Horror

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I want this all to end

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer (the little one, not the regular sized one).  The laptop is slightly more awkward for typing on when there are bumps and shakes in a vehicle, but the vastly greater speed with which I’m able to type on it more than makes up for that—though it does not assuage the frustration.

I’m already exhausted (mentally) after only one day of work.  I don’t think it’s the work per se that’s so exhausting, it’s the environment, the people, the noise, the frustrations, the fact that other people arrive late or not at all, so many little frustrations.  There’s so little predictability in their behavior, and what there is is so often illogical.

I have, in general, identified more with Melkor than with Sauron in Tolkien’s universe—largely because he’s the Big Boss—but sometimes I can understand Sauron’s desire for order, and for forcing other creatures to be more orderly.  Of course, the way he goes about that is pretty stupid, but whataya gonna do?  As Gandalf said, he is a “wise fool” (a great expression).

Anyway, I like Lord Foul better than either of those two, and I like Doctor Doom most of all.  Doctor Doom is the sort of character about whom Christopher Nolan could make a movie trilogy, presenting him in a more down-to-earth fashion in a nearly realistic story, as he did with Batman, because Doom is not the product of radioactive spider bites, nor is he the last survivor of a star faring people with powers because of his alien nature, nor is he otherwise enhanced.  He is a human, but with a brilliant, inventive intellect and an obsessive drive.

Why am I writing about this stuff right now?  I have now idea.  This is all stream of consciousness, and that stream flows faster when I’m typing.  I’ve written all this so far in less than ten minutes (first draft), and I’m already almost halfway to my target word count.  I have to set a target, not so that I don’t go below it, but so that I don’t go too far over it.  I could probably gabble on here interminably.

But I want it to end.  I’m so very, very tired, and I have very little joy in my life.  I mean, I’m pleased that The Chasm and the Collision is still an enjoyable read even now.  But of course, I’m probably one of two people in the world who has actually read it.  My mother died just days after it was published—I tried to read some of it to her in her hospice bed, from her own miniature Kindle, but it was clear she wasn’t even following.  That’s too bad.  I think she really would have liked it.  I think she had been looking forward to reading it.

It’s such a me fact that my most wholesome, family-friendly story involves a threat of destruction to two universes and a villain who is unknowingly in the thrall of a much greater, larger scale “villain” or destructive force that threatens all universes, potentially.  That’s my meta-level villain; its influence is felt in many of my other stories, though I don’t always make that explicit.  I have so many ideas for my large-scale omniverse (formerly thought of as a “metaverse” before Schmuckerberg stole my term), so much backstory and intersections and connections and so on, but none of that is ever going to happen or be revealed or anything.  It’s sad, but, as a character in my darkest ever story says, “Life’s like that, I suppose.”

I wish I could sleep for a really long time, just to rest and recreate myself, but that’s not an available option.  I don’t simply long for “suspended animation” because that’s just like pausing a game; you wake up in the same state you were in when you laid down.  The only point to that would be living to see a future you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.  It’s not any kind of a cocoon, a chrysalis, an Adam Warlock kind of thing, where you change and grow and heal.

I don’t know why I’m writing about comic books and other wildly fictional characters.  Perhaps it’s because the real world is not only so stressful but is also so stupid.  This emergent system that is the whole human race interacting with itself is just an astonishing example of idiocy on performance enhancers.  I really am sick of them.

If I were Doom, I would decide to commit myself to saving them, correcting them, trying to make the world as good as I know it could be.  But of course, that leads Doom to be thought of as a villain (he has other psychopathology that contributes to that, of course).

Okay, well, I’m approaching my target, and obviously I have nothing to say, but that doesn’t stop me.  I’m really tired and depressed and discouraged.  I cannot go on like this for long.  Right now, I’m trying to hold on until at least next Friday, when I’m finally getting an autism assessment, but I don’t even know if that’s enough to cling to even for so short a time.

We shall see.

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The noonday demon lurks everywhere

It’s Monday morning and, yes, I’m writing another blog post.  Isn’t it exciting?

I’m basically doing this because I have nothing else to do.  By which I mean I have no other real outlet on any kind of regular basis.  I don’t write fiction anymore, I don’t draw (or paint…nor do I do any sculpting, for that matter, but I haven’t done that in nearly 35 years).  I haven’t even diddled around on the guitar in about two weeks, and I haven’t played any kind of keyboard in far longer than that.  I certainly haven’t played any video games in I don’t know how long (unless you count the Euchre app on my phone).

