Horror

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The undiscovered country from whose blog no traveler returns

Hello and good morning and all the rest of that stupid bullshit.

I’m writing a blog post today—obviously—which means I’m going in to the office today, which means that, unfortunately, I am still alive.  I cannot give you any good reasons for these facts.  They simply are the case.

There are explanations, of course, as there are for all things, but they entail nothing more than the mindless churning of physical and, at the next level biological, and, at the next level psychological forces that happen more or less on their own.  They carry a certain metaphorical inertia; to divert them requires a deliberate application of some manner of force.  But since they are not literal, straightforward cases of inertia, it’s not always easy to tell just what the proper application of what “forces” should be to cause them to change their direction into one which one might prefer.

I’m at the train station now, waiting for the 2nd train of the day.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise.  It let up ever-so-slightly in the afternoon to evening, thanks to lots of Aspirin and Tylenol and Icy-Hot and all that stuff, but it still felt as though I had recently tried to do some fairly serious acrobatics without stretching and had not only failed, but had fallen hard on barely-padded ground.  I still feel stiff and sore.  Also, the bases of my thumbs ache severely; for that reason, among others, I’m typing this on my laptop computer rather than my cell phone.

I don’t have much else to report, and I certainly have nothing positive to relay to you.  As my pain eased slightly yesterday, my mood improved slightly, but it was never very good, and it’s now nearly as low as it was yesterday morning.

I’m also a bit nauseated.  That’s probably partly because of the excessive use of analgesics over the last 24 hours, even beyond my ordinary intake.

I really feel horrible, and I don’t know what to do.  I feel no sense of any future other than one of stress and pain and further alienation, or alternatively, of being a burden to people I have no right to bother.  I wish, I wish I had the strength of will just to stop eating and waste away until I die.  That wouldn’t be so bad.  After a while without food, once one gets into deep ketosis, there is little or no real pain, just lassitude.  And I have lassitude anyway, so I don’t think it would be all that much worse.

But it’s very difficult just to say “no” to food when it is available; billions of years of evolution has sifted things so that not eating when food is available is quite difficult.  I’m probably going to have to find some other way.

I’ve looked into things like hemlock—it seems like it might be nice and “classical” to go the way of Socrates—but although some descriptions of his death involve acceptance and serenity and the like, it seems they are highly fictionalized, which should come as no surprise.  Apparently, actual death caused by hemlock poisoning is quite uncomfortable, and associated with nausea and cramping and neurological symptoms of various kinds that might lead one to seek “help”.

Likewise, unripe ackee fruit—which grows in abundance around the house in which I live—is associated with quite uncomfortable symptoms and is not even close to universally fatal.  And again, the urge to try to relieve one’s symptoms might lead to one aborting the whole project.

Of course, asphyxiation via inhaling pure nitrogen or pure helium (for instance) is actually quite benign, since it is not associated with any feeling of suffocation—especially if one has a non-rebreather mask, so one does not retain carbon dioxide, which is the actual source of the feeling of not being able to breathe, and is indeed the primary driver of respiration.  I have two non-rebreather masks, and tubing, and even a regulator valve, but though I ordered helium tanks, I couldn’t figure out how to hook up the party-type helium tank output valve with the tubing and respirator mask—so I let people use the helium for balloons.

Also, one really needs a decent space and privacy for something like that, and one needs to make sure one’s mask doesn’t slip as one loses consciousness.  If that happens, one could live but have hypoxemic brain injury.

I’ve looked into ordering nitrogen tanks, but you can’t just get them delivered already filled; you have to go to some welding supply place or similar to get the nitrogen, and it’s hard to cart a nitrogen tank around when one does not have a vehicle.  There are similar problems with liquid nitrogen.  You can order a crucible (or whatever the term is) in which to carry it from Amazon (as you can the gas tanks) but to get the liquid you need to go to restaurant supply places or medical supply places or similar.  And, again, it’s hard to carry such things around without a vehicle.

Of course, there’s always simple use of blades—the proverbial bare bodkin—but though I am not afraid of cutting myself, to cause life-threatening bleeding thereby is not easy, and it is also supremely messy, leaving behind a horrible spectacle for some poor slob to find.  It’s likewise not entirely reliable and requires privacy.  I could lay down in my shower with water running and do it, but then my “housemates” and the landlord would eventually have to deal with the situation—at the latest by the time I started smelling—and that would be inconsiderate and traumatic.

When I think of the people I’ve known in recent years who have died of overdoses of narcotics—usually heroin—I again find myself wishing I had a drug problem.  But I don’t like opiates, though I was prescribed them for a few years for my chronic pain.  They didn’t work as well as I would hope, and the side-effects were annoying and unpleasant.  Of course, a goodly dose of an opiate plus a goodly dose of a benzodiazepine has a goodly chance of shutting down one’s respiratory drive, but as with asphyxiation above, that can sometimes just lead to brain damage.

My brain is dysfunctional enough.

A good fall from a high building (or mountain or cliff or bridge) is pretty reliable, of course, if one can muster the courage to throw oneself off.  However, there aren’t very many buildings or similar near me that are aesthetically high enough, and I don’t really have access to any of them, anyway.  Also, again, it leads to one making a mess for innocent passersby, and I would rather not do that.

There’s always the prospect of just swimming out into the Atlantic, which is truly close at hand, until exhaustion leads inevitably to drowning.  There’s not much mess that way, and most of what there is might be cleaned up by ocean life.  If I were more comfortable in the water, that might be a good option, and I still do consider it.  But it requires real determination, and I am not all that strong a swimmer.  I mean, I’m a good enough swimmer to swim out far enough to drown, but there’s enough stupid animal fear built into this operating system that I worry I wouldn’t be able to force my way through it.

I really don’t know what to do, or what I should do.  I’m still brainstorming ideas.  Meanwhile, I’ve really got loads of physical pain…but the psychological pain is worse.  The former wears down and eradicates one’s resistance to the latter, and the latter makes it difficult to keep a useful attitude about the former.  And I have so much trouble sleeping.  I’m really very tired all the time.

TTFN

standing on ledge newer

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And the mazèd blog, by their increase, now knows not which is which.

Hello and good morning.

I’m writing today’s blog post on my smartphone, because I walked to the train this morning.  That’s not quite the non sequitur it might seem to be.  Given the new train schedule, I arrived here only a few minutes before the 6:20 train is due to arrive, whereas on the old schedule, I would have just missed the 6:10 and sat down to wait for the 6:30.  Of course, I could simply let the 6:20 pass and wait for the 6:50 and pull out my laptop to write my post while I wait.  Perhaps, in the future, I will do that.  Today, though, I don’t want to push back my departure any further.

I’m now on (actually, in) the train, and I was surprised to find my preferred, relatively isolated seat on the older style car free.  Combined with the feeling of achievement from already having walked about five miles today, that’s pretty nice.

