sometimes one sees the word “fishes”, but that is generally used, I believe, when one is discussing more than one kind of fish.