I tried to download a chess app.  Well, actually, I did download one; it’s not as though that’s challenging.  What I tried to do was get interested in chess.  However, before I’d even gotten through one game against the computer, I’d remembered just how boring I find chess, even though I won that game.  It didn’t help that, because it was a free app, ads would pop up that would supersede the game now and then.  I uninstalled it.

Similarly, I tried again to get on Brilliant dot org and learn and/or review some stuff, and that was fine as far as it went, but the stupid Brilliant people (somewhat of an oxymoron, I guess) have the app set up so that it sends all sorts of irritating emails and (if you let it) cell phone notifications about how your “streak” is going to come to an end, so you should go and do a couple of review problems to continue it…it’s so annoying that I don’t go back on the app, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m supporting Sabine Hossenfelder by using it, I would unsubscribe, so I would no longer be tempted to annoy myself.  People at Brilliant take note:  my loyalty to Sabine goes only so far.

It’s a shame, because I kind of like doing the stuff on Brilliant when I’m doing it, but the last thing I want is to trigger all those intrusive proddings that make me want to find where Brilliant is headquartered and burn the building to the ground.

I also have the Babbel app, and though I had briefly started learning a bit of conversational German, I fell off that (again, after irritating emails and push notifications).  Still, I think now I may try to start learning some Russian.  There’s nothing political in this, it’s just an interesting language.  It’s different enough from English to be engaging, and Mila Kunis speaks Russian.  So do many of the people in Ukraine (they don’t offer Ukrainian on Babbel, but I figure Russian would be a start) and as the Beatles sang, “The Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind.”  Ha ha.

Anyway, I like languages, generally.  I’ve often said that language (especially written language) is the greatest invention of the human race, the one that made nearly every other invention possible.  Learning another language helps you understand your own language more deeply, and to get a sense of the nature of language itself, how it varies, what things are constant, and so on.

So, I set myself up to start Russian, but I didn’t actually start it yet.  Is that what they call “executive dysfunction” nowadays?  In my case it might be better called “middle-management dysfunction”, or perhaps even “janitorial dysfunction”…though that latter sounds like it might be a euphemism for incontinence.

I don’t know what to do.  Nothing is really interesting.  Certainly nothing is fun.  Nothing really even gives me any relief from anhedonia; I can only distract myself through autogenous damage, if that’s a term.  Cuts are best, but burns are less obtrusive‒people tend to freak out about blood too much, whereas no one can see burns at the moment they occur.  Burns leave deeper and more damaging scars, also, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I’m trying to read an old, previously abandoned light novel series that I’d started because I liked the anime.  When I’m done with that‒which will be soon‒I think I’m going to be out of anything I can even force myself to read.

All of this is trivia, of course; it doesn’t matter‒because I don’t matter.  I don’t do any good for anyone, including myself.  I don’t really interact with anyone, except a weekly (ish) phone call with my sister.  I don’t have any friends to talk to or with whom to hang out; everyone I love has at some point decided they no longer want to be around me, so I don’t intend to fall into that trap ever again.  My memory is too damn good for me to forget how much that shit hurts.  It all still hurts.

“Life is pain, Highness,” the Dread Pirate Roberts said.  But it is not mandatory.  One can opt out if one so wishes.

I hope you all have a good day.

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Had I pow’r, I should Pour the sweet blog of concord into hell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday yet again, and I’m writing my more traditional blog post, but for those of you who weren’t expecting them, and so did not look, you should know that I also wrote posts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I had no drive or desire to write any fiction; it has felt utterly pointless to do so all week.  Everything pretty much feels pointless.

I did spend a bit of time yesterday sharing all my blog post links to my published works‒not counting music‒to X and LinkedIn and Facebook.  I don’t know if many people saw them, though my sister did leave a comment on Facebook on the shared link for Hole for a Heart, stating that it is one of my scariest stories.  Thankfully, it was intended to be scary, so that’s quite a good compliment.  If I’d meant it to be a light-hearted children’s fairy tale and it was one of my scariest stories, that would have been troubling.

I’ve long since noticed, from early on in my writing, that I tend to put horror elements into a lot of my work.  For instance, in Ends of the Maelstrom, my lost work from my teenage years‒which was an overlap of science fiction and fantasy‒I ended up having quite a few sequences that followed a large and powerful (and quite mad) cy-goyle named Chrayd, who was basically a horror monster, and whose actions didn’t directly push the plot forward.  His portions of the book were clearly little horror stories.