Today is the Winter Solstice, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, meaning it’s the day of longest night, if you will.  Going forward, now, the nights will become shorter, though the change will be hard to notice at first, since, near their maxima and minima, the derivative of sine and cosine curves (well, any smooth curve, really) is around zero, meaning the rate of change of the function is very small.  For one brief instant‒one infinitesimal moment of time‒during this 24-hour period, that rate of change will be exactly zero.

But, of course, the rate of change itself is constantly changing.  This isn’t true of all functions, obviously.  The rate of change in a linear function is a constant, and the rate of change of a constant is zero.  That’s why it’s called a “constant”.  And the rate of change of zero is still zero, no matter how many times you would like to take that derivative.

Sine waves, however, are cyclical, and their derivatives are also cyclical.  The derivative (i.e., the rate of change) of a sine is a cosine…and the derivative of a cosine is a sine (inverted, I think, if memory serves, but that changes nothing fundamental).  So, even the derivatives of such cyclical functions are eternally cyclical.  There’s something very pleasing about that, at least to me.

Oh, by the way, it is the Summer Solstice today for those who live in the southern hemisphere.  This has been a smaller number of people than live in the northern hemisphere for as long as human civilization has existed, I think, largely because there simply is more land in the northern hemisphere.  Nevertheless, there are now many millions of people south of the equator, and so there are oodles of those for whom Christmas and New Year’s are summer holidays.

Summer ought to be slightly warmer for those in the southern hemisphere than for those in the north, since technically the Earth is at its closest approach to the sun in January.  However, the Earth’s orbit is very nearly circular, so the difference between aphelion and perihelion is tiny, fortunately for us.  Also, there is much less land in the south, and land heats up much more rapidly and noticeably than water, so that may completely swamp the effects of slightly different nearness to the sun.  I’m not sure.  If anyone out there has that information, please let me know.

It’s a bit interesting to think of those people who have grown up in the southern hemisphere, seeing all the movies and shows (and before that, books and legends) that associate snow and cold and the like with Christmas time and New Year’s.  Of course, the reasons would not be a mystery, but it still might feel peculiar, just as it might feel rather alien for a northerner to hear of someone going to the beach to celebrate Christmas.

Instead of building a snowman, maybe such people might build a sandman.  Actually, given the old horror short story about the Sandman‒not to be mistaken for Neil Gaiman’s admittedly also quite dark creation‒it might not be great to make a sandman as part of a joyous celebration.

Although, being rather dark myself, I consider the notion somewhat amusing.  Maybe there could be a kids’ story called Gritty the Sandman, instead of Frosty the Snowman (Anakin Skywalker would hate that).  But Gritty would be much harder to destroy than Frosty.  It takes serious heat to cause sand to melt, and even then it just becomes glass.  Imagine that:  they try to kill Gritty with heat and fire, and he just turns into a misshapen blob of living glass, with razor sharp shards for fingers‒more deadly even than he was before!

Wait, that was supposed to be a kids’ story, wasn’t it?  Sorry, I got distracted.  Still it would be fun to hear a song with the lyric, “There must have been some madness in that old silk hat they found.  For when they placed it on his head, he began to…”

…who knows what?

Anyway, I’ve reached the office now.  My pedometer seems to have accidentally reset while I was on the train, as it’s only showing one mile of walking, which is the distance between the station and the office.  That’s a bit frustrating, but I know that the distance to the station from the house is almost exactly five miles, so I’ve walked six miles so far, and I’ve now reset the little bastard, so we’ll see what I’ll do for the rest of the day.  Maybe I’ll have the gumption to walk back to the house from the train in the evening.  I feel okay now, from my walk, but I don’t want to overdo things and set myself back.

I’ll sign off for the moment.  Have a lovely solstice if you can, be it your summer or your winter.  But if you’re in the south, and you make a sandman, try not to bring it to life.  Quite apart from it having the nefarious power to put you to sleep at will, remember that sand is basically just ground glass, and that can have dreadful effects on bare skin or on your mucus membranes.  And you certainly don’t want it in your eyes!

I think I’m imagining a new kind of horror story here, albeit a spoofy more than spooky one.  We’ll see what comes of it.

TTFN

stonehenge solstice merged

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Would YOU want to visit Cape October or Murder Beach?

I’m back at the train station this morning, writing as I wait.  There seem to be fewer people waiting at this time than at comparable times earlier this week and last week.  I cannot say anything more broadly, though, since the new train schedule has thrown any generalizations awry, and made the detection of legitimate patterns (as opposed to constellation-style perceived patterns in the random) tricky at best.  It will require more time and observation to learn if there really are tendencies to be seen in the number of people waiting for the train at a given time in the morning.

I left work early yesterday, because I was really starting to crash.  I ate and then fell asleep by about 5:30 pm.  I then woke up around 9:30 thanks to some irritating noises from outside, and I decided to watch some music reactions to songs from OK Computer.

At that time, I carried out a notion that I’d considered in the past:  I got up and, in addition to singing, “danced” along with the songs.  I use “scare quotes” because my dancing is never going to be considered an art form, though it is at least a bit of exercise.

Since I was alone, I was more than able to “dance like no one is watching”.  If anyone was watching—spying on me, perhaps, for some inscrutable reason—well, they got what they richly deserved.  Possibly they suffered the fate of those who have dared to glimpse Yog-Sothoth or one of the worse forms of Nyarlathotep:  horror and madness.  At the very least, they would be at risk for PTSD.

“Dance like you’re listening to the cosmic flutists that eternally entertain Azathoth” might not be a catchy expression, but in my case, it probably applies.

Still, it was kind of fun—I got somewhat melodramatic because I was singing along to the music as I danced.  I also tend to air drum at various points while dancing, because it’s all part of the rhythm.  Anyway, I went back to sleep not too much after midnight, and actually woke up to my alarm playing Good Morning Good Morning by the Beatles.  That’s a remarkably rare occurrence.

In the morning yesterday, I saw a Readers Wildlife Photos post on WEIT in which the pictures were taken in Cape May, New Jersey.  My thoughts traveled down peculiar lines, as they are wont to do, and it occurred to me that there could be “capes” named after various months—if indeed Cape May is named after the month and not something else entirely.

I ran through several months and they worked to varying degrees, but of course, once I got to “Cape October”, it occurred to me that this would be an excellent name for a horror story, or maybe even a murder mystery.  Perhaps it was a long spit of land with a hill at the end that had been first been discovered and colonized by those who went on to become Ray Bradbury’s “Autumn People”.

It could even be the beginning of a two-parter, paired with another title that occurred to me a long time ago:  Murder Beach.  That one’s easy, because I’ve often thought that Myrtle Beach sounds almost like “murder beach”, and I was amazed that no one—as far as I could find—had written anything with that title.

I do this sort of thing rather often:  I think of fun titles that sometimes lead me to write stories.  I won’t say it’s my usual way—normally I think of the story first—but it does happen.