Also, my son read the original 2nd chapter of The Chasm and the Collision (which became the second half of the first chapter, “A Fruitful Day and a Frightful Night”) back when he was, I guess, about 11 or 12, and he said specifically that it was scary.  Of course, obviously it was meant to be scary for the main character‒I did call it “A Frightful Night” after all‒but I guess I did a good job of conveying Alex’s fear and making it at least slightly contagious.

I feel that at least some of the portions of Outlaw’s Mind ought to be quite scary‒it’s certainly meant to be a horror story‒but that may just be because I know what’s happening, and that at least some of events of the story were inspired by one of my two experiences of sleep paralysis (which is a truly frightening thing).

Of course, the two stories that are currently on my burners are not horror stories at all.  One is sort of a whimsical, light science fiction tale (set in the “ordinary” world), and the other is a more “light-novel” science fiction adventure, possibly good for young adults, based on a comic book I had long-ago envisioned.  I’m sure I will throw some horror elements in the latter by accident‒it seems to be how my writing works‒but it’s not any primary part of it.

Here I am writing as if any of those stories will be published and read by people.  Isn’t it cute?

One good thing about writing horror is that there is no reason to have any “trigger warnings”.  If you’re the sort of person who needs trigger warnings, you probably shouldn’t be reading horror stories.  I admit, though, that a few of my works probably merit greater-than-average caution; I’m thinking most specifically of Solitaire and both parts of Unanimity.  These are stories in which some quite “realistic” horrors take place‒things that could, in principle, happen in the real world.

Not that Unanimity itself could happen in the real world.  It couldn’t.  But many of the things done in the book that are horrific are possible and even realistic in a sense.

As for Solitaire, well…yeah, there’s nothing supernatural there at all.  It’s an entirely realistic story, probably too much so.  It’s short though, so a potential reader wouldn’t be troubled for long.  Still, that story is probably for “grown-ups” only.  Yet, as I’ve noted before, I wrote the story, all in one night, while I was in a perfectly good mood, keeping my then-future-fiancée company while she worked overnight on a project.

It’s curious to think about where these ideas originate and how they arise.

Even if we ever have a full description of the workings of a human brain, I doubt it will ever be possible to model, predictively and precisely, the specific outputs of any given one.  There are hundreds of trillions to a quadrillion synapses in a typical (or even divergent) brain, and those synapses are not simple And, Or, Xor, Not, Nand or other basic binary logic gates.  Their connections are almost continuously variable, and the reactivity and set-points can vary over time as well, in response to intracellular and extracellular conditions.

A quadrillion-bit system would never be close to big enough to model a human brain, even if we knew how to write the program.  And the possible outcomes of different processes in such a system would rapidly grow to numbers so vast they make the number of cubic Planck lengths in the accessible universe vanishingly close to zero.

As for “neural networks”, well, don’t let the name fool you too much.  They aren’t really modeling neurons or even acting very much like them.  I mean, they are super-cool*, don’t get me wrong!  But I don’t suspect that any of them, at least not by itself, will ever be a true AGI, not without also incorporating some analog of basal ganglia, limbic systems, and brain stems‒drives and motivations (general and partly alterable utility functions) in other words.

It’s also a concern (mainly orthogonal to the above) that, as more of what is out there on the anti-social webernet has been produced by LLM-based chat programs, the programs will more and more be modeling their future responses on responses not created by humans but by previous uses of the GPT style bots, and so they will more and more model only themselves‒a kind of solipsistic spiral that could rapidly degenerate into a huge, steaming pile of crap.

Of course, the programmers are clever, and they may well find ways to circumvent such issues.  I suppose we shall see what happens, unless civilization fails and falls before that comes to pass.

Wow, all that was a curious course of thought, wasn’t it?  I certainly neither planned for nor predicted it.  It just happened (like everything else).

As for what will happen for the rest of the week, well, I’m far from sure and can’t even give a very good guess.  I may write blog posts tomorrow and Saturday, or I may write fiction, or I may do neither.  I may take a long walk off a short pier, literally or metaphorically.  If Hugh Everett was right, there will probably be some versions of me “somewhere” who take each of all possible actions.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope that the only possible Everettian branches in your futures are ones in which you are happy.

TTFN

*Though at least most of them don’t need literally to be supercooled, unlike most modern quantum computing systems.

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One of a new pair o’ digms

Hello again.  This is hopefully going to be the first event in a new pattern of behavior in which I write blog posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday and write fiction on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  The future is always in motion, of course, at least from our “worm’s eye view” of the universe without any access to enough information (let alone computing power) to make us anything like Laplace’s Demon, so things may not turn out according to plan‒but it is the plan.

I used the MS Word app on my phone to take a look at Outlaw’s Mind yesterday, just to see whether it looked like I might want to work on it again sometime.  I think it might benefit from eliminating the opening portion, which has an adult Timothy Outlaw approaching what will be (according to the original story idea) the climax of his tale.

I wrote this based on a story idea that I had written down in my “Story Ideas” file (appropriately enough), and the rest of the tale took off from there.  But I think‒perhaps‒that it has changed into a slightly different story than the opening idea, and I think it might be better if I just throw that little concept away and focus instead on the account of Timothy’s difficulties with rage and his exploration of his mind and its nature and the real or imagined horrific forces that plague him.  For one thing, this story connects with ideas that involve the larger Omniverse of my stories, including everything from The Chasm and the Collision and my potential story Changeling in a Shadow World, all the way back to my first completed (and now lost) book, Ends of the Maelstrom.

I like the process and concept of joining disparate fictional universes together, as in Stephen King’s whole Dark Tower concept, to say nothing of the (earlier) multiversal connections in comic books and graphic novels such as, for instance, Marvel/DC crossovers, and even, on a less “meta” scale, the merger of Asimov’s Foundation novels with his robot and empire novels and so on.  I’ve certainly done this on smaller scales myself already; careful and committed readers of my stories (if such people exist other than I) will know that the world of Unanimity is the same as the world of Hole for a Heart.

I guess that’s all still up in the air in many senses.  Extra Body, the story I’m ostensibly working on “now”, has some references‒highly speculative ones‒to a particular world of light-hearted, classic sci-fi.  It will be a rather nerdy sort of speculative connection, but I have no trouble with that.  I am certainly a nerd.

In other news, I did indeed walk to the train station again this morning, and I feel reasonably well, physically.  Yesterday I walked a total of about seven or eight miles, roughly, and I feel fairly okay.  I considered walking back to the house from the train in the evening, but my boss‒quite correctly, I think‒warned me against overdoing it.  This is quite sensible.  I think for most of this week I will stick with just the morning walk, but then next week I intend to add the return journey and eventually work my way along from there.

As for sleep:  well, I didn’t seem to get any worse a night’s sleep than usual, though it wasn’t particularly better.  I still started waking up very early, but knowing that I was going to be walking allowed me at least to put a decent spin on that fact, since I could just tell myself that, if I was unable to go back to sleep, I would just get up sooner and start walking sooner.  I did finally leave about five minutes earlier than yesterday, and I took a slightly different route, just to keep things fresh.

Yesterday while walking I listened to the audiobook of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, volume 1, whereas today I listened to some of Sean Carroll’s latest AMA podcast.  I highly recommend this; it’s both enjoyable and educational.  In the book, yesterday, I had to rewind and relisten to portions a number of times when I realized I had zoned out on some things he said (or wrote).  That’s fine.  It helps me learn better.

I wish there were an audio version of Quantum Field Theory, as Simply as Possible, and some others.  I suppose I could offer to do the audio myself, and by doing it, would learn the subject better.  It’s something to consider.

We’ll see.  I’m going to call this to a halt for the moment because my train stop is approaching and‒funnily‒I’m dozing off while writing.  That doesn’t happen very often, but maybe I’m getting into a relaxed state because of the exercise.  Either way, I don’t want to miss my stop, so this’ll be it for today.  Talk to you Thursday.

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How many times must a man wake up before he can sleep through the night?

What a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sleep I had last night*.  I have said before, and I will repeat it in all honesty here:  my last good night’s sleep that I can recall happened in the mid-1990s.  So, I never seen to get a very good night’s sleep anymore, and this either contributes to or is a consequence of my dysthymia and apparent “neurodivergence”**.

Last night, however, was a bit of an outlier even for me.  For much of the night I would drop off to sleep and then awaken in stress, wondering what the time was and if I had overslept, only to discover that it was a mere five minutes since I had last looked at the clock.  I don’t know how often that happened, but we can work out the theoretical maximum just by taking the number of hours between when I first dropped off and when I finally gave up and got up, and multiplying that by the number of five-minute intervals (a rough but reasonably accurate average) per hour, which is twelve.