Of course, I haven’t begun writing nor even plotting any of these stories, and I haven’t gone any further than a sort of plot summary for last week’s rom-com idea of Up-dating.  As I think I mentioned last week, I see the latter story as more of a screenplay than a book, but I haven’t written a screenplay since high school, and the one I wrote then wasn’t really in official screenplay format.  It was just a “play” with some thrown-in camera and other descriptive directions in parentheses.

It was, according to my friend Joe, a movie that was not worthy of its excellent title—Night Vision.  He was far from wrong, as was usually the case with Joe, but I had tried to write a screenplay that I could actually produce with the equipment at hand:  a VHS camera belonging to the father of my friend Jim Leone.

It never went very far, because it turned out that wasn’t really enough equipment to make and then edit even such a cheap movie.  It could be done now, I’m quite sure, with the readily available and cheap-to-free video and audio mixing software, to say nothing of the ubiquitous, high-quality video cameras, many of which we carry around in our pockets.

I did write some music for Night Vision, including a main theme that I still know by heart, and which is quite pretty, I think.  Oh, and I did a horror/bad guy’s theme for it that was grown from the kernel of Chopin’s Funeral March played backwards*.  That’s pretty good, too.

So, I still have no complete dearth of creative ideas.  I just lack the will to make them, including to write the many stories that still lie waiting in my head.  Maybe, if I were regularly able to get a total of nearly eight hours’ sleep, like I did last night, I would do better.  Certainly I feel a bit more chipper today than I normally do in the morning.

I suppose if there were some wealthy patron who commissioned some or all of these works from me, I might be able just to sit down and crank them out, since the actual process of writing isn’t that difficult.  But I sincerely doubt that’s going to happen.  The only thing making it more likely than winning the lottery is the fact that I don’t play the lottery, and any probability at all is greater than zero**.

Anyway, we’re getting close to my stop, and I’ve already written quite a lot this morning, so I’ll wrap this up.  I hope you’re all having a decent run-up to the oncoming holiday storm of Christmas and New Year’s and various other solstice-adjacent celebrations.

If there are any wealthy people out there interested in sponsoring me to write any of the above-mentioned stories or screenplays or whatnot, please, get in touch.

*This was, supposedly, what the carousel from Something Wicked This Way Comes played when it was running in reverse and thus making people younger, and that’s where I got the idea of using this as a theme for my villain, Jameson Summers, who was in a sense returning from the dead.

**I suppose that, in principle, one could win the lottery without even playing it, if for instance someone bought a ticket and gave it to another person as a surprise or to pay a debt or something along those lines.  That is an extremely unlikely event, and when layered atop another independently extremely unlikely event—the ticket actually winning—it seems still perhaps less likely than a wealthy patron deciding to sponsor my writing.

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Apologies for a blogless Monday

I was out sick with some form of enteropathy* yesterday, so I didn’t write a blog post.  I frankly haven’t done much of anything that’s in any way productive since Friday, and I’m not sure I did anything productive then.  I hope no one was too bereft by not being able to read my writing for three days (ha ha).

I’m now sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to the office (well, it doesn’t actually go to the office, but I think you know what I mean), not looking forward to the fact that I’ll have to do extra catch-up work from both Saturday and yesterday.  I really don’t want to have to deal with any of it or with anything at all.

I don’t know why I keep doing anything whatsoever.  I can speculate on certain causes, of course‒habit, the evolved drive simply to continue to survive, a dislike for causing inconvenience to other people, all that sort of thing.  Also, I guess there is the idiotic hope that maybe, just maybe, I will find some answers, some meaning, or some solutions to at least some of my problems.

Honestly, when I get sick like over Sunday through yesterday, I get the wild hope that maybe I’ll need to be hospitalized, and while in the hospital, I’ll be able to get some help for my psychological issues as well as my physical ones.  It’s stupid, I know.  I need to stop hoping for anything.  Hope is a waste of my time.

Ironically, it’s hope that keeps me writing about the fact that I’m having problems going on, problems dealing with my issues and my loneliness and my depression and insomnia and pain and all that crap.  I hope that somehow, by talking about it, I’ll either arrive at some insight or ideas or some semblance of understanding that might lead to some modicum of peace.  Or I hope that someone out there in the WordPress world‒perhaps it should be called the WorldPress‒will have some new ideas or insights or some help to offer.  Or maybe some old friend of mine will read what I write and will reach out and offer a hand or something.  I don’t know what they could do, or what I could do.  But anyway, it is hope that keeps me writing, I guess.

But it’s getting old.  I’m getting tired of it.

When I don’t just dwell on morosity (I don’t know if that’s a proper word), I write about weird shit, like I did on Friday.  I could write about current events, I suppose, but most of those are discouraging and boring.  It’s basically about as fun as writing about the interactions of a very large colony of baboons from the baboons’ points of view.  Baboons don’t want to admit to themselves that most of their choices and motivations are almost entirely simple primate dominance, mating, and social jockeying behaviors.

Humans really are just baboons with delusions of grandeur, some of which are excusable, many (perhaps most) of which are not.  They’re weirdly built and strange to look at, with very rare exceptions.  They think their culture and society and civilization were made somehow, deliberately‒by them it sometimes seems they imagine, though that cannot be possible‒when really, it all just sort of happened and continues just to happen, like any weather phenomenon or termite mound.  This is nothing of which to be ashamed‒it’s the nature of everything as far as I can see‒I just find the hubris disgusting and inexcusable.

Even nature itself seems just weird and rather twisted and horrifying when I look at it these days.  Maybe part of it is that I’m down here in Florida, but when you look closely at the very ad hoc, cobbled together, misery-laden natural world, in which even green plants compete ruthlessly against each other, while insects gnaw the tree trunks, and birds eat the insects and cats eat the birds (when they can) and meanwhile ten thousand other such painful and fear-ridden interactions are taking place in every acre, at all levels, from viruses to bacteria, to yeast, to protozoa, to slime molds and lichen and moss and mold and mushrooms up to grasses and bushes and trees and worms and snails and arthropods and fish and amphibians and reptiles and birds and mammals…everything ultimately just churning away at low entropy energy and converting it into high entropy energy…well, it all seems horrifying and discouraging and very, very dark.

Everything in the world seems alien to me…which I guess must mean that I am alien, since everything else is just there, doing what it does, being what it is, and I’m the one that finds it all daunting and repulsive.

I often bring up the concept of Sisyphus, and it now occurs to me that, maybe, Sisyphus is gradually wearing away the mountain on which he rolls his ever-falling boulder, slowly grinding it down until, finally, it’s level, and the boulder will no longer roll but will stay where Sisyphus puts it, and that will be the state of the universe at very high entropy (I want to say at maximum entropy, but I don’t think there is a maximum overall entropy**).