Given this, there was a theoretical maximum of between sixty and sixty-six awakenings during the night.  I’m sure I had quite a bit fewer than that, though.  for instance, I had a period of relatively long sleep during the early night, lasting about an hour to an hour and a half.  So, there were no more than 48 awakenings, and still probably significantly fewer than that.  Misery tends to amplify and magnify the subjective impression of these kinds of occurrences.  It’s probably a perverse version of the peak-end rule, described by Fredrickson and  Kahneman, which was used in colonoscopies before the general practice of doing conscious sedation, which ensures that people don’t tend to remember what happens during the actual test.

As one who has been present when colonoscopies were performed, I can tell you that patients are often semi-awake and even somewhat responsive to interactions during the test, but they do not remember it.  Such conscious sedation can give one the appearance of rest, but it doesn’t actually allow for effective sleep, though one may feel that one has slept during that time.  It’s also not the sort of thing to use outside of careful clinical monitoring, as the death of Michael Jackson demonstrated.

Anyway, I had a moment‒subjectively‒of relatively deep sleep quite early in the night followed by a very prolonged period of miserable and stress-filled, anxiety-ridden sleep throughout the remaining hours, until I gave up and got showered and dressed and ready and came to the train station quite early for the train.  That’s where I am now.

It’s not too cold here, but the wind is relatively strong, making it feel colder, and so I have my hood up.  I imagine I look a bit like a poor man’s Ringwraith from a distance, dressed all in back as I always am.  Or maybe I seem to be a would-be Sith Lord.  Neither is a pleasant state in which to be, of course, but at least they have powers.  My powers, if that’s the right word, are mainly just mental abilities, and unfortunately, my best ones are not really put to much use, other than in this blog.

I’m so tired all the time.  Nothing is very much fun anymore, as Pink Floyd sang in One of My Turns, from The Wall, disc one, side B, fourth song from the end.  Don’t Leave Me Now*** has already become an obsolete, already-too-late situation for me, which leaves only Another Brick in the Wall Part 3, and then Goodbye Cruel World to finish up the first half of that album.

I did get some new reading glasses yesterday, somewhat stronger than the previous ones, and I’m pleased to relate that they seem to allow me to read a normal, printed page (without adjustable type size) adequately.  I even read three or four pages of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible yesterday, and maybe that will be the beginning of something more.  Right now, I probably wouldn’t read it even if I had it in front of me.  But hopefully, with that one barrier reduced, the vector sum of that system in phase space will change, and I’ll do some more reading.

This leads me to wonder if it might be better if I overshot the vision target and got reading glasses that are stronger than the ones I have now.  Maybe I should try that experiment.  Thankfully, reading glasses are pretty cheap, so even if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be out too much money.

Perhaps I would even rekindle (no pun intended) my ability to read and enjoy print books of various kinds if I did that.  It’s probably a lot to ask or expect, let alone hope for, but it might be worth a try.  My life post-FSP is unrecognizable even to myself compared to the one before it.  I’ve said many times that I feel that I’m like a Nazgul, or some other mortal who keeps a “great ring”.  I have not died, but neither am I growing or obtaining new life; I’m merely continuing, until at least every breath is a weariness.  “…thin and stretched out, like butter scraped over too much bread,” indeed.

Anyway, that’s more than enough of that.  I mean the blog post, of course, but I also mean the other‒that drawn out, continued existence that has no true life to it.  I’m just weary, and I have no hope for anything good in my future.  I need to get to the end of that first disc.  I can see no real point in anything else; it’s all just trudging through an endless, primordial desert with no oases.

*Unfortunately, I don’t think that moving to Australia would make a difference, and they probably wouldn’t let me in the country, anyway.

**Most likely it’s a complex system that interacts with itself, with each aspect feeding back on the other, the sleep trouble exacerbating the depression and other issues, and those issues further worsening the sleep, until some relative dynamic equilibrium is reached.

***And I want to make it clear that I never did the abusive stuff mentioned by “Pink” in that song.  I am certainly an unpleasant person, but I never was one to put my spouse “through the shredder in front of my friends” let alone “to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night”.  If anything, being the recipient of such things would be more likely for me.  But even if she had been so inclined, my ex-wife was not capable of beating me to a pulp.  Not that she would have been so inclined, anyway.  Though I suspect that most people who spend very much time with me entertain that notion at least occasionally.  Goodness knows I do.

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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.