Of course “maximal” entropy is a state that can go on for a very long time.  It’s like the fable (as told by the 12th Doctor) in which the Emperor asks a shepherd boy to tell him the meaning of eternity.  The shepherd boy says there is somewhere a mountain of pure diamond.  It takes an hour to climb and an hour to go around.  Once every hundred years, a tiny bird comes along and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain.  And when, after so many repetitions of that once-a-century sharpening happens that the diamond mountain is finally worn down to nothing…then the first second of eternity will have passed.

Even once the “heat death” of the universe comes to pass‒assuming that is what will come to pass‒and all is a haze of elementary particles, barely above absolute zero in an endlessly expanding but empty spacetime, which will come potentially after more than 10 to the 100th power years, that will only be an infinitesimal instant at the uttermost beginning of the eternity of nothingness.

In that quantum vacuum, even a direction of time will have less meaning than would any possible sense of up, down, left, right, forward, and backward in the heart of one of the intergalactic supervoids, in which not even a single distant star or galaxy could be seen with anything but the strongest telescope on long exposure.  To the human eye, in a supervoid, all would be blackness and emptiness in all directions, and in the heat death, that would apply to time as well.  With no change, the past and the future are indistinguishable.

Yet, eventually, new universes, or Boltzmann brains, or other esoterica might yet come to be.  Eternity is a long time.  Or maybe they will be found to have been in what seems to be the future but which is, eventually, the past of some universe with an opposite-pointing “arrow of time”.

Anyway, my point is, the universe is weird and harsh and the hubris of self-important creatures would be laughable if it were not so nauseating.

I don’t think I can do all this much longer.  My stop is coming up soon.  Have a good day.

*You can look it up.

**There is a maximum amount of entropy that can be fit into any given region of spacetime, and that is the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the area of an event horizon of a black hole that would enclose that region, expressed in square Planck lengths.  Actually, if memory serves, it’s the logarithm of that surface area (probably the natural logarithm).  If you tried to “add more entropy” to such a region, the black hole would grow, and the horizon would just get larger…you wouldn’t get more entropy “within” the given region.

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The General Relativity of life-threatening depression

There’s a moment in the movie version of Interview with the Vampire in which Lestat and Louis are sitting around a table and the latter is looking at a candle flame.  Lestat begins, “There’s nothing in the world now that doesn’t hold some…” and Louis finishes “…fascination.”

I used to be sort of like that, I think.  I’ve since become much more the opposite:  There’s nothing in the world now that doesn’t hold some irritation/frustration.

Of course, I can’t blame the world, especially not given my prior converse (or obverse or whatever the hell the proper term is) attitude.  The problem is clearly with the eye of the beholder, and more importantly, with the mind to which that eye is attached.  I know this.  But knowing it doesn’t change the fact that each waking moment‒and I have far too few non-waking moments‒is at least a minor form of torture.  And the only escape I get from my mind is in the precious few hours of interrupted sleep I have at night.  I need a better solution.

Speaking of that, as I said in my impromptu post yesterday afternoon, I haven’t taken anything for depression today (unless you count caffeine, which does have some benefit for depression, according to some studies).  The Wort wasn’t helping and may have been making things worse.  It’s far too early to notice any difference so far, but hopefully by the middle of the day to the afternoon, I might at least feel less tense.

As I said yesterday afternoon, a work situation got me so frustrated that I kicked my black Strat, briefly kind of hoping to break it*.  All that broke was the high E string, which needed changing, anyway.  I did, as part of the collateral chaos, break my PSP, which I had bought so I could play Pangya, but that’s no big loss.  I also really bruised my right big toe (not my left one, as I mistakenly wrote last night in my obviously quite severe mental confusion‒I don’t think I’ve ever confused my right foot for my left foot before) but I don’t think it’s probably broken.  It’s black and blue, but not as painful as I would expect it to be if it were broken.

That wasn’t the only frustrating thing at the office.  In the morning, I tried very hard to convince one of the office workers that they shouldn’t come to me and say “we need paper cups for the front”, because that’s just trivia, and it’s inaccurate and exaggerated.  After all, no one will die or even become ill without paper cups, and I don’t use them at all, so there’s no “we” in that situation from my point of view.  I just keep track of the cups and order them for the office when they get low.  In any case, the word “need”, in my perception, is usually manipulative.  I find myself reverting to my old Ayn Rand reading and thinking about the fact that each person’s need is their particular problem.  But I couldn’t get her just to ask for cups instead of proclaiming a need.  Next time I should just say, “I’ll alert the media.”

Anyway, it’s not as though I won’t keep providing and doling out cups as long as I’m around, and I was probably the rude one in that situation.  I just have a pet peeve about people not being able to ask for things directly and politely.  All this isn’t helped by my chronic pain and sleep deprivation and the horrible, high-pitched tinnitus in my right ear that’s been going on for 15+ years (objectively) or forever (subjectively).

I’ve also recently taken to burning several mosquito bites that have been really bothering me.  It’s been raining a fair amount lately, and it’s hot, so the mosquitoes are out and about in force, and I’ve always been particularly tasty to them, it seems.  Finally, I got so frustrated with all the itching** that, over the past few days, I’ve taken to holding the end of a paper clip briefly in a torch type lighter and then pressing it against a mosquito bite.  This worked in the past, when I tried it once, and it has seemed to help some, but it does tend to leave scars.

Two days ago, a combination of a bite on the back of my hand and the frustration of the noise and chaos of the office (and people just doing whatever they please, with no backup for me from the boss when I try to see if we can be more orderly and time-sensitive) led me to take that torch lighter and apply the flame semi-directly to my right hand.  It lasted only an instant, and it hurt less than the metal does‒which makes some sense, given how metal conducts heat‒but it did raise a nice blister.

However, though it has since spontaneously drained, that blister seems less inflamed and quite a bit more superficial than the other marks.  Frankly, it doesn’t look as bad as the copious other plain, unburned mosquito bites, which are scabbed and inflamed and still itchy.

I also had/have a headache and some slight wooziness from literally banging my head against a wall and a door at various times out of frustration.

Why am I telling you all this?  I’m trying to give some hint as to how distressed I am.  I think maybe my sardonic, sarcastic, jokey style makes people think I’m not being serious about some things about which I am, in fact, deadly serious.  It’s my own fault, obviously‒my own need, you might say‒so I’m trying, in my own weird, absurd, idiotic way, to be more effective in my metaphorical screaming.

Because one thing that’s clear from my own point of view, anyway, is that I am spiraling closer and closer to the pitch-black event horizon, and my orbit is getting faster and is more chaotic, and I’m starting to be torn apart, and will soon “spaghettify” if I can’t break out of this gravity well.  But, as is the case with real black holes in general relativity, “distant” observers can’t see the local happenings well or at all, as my apparent time slows and my radiated light is redshifted out of existence.  I don’t know if that’s ironic or appropriate or what.

Today is payroll day, which is always extra stressful.  I guess we’ll see if the lack of antidepressant makes a difference, for better or for worse.

I honestly half expect each blog post to be my last‒the final photon that’s just barely able to clear the gravity well and get out into the universe, perhaps to be detected by someone who might recognize it for what it is…but probably not.  It’s a big cosmos, and it’s mostly empty and getting bigger and emptier by the instant.  But I continue to remain, against all possible use or benefit to anyone, least of all to me.

I’m an idiot.  I ought to give up and go.  It’s not worth the effort to resist gravity.  But it’s also so hard to fight the dumbass biological drives and the moronic, faint delusion of potential hope that somehow, something or someone might rescue me.

With any luck, something will take it all out of my hands.  I try to arrange such things when I can.  I guess I haven’t tried hard enough yet, but if I keep trying, sooner or later something will nudge me over the horizon.  Or, less likely, something will pull me away from it.

Whatever.  Who the fuck cares?

*I was overwhelmed at baseline anyway.  I had earplugs in my ears and wore tinted reading glasses even indoors to try to blunt all the sensory input, but it didn’t make much difference.

**I scratch until I bleed and scab, and unfortunately, topical stuff doesn’t seem to be helping the itch, even stuff with lidocaine in it.

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I think I’m going to stop my antidepressant

It’s not working.  I don’t feel any less depressed or less stressed or less unable to tolerate the noise and chaos and other nonsense.  I very briefly had a lift in my mood–for about a few days–but I now strongly suspect that to have been a placebo effect.  Perhaps all that I’ve ever gained, such as it is, from antidepressants of any type or brand or what have you has all been placebo.  Anyway, it’s not like I feel any less like I want to die than I did whatever it was, six weeks or so ago, when I restarted.  If anything, I’m just spiraling farther downward.  So, I think I’m going to call it a failure, like most things I attempt, and just see what happens.

I kicked my black Strat in frustration today, but all I did was break a string (and bruised my left big toe), and broke the nearby retro PSP that I had.  Oh, well.  I feel like shit.  I feel tighter than any string of any guitar or cello or whatever.  I think I just need to go away, completely.  No one can do anything to help me, it seems, and I’m not able to help myself.  I’m just an unpleasant presence much of the time.  And I can’t sleep.  And I’m losing almost all of what little joy or interest I’ve had in anything.  I probably ought to take a dirt vacation*.

I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know how to do anything that would have any benefit whatsoever, to anyone at all.

Oh, by the way, I despise the new WordPress block editor functions that interfere with doing things the way one used to do it.  I’ve been paying for this domain and use for years, and for my other one that I almost never use.  I’m sick of things being changed when they were working fine.  It’s one thing to add functionality, to make more things available, but don’t do things that interfere with prior functionality that people were using, and for which they were paying.  That’s my message to WordPress.

Anyway, that’s completely an aside.  It’s just one of a seemingly limitless number of things that frustrate and stress me out.  Obviously, the problem is mainly just me.  And I don’t have very many options for what to do to solve that problem.  I’ve tried many things in the past, and obviously none have done very much.  I’m trying to eat right and exercise, I don’t have a drug or alcohol problem (unfortunately), I’m just a fucked up, faulty machine.  And I’m tired of it.  But the St John’s Wort isn’t helping so far.  And it may be making me more tense.  So I think I’m probably not going to take any more starting tomorrow.  And we’ll see how that makes me feel.

Honestly, I wish something would just kill me, preferably painlessly–or if painfully, maybe something prolonged so that maybe I’d get a chance to say goodbye to my kids, if they wanted.

Whatever.

*That’s like a dirt nap, but even longer.

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Picked over by the worms and weird fishes

It’s Tuesday, and though it’s merely a pair of otherwise unrelated homophones, I like to think of ways in which Tuesday might be related to a “two’s” day.  So, here we go.

Well, it’s June sixth, the 6th day of the 6th month, so there are two sixes right there.  And 6 is an even number, so that’s always a multiple of two.  And, indeed, six is the product of the first two prime numbers (2 and 3), which provides extra fun.  The year, of course, has 2 twos in it:  2023.  However, that second part “23” kind of adds a third 6 to the day, which is a tad irritating, and slightly spoils the symmetry of the date.  Oh, well.  The world is almost never satisfying.

I’m writing on my smartphone again, today, because I thought yesterday’s writing went okay, and it’s nice to have a continuing break from carrying my laptop.  I’m sure that, before too long, I’ll wobble in the other direction like a poorly damped spring, and go back to using the laptop.  I guess it doesn’t matter.  Nothing matters.  Not just “nothing really matters” like in Bohemian Rhapsody, but nothing matters at all.  Full stop.

The logic of that conclusion is sort of similar to what I used in my video in which I stated that there is no life in the universe.  Of course, if one is splitting hairs, I will be the first to concede that the difference between truly zero life and a tiny, unnoticeably small amount of life is more glaring‒it’s a categorical difference‒than the difference between a tiny amount of life and a significant amount of life‒which is just a difference of degree, not of type.  But that’s all in how you look at it; again, “see” my video*.

Life is frustrating, and for me at least, there are very few compensations that counterbalance the frustration anymore.  Even the increasing success of the office lately means, for me, more work, with more sales to process and record, more new people coming and going on whom I have to keep records and process payroll, and more chaos in the office because of more different voices and noises, on top of the “music” that’s constantly playing, supposedly so people don’t get distracted by their coworkers’ phone conversations.

But how do they not get utterly distracted simply by the level and incoherence of the noise, the lion’s share of which comes from the effing “music”?

Also, with more and more people, there is always a greater chance that every day someone will have a sale that overflows into lunch time or past the official end of the day.  I hate that.  I don’t get to “go home for lunch” in any case, since I live more than 30 miles from the office and don’t have a car, so I’m sort of a natural resource, and people take advantage without even thinking about it.  But I need my mental breaks, and my break from the noise, and my chance to rest my back.

Also, quite apart from that, I simply hate people not following the clearly promulgated (but lamentably not enforced!) schedule.  People come in late, then they stay late, as if it doesn’t even occur to them how their actions might affect other people (which it probably doesn’t).  It’s reprehensible.

This issue, or this suite of issues, is not unique to my workplace; it’s horribly common in the human world.  But at least in some places there are consequences for people being lax about hours and timing‒there are penalties of one kind or another.  The only penalty in our office is my anger and frustration, which I do express, but which is not really seriously backed up by the boss, and so the only potential serious consequence is that, one of these days I’m going just to douse my desk and myself with lighter fluid and set it all on fire.  Or else I’ll do something else that’s similarly destructive and self-destructive.  Many’s the time I have contemplated smashing my black Strat guitar to bits.  And this is just counting yesterday**.

At least when people work late or run late in medical settings, it’s usually because illness and injury (and the treatment thereof) don’t follow schedules; things take as long as they take.  Also, I’ve never been in a hospital‒indeed, in any of the various other industries in which I’ve worked‒in which people thought they needed to have constant, loud, background “music” to be able to do their jobs (not counting pit orchestras, in which one makes the “background” music).

It’s pathetic.  I don’t endorse it or approve or agree that it’s a valid point or claim that it needs to be there.  At worst, it’s a way for people to be able to feel more comfortable saying things they wouldn’t want anyone else to hear, possibly exaggerating the characteristics of what they’re selling‒which is stupid, because customers soon find out the specifics and, if they are not what they were told they were, they can just chargeback.  And they do.  Often they do it within the same day.

Anyway, sorry about the rants and complaints.  Life‒indeed, the simple fact of being alive‒is very stressful to me.  I’m sure that I need psychological and/or even medical/psychiatric help, but it’s not readily available, and I’m not capable of proactively seeking it out.  Maybe I was better at looking after myself in the past, but I’ve never been very good at it.  So I just trudge along, unable simply to stop out of embarrassment and confusion and inertia and simply my tendency to be strongly bound by my routines.  One example of which is writing this blog every workday morning.

Ugh.  I’m sick of this life and I’m sick of this world.  I look forward to the time when, like the protagonist of the Radiohead song Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, I hit the bottom and escape…escape.  Yeah.

*Really, you can just listen.  The visual is just…video of me talking.  People seem to like videos of people talking; there are 8 trillion and two of them uploaded to YouTube on any given day, but most throw in little pop-up graphics to give the viewer some distraction from simply watching a person talking.  I guess that’s analogous to slides in a lecture, or more recently, PowerPoint stuff.  It is weird how people learn, if they learn, and I don’t exclude myself.  The vast majority of the material in my college and med school notebooks were elaborate doodles and drawings I made during lectures.  I wish I still had my old notebooks.  Some of the drawings weren’t bad.  Most were grim and dark (since I was the one who drew them) but a few were funny.  For instance, during a lecture in which we were being taught about the lactiferous ducts, I drew a picture of a lactiferous duck‒imagine a cartoon waterfowl equivalent of a Saint Bernard rescue dog, but with a bottle of milk around its neck rather than a cask of booze.  It made my friend, who was sitting next to me, chuckle.

**That’s jokey, of course, but it’s also true.  I often feel like I want to hurt or damage something, but I don’t have the right to hurt or damage other people (generally speaking), and anyway, I hate myself most of all, so my inclination is to break my own stuff and hurt myself.  And there’s only so much stuff I can break and destroy anymore, so mainly I hurt myself in one way or another.

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Bus stop, waiting, she’s there, I say, “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

I considered writing this post this morning directly onto my WordPress site, which is something I almost never do.  But that would require a change of pace from my usual practice, so I’m not going to do it this time.  That’s largely because I have an already existing “change of pace” today, in the form of some person yet again lying down on the bus stop bench.

It’s very annoying.  I mean, I’m sure it’s probably annoying for that person, too, but I’m not the one that put them in that position‒I am all but mathematically certain of that‒but that person is the one who put me in the position of having to stand at the bus stop (and finally sit cross-legged against a tree, which put one of legs to sleep) with my back and hips and knee and ankle really giving me trouble already, writing my stupid ass blog post that maybe 5 people will actually read if I’m lucky.

By the way, there’s even someone at the “alternate” bus stop as well, apparently.  It never rains but it pours, as they say.  They talk too much.

I don’t know if anyone has actually read The Dark Fairy and the Desperado so far yet, but I’ve seen no feedback on it.  Maybe it’s so bad that no one can get through even the modest part that I’ve written so far.

I’m still struggling to find interesting things to read; most of the science books I have are dull to me now, though I reread The Coddling of the American Mind recently, almost all the way to the end, and it was good again.  I also got a new “biography” of Radiohead, titled Radiohead: Life in a Glasshouse after one of their songs, but it took me less than a day and a half of highly interrupted reading to finish‒maybe three hours, tops‒so it was engaging, but very brief.

I’m trying to start rereading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, which I remember being quite good when I read it once before.  So far it’s not bad, but I don’t know how long I’ll stick to it.

I have a modest amount of trouble with the premise.  Not the time travel thing, even in the atypical way King sets it up.  That’s fine.  It’s imaginative, and he recognizes and has the characters recognize‒and mainly just shrug in confusion, which is appropriate‒the apparent paradoxes.  It’s a horror story, not science fiction, so it’s not important to get into the nuts and bolts of this curious phenomenon.

No, I have trouble with the notion that changing any event in history could have any impact on any cosmic level of stability whatsoever.  I think the question of whether JFK hadn’t been assassinated only seems Earth-shattering to people who lived through it, and for the most part, the course of events doesn’t change much in any case.  I suspect most Gen Z “kids” barely know who JFK was, any more than they know who Andrew Johnson was, or Pepin the Short, or Phillip of Macedon.  Really, why should they know or care?

I mean, yes, history can be quite interesting, and it is good to know history, so we can try to see‒to the best of our ability‒the way events have flowed, and the sorts of mistakes and failures and successes are possible.  But this is all still parochial knowledge.

The universe wouldn’t care at all if the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to World War III or if a much more devastating all-out global thermonuclear war had happened at the peak of the arms race in the 80’s and wiped out civilization*.  Frankly if another asteroid the size of the K-T asteroid hit and drove 70% of all Earthly species extinct, including humans, it wouldn’t matter to the universe…indeed, if another huge impact such as the one hypothesized to have created the moon literally wiped out all life on Earth and reduced the surface to a new, partly molten “Hadean” phase again, the universe would not notice.

Probably.  Very probably.

I think this notion that human deeds could endanger some kind of cosmic balance is just hubris and delusion, harking back to pre-Copernican worldviews, though I’m quite sure King is not literally so deluded.  But this focus on humans (and human-like) things may be why King can never quite pull off the Lovecraftian, cosmic type horror, in which humans come to realize just how tiny they are and that even the “gods” of reality are not in any way anthropomorphic.

Though even in Lovecraft, having such “gods” is a bit of anthropomorphizing of the universe.  But then, a merely dead and bleak universe does not make for a very interesting story.

Still, maybe that’s one of the reasons Stephen King is so much more generally popular than Lovecraft‒because in his worlds, the deeds of humans are not only important to humans, but they can have cosmic significance.  And his bad guys are mostly very much human as well, in their character and motivations‒even the Crimson King and It.

His scariest stuff, to me, anyway, is his material along the lines of The Shining and Pet Sematary, where the evil forces are quite otherworldly, quite different, and though they certainly have malice toward humans‒the Overlook does, I’ll be bound‒even the “ghosts” in the hotel are not really the source or center of the evil.  They are, if anything, just the spiritual husks of souls that the hotel‒whatever it is‒had devoured in the past, like the empty carcasses of insects in a spider web, or perhaps like trophies on a hunter’s wall.

Well, that was a meandering and surprising turn through my head.  It’s curious sometimes to see what will trigger what.

By the way, I think that was the same woman from before who was sleeping at the bus stop, because she woke up just before the bus came, and she asked me something.  I thought she was seeking bus fare at first, and I had to tell her that I use a monthly pass, so I don’t have any cash, but then she said something about needing to stop the buses running because of something to do with a wedding.  I tried to tell her I didn’t understand, and she repeated part of it and then asked if I had heard from the children about the bus and the wedding.

All I could do was tell her I think she had mistaken me for someone else.  As I suspected before, I’m pretty sure she is mentally ill, with some manner of schizophreniform disorder.  Though I’m not a fan of interacting with strangers, she certainly didn’t make me feel frightened at all.  She just made me feel sad.

It’s very sad to think that not only is there nothing I could do for her in my present state, there would be little anyone could do for her even in the best of circumstances available in the modern world.  Mental illness is terribly difficult to treat, and it doesn’t get nearly as much scientific interest and resources as it should merit, as with so many other things.

It’s far more “important” to humans to have brand name shoes and mocha lattes and Frappuccinos from Starbucks** and to own the newest iPhone (same as the old iPhone), and to follow “celebrities” and to buy their ghost-written books.

That’s probably part of why even “cosmic” level horror stories, with rare exception, make humans so important.  Humans are delusionally self-important in reality, and want even their fictional horrors to be likewise.  And so, humans will continue to deceive themselves about their inherent importance, and vanishingly few of them will realize that, if humans want to become cosmically important, it’s going to be up to them to make it happen.

They aren’t inherently important, except to themselves (which is perfectly reasonable), and it seems vanishingly unlikely that any space faring, extraterrestrial civilization (if such a thing exists) will come to save humans and show them the way.  Why would they?  At most, they might send some disguised observers, anthropologists in the literal, outside sense.  Xenobiologists, from their own point of view.

All right, that’s enough for now.  It’s too much, actually.  I don’t have any idea what my point is.  Which may, ironically, be the point.  Or maybe I’m crazy, even beyond the illnesses of which I’m aware, and this is all just a hallucination.

What a dreary, disappointing hallucination that would turn out to be.  It’s not even scary.  Even the truly dangerous things in the universe are banal, dreary, and not all that impressive.  One would expect paranoid delusions to be frightening.  But I guess that would depend on how much the amygdala and related structures are involved in the disease process.

Enough.  ‘Tis done. 

*That’s the sort of thing I grew up being afraid of and feeling completely powerless to prevent.

**Why is there no apostrophe in the title of the coffee giant chain?  Is it meant to imply that there is more than one Starbuck, or indeed that each customer is a Starbuck?  It strikes me as lazy and slipshod.

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A call for topics

It’s Monday morning yet again, despite my best efforts‒the beginning of yet another pointless work week in the dreary tail bit of the year, when the sun sets at 5:31 pm local time, thanks to the outmoded “daylight savings time”, making people like me, who are already dysthymic/depressive and are also subject to some seasonal affective problems that much more unstable.  Spread the word: daylight savings time causes significant morbidity and mortality* and does no one much, if any, good.

I’m writing this on my cell phone again, or “smartphone” if you will (though dumbphone seems like a better term given the way most humans use theirs).  I deliberately didn’t bring my laptop to the house with me over the weekend.  It’s not as though I’m writing stories anymore; I’m just writing this ridiculous blog.  So there’s no particular impetus to make the writing process easier for me, as using the laptop does.  I might as well use the smaller, lighter device when I don’t feel like carrying the heavier one.

I had a reasonably boring weekend, which I guess is a good thing.  I watched a few movies, and I went on some comparatively long walks‒I think I totaled about 12 miles over the course of the two days.  I also spoke with my sister on the phone on Sunday, and that was good.

That’s about it.  That’s the extent of my non-work life.  It’s the best I have to offer, and it’s as like as not just to get worse as time passes.  But I was able to force myself to get almost eight hours of sleep on Friday night and Saturday night, thanks to Benadryl and melatonin.  Oh, and of course, I did my laundry on Sunday, as I always do.

Sorry, I know this is really boring so far.  I don’t know what to tell you.  I didn’t really have any subject in mind for today, other than my brief diatribe about daylight savings time and depression/seasonal affective disorder.  Obviously, it’s a topic that affects me significantly (no pun intended), but there’s otherwise not much for me to say about it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has an interesting bit of insight into it that he gives as an illustrative case in his excellent book Inadequate Equilibria, dealing with, among other things, the reasons why no one has done research on much stronger light-based treatments for SAD.  But you can’t expect depressed people to take initiative to do remarkable things to help themselves, since a major part of the problem with depressive disorders is comparative inability to take positive action.

If anyone out there has any requests for subjects or topics for me to discuss in a blog post, I’d be more than willing to consider them, though if it’s not a subject about which I have any expertise, I may not be able to do anything worthwhile with it.  Still, I have a fairly broad knowledge base regarding general science, especially biology and physics.  I like mathematics, though I’m not that deeply knowledgeable about esoterica thereof‒a regretted failure of my youthful imagination when I was in college.  Similar things could be said about the deep aspects of computer science; I wish I had known how interesting the subjects were back then and so had pursued them more than I did.

Of course, I have a fair amount of personal knowledge in the reading and writing of fantasy/science fiction/horror, though I haven’t read any new stuff in a while.  I haven’t even read any of my own books in a long time.  I think the most recent horror I’ve read was Revival by Stephen King, which was pretty good.  I haven’t read much if anything in the way of new fantasy since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I’m reasonably well versed in slightly older comic book lore, especially Marvel.  And of course, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings are among my favorite books.

I enjoy Shakespeare, but I don’t consider myself any kind of scholar of the Bard.  I like his works and his words in a fairly straightforward fashion.  I also like Poe quite a lot, as you might have guessed from my recitation videos of some of his poems.

Anyway, that’s a quick summary of some of the subjects upon which I might at least feel justified in opining.  So, if anyone has any suggestions or requests in these or even other, tangentially related subjects, I would appreciate them.  I like to feel useful or productive in at least some way, so I can justify my existence to myself.  It isn’t easy.  I’m a much harsher judge of my usefulness or worth than Scrooge at his worst, and I expect no ghosts of past, present, and/or future to visit me to give me some epiphany that changes my character.

It would be nice if some rescue mission were to happen to save my soul, but I don’t see it as plausible, and I don’t think anyone thinks it’s in their interest‒or anyone else’s‒to save me, in any case.  So in the meantime I’m just stumbling along like a wind up robot that’s been forgotten by the child that wound it up, legs moving and shifting until the mechanism breaks or the spring finishes untightening.  And damn, that’s an annoyingly efficient spring.

*I don’t have the data for this, but I strongly suspect that, if the sun set at least a little later‒say an hour later, even‒things would be slightly easier for people with SAD.  It might be difficult to tease out the statistics, but SAD doesn’t just kill by increasing rates of suicide, though I’m pretty sure it does that.  People experiencing exacerbations of depression have higher rates of numerous other illnesses and accidents beyond the obvious. 

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“When comes the storm?”

I brought my laptop with me yesterday after work, and I’m using it to write this post.  I was afraid this morning that I would need to avoid its use.  I was worried that there would be heavy rain and high winds at the train station thanks to the “subtropical storm” morphing into a hurricane that’s bearing straight at the east coast of Florida.  However, this morning it’s just a bit breezy, and the rain is not very impressive—more a drizzle than anything else, though it is steadier than rain tends to be down here.

I have my raincoat on, just in case.

As of yesterday, the announcement was that today the trains would stop running after about 5 pm, so I’m going to need to leave work early if that’s still the case.  In addition, the announcement was that there would be no train service on Thursday, since the storm is predicted to make landfall at around 1 am Thursday morning.  So, I may not be going to work on Thursday, since if the trains aren’t running, the buses aren’t likely to be running, and I have no other reliable way to get to the office.  If that’s the case, I probably won’t be writing my traditional Thursday blog post.

I doubt anyone will mourn.

Maybe I should take this as a sign from the universe that I should just give up on this blog post, as I’ve given up writing fiction or playing guitar or even really listening to any music, let alone singing along.  I get the impression that my post yesterday—which was on a subject I find interesting, and thus about which I tend to go on and on and on, even when writing on my phone—wasn’t particularly interesting to anyone but me.  There’s nothing terribly wrong with that, but it’s a lot of work just to spew my random thoughts into the void, when for the most part, I already know what those thoughts are.

I’ve given myself plenty of such potential “signs” to look out for, that I would take to mean that the universe wants me to stick around.  Not that I really believe in any such nonsense; it’s just a bit of frivolity.  Most of the potential signs I’ve chosen center on my love of numbers; they relate to certain automatically generated codes that happen when processing things at work.

I gave myself more than 10 opportunities over the last several months, and they’ve all failed, which was predictable.  I knew that they weren’t likely—I was looking for palindromic sequences of eight digits in an eight-digit code that turns over very rapidly, since numerous offices and businesses use the service—but I figured, since I’m a fan of numbers, and especially such numbers, if one of them came up honestly, in the normal course of business, I would take it as an indicator to reorient myself somehow, at least for the time being.

I don’t actually imagine that the universe cares one way or another whether I live or die, or indeed, whether anyone or anything lives or dies, except to the extent that the universe contains minds instantiated in flesh.  All of those that might have any pertinent opinion have shown the general tendency to find their lives more comfortable when I am not around them much, as I’m sure I’ve noted ad nauseam in the past.  So, there really is nothing significant holding me here.

Even those distant people with whom I keep in occasional contact, and who would probably be sad for a bit if I were gone, would not experience any true upheaval in their lives.  I’m disconnected from nearly everyone, beyond tenuous cobwebs; the people at the office are the ones who would have the greatest adjustments to make, but these would be rapidly achieved, and some people there would no doubt get raises as they took over some of my duties.

I’m tired, in so many ways.  I’ve slept worse than average even for me this week, probably partly because of the change in the clocks over the weekend.  And the fact that it gets so dark so early in the evening this time of year has never been good for me.  I’m on the first train of the day here, now, but I was up for hours already before I left the house.

I kind of wish for something to take the whole issue out of my hands.  I don’t tend to cross streets against lights deliberately—that would feel utterly impolite and inappropriate to me—but I have been willfully walking into the road even when right turners are approaching the intersections, hoping that someone will be reckless and run into me.  It’s a silly little thing, but if someone caused such an accident, they would be the ones disobeying traffic laws, so the fact that my “gain” would inconvenience them would be appropriate.

So far, I’ve had no luck.  I don’t really expect to have any in this sense—even if someone were to hit me, the speeds are too slow to be likely to be lethal.  Still, I have channeled the Joker (from The Dark Knight) a few times while crossing the street recently, saying, “Hit me, hit me, I want you to do it, I want you to do it,” under my breath as drivers approach the intersections.  Of course—rather obviously—no one has hit me so far.

Wusses.

Oh, they’ve just confirmed with announcements on the train that, yes indeed, there will be no service tomorrow (and today it will stop early) so I don’t plan to write a post tomorrow.  If you’re looking forward to my bastardized Shakespearean quote for the week, I can only apologize, but I’m not going to go out of my way to do it.  It’s not as thought there would be any point, to it or to anything else that I do.

Every day, more and more, I feel like someone lost in a Lovecraftian landscape full of creatures that make little sense to me, and with whom I cannot effectively communicate or interact.  I know that I make no sense to them, also, or at least very little.  I suppose, in a way, I’m the alien, I’m the mutant, so I have no “right” to expect them to try to understand me.

But surely, to Cthulhu or to Yog-Sothoth or to Shub-niggurath, humans and other mortal creatures must look as horrifying and alien as those creatures do to the hapless humans who encounter them in the stories.  Cthulhu may find the presence of humans to be as repulsive (and even frightening) as humans would find an encounter with cockroaches, ants, and mice or rats in their kitchens, in their food.  If it’s evil for Cthulhu to want to destroy humans, then it’s surely just as evil for humans to want to fumigate their homes when they are infested with “pests”.

I know, I know, Cthulhu isn’t real*, but that doesn’t change the point I’m making.  The monster, the outsider—the stranger—can be just as innocent, just as horrified, just as frightened as any human in any scary story.

Fear is not the mind killer, despite what they say in Dune, but prolonged fear is erosive, corrosive, and a burden that can become too great to bear.  And being a stranger in a strange land may be a low-level kind of fear—often more of a stress and tension, really—but it is real.

And even a monster, a stranger, might hope or dream or wish that somewhere, somehow, someone would rescue it, would reach out and try to help it, so that it doesn’t have to feel so lost and alone and afraid.  But it might recognize that it has no actual right to expect that anyone would ever do such a thing, and—seeing as it is a monster, a stranger—that its nature is to be alone until it finally succumbs to its local increasing entropy.

Anyway, that’s nearly all for today.  I won’t be writing anything tomorrow.  As for Friday, well, whether I write anything then will depend on factors such as whether the trains are running again by then so that I’ll be able to get to the office okay, and of course, whether I’m even alive—but, then, it always depends on that latter variable.

In closing, I’ll refer to a different topic.  Many of you are probably aware of the very large Powerball jackpot that was recently won (or so I understand) by some human somewhere.  If you’re interested in reading a story about someone who wins a similarly large jackpot and tries to do good with it, leading to unexpected and earthshaking consequences, you could read my short story, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” which is available as a standalone story through Kindle, and also as part of my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is available on Kindle and in both paperback and hardcover editions.  I think it’s a pretty good story.  If you read it, I hope you enjoy it, and I’d be grateful for any feedback I’m able to receive.

Stay dry and safe, wherever you are.

*As far as we know.