insomnia

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Please don’t take this post to heart; it’s not aimed at you.

Hello and good morning.  There’s no Shakespearean quote-based title today.  My apologies for that and for what follows.  I’m just having a rough time right now.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing this on the stupid mini lapcom again.  It’s “stupid” because I have to deal with changing the base font and type size every time I create a new post now, because Microsoft Word changed its defaults to the shitty little font Aptos Narrow, which sucks hugely, and they now want to start the font size automatically at 12, when for ages it’s been 11, which works just fine and is a prime number.

I swear, it’s almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple computer.  But I’d really rather not buy any more computers, nor any new smartphone, nor any more clothes or shoes or cups or silverware or shampoo or deodorant or any of it.  I hate having to get new things that have to do with the present bleeding into the future, when I don’t even want to be here in the present.

But, of course, one is not supposed to want not to keep living.  That’s taboo.  One tends to get shamed and cajoled about it if one even mentions it.  One is offered no help, of course.  It’s rather reminiscent of the “pro-life” movement, who want to make sure that babies are born if conceived (and many of them want to eliminate contraception) but have no intention to take responsibility for the lives they are forcing to continue.

Well, fuck them in the neck until they are “aborted” is how I feel about that, and when I’m feeling very uncharitable, I’m inclined that way about the other.  I mean, people don’t want you to die, but they don’t offer any actual help, and they don’t offer any serious reasons to stay alive.  At the very least, they don’t offer any convincing ones.

I’ve been dealing on and off with suicidal thoughts and hatred of myself starting when I was in my teens.  It has waxed and waned over my lifetime, and is resistant to the various and sundry treatments I have tried.  At least, they never have seemed to work for very long.

I have learned rather recently that this is common in people with ASD, particularly relatively “high functioning” ones, because of the exhaustion and ego-dystonic effects of constant masking, pretending to be human, pretending not to be seriously bothered by the things that bother us, trying to make our quirky habits of thought into jokes so people aren’t bothered too much by them.

It is at least good information to have, that one is autistic, but it points to no solution.  Indeed, data appears to suggest that ordinary treatments for depression that work reasonably well on NTs are often not useful in people with ASD.  But of course, it’s not as though one can cease to have ASD, any more than one can decide to be no longer right handed.

Anyway, the point toward which I was moving is one I’ve mentioned before:  I have been dealing with depression and self-hatred for more than three quarters of my life, and I am a bookish, rather studious sort of person who likes to try to understand things as much as he can.  I am also a trained medical doctor, who obviously has given special attention to such matters when he was/is studying, since it’s of real personal interest.

I’m not saying that no one out there could possibly find some answer or treatment that I haven’t encountered or tried or whatever; that would be astonishing hubris.  But if one is going to go for obvious or stereotypical things (or worse, to try to give religious reasons for one not to take one’s own life) it’s unlikely to be successful.  Indeed, the fact that it just reiterates things that have been tried and have failed already, makes everything all that much more depressing.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to demean or disparage or denigrate or dismiss (or any other d-word) people who want to help those who are in distress.  But it gets frustrating when, for instance, one logs onto Instagram or whatever and a pop-up message says “Someone out there thinks you need help” and it directs you either to—wait for it!—the suicide help line* or to suggestions for seeking therapy or suggestions for how to help oneself that include things like “talking to friends” or such like.

It’s almost as if it were taunting you.  It’s almost as if it were saying, “Aw, are you not doing too well?  Well, here, take a look at these various things that you have tried and found unsuccessful in the past.  Or you can talk to your family or friends, though you live alone and have no local friends**, and your nearest family members are more than a thousand miles away and have their own shit with which to deal.”

Sorry, everyone.  I’m angry and grumpy and gloomy and unpleasant today—more so than usual, I mean.  And yet, other people still come to me with their problems, and I do my best to help when I can, and I even expend my own resources to help.  But no one even asks me if I have any problems, and if I start to mention any, people just get awkward or make some joke or dismissive comment about it all.  If I had a drug problem, there would be available resources, but I don’t have one***, alas.

I get it.  Everyone has their own things happening.  That’s definitely true.  I don’t have any right to impose my troubles on anyone.  But if people aren’t going to do anything, then they should shut the fuck up.

Anyway, again, I’m sorry.  Really.  Forget about that crap from me, please.  I know that none of you out there are doing anything to try to cause me consternation.  I’m the one with the bad hardware and software.  You’re all just curious, literate people reading the blog of someone who occasionally has something mildly interesting to say and being as supportive as its practicable to be, often more so.  It’s my problem or set of problems, and it’s my fault (in the sense that “I am the faulty one” not in the sense of “I have done wrong”).

It doesn’t help that it’s near the solstice, so the daytime is getting shorter and shorter—I tend to be seasonally affected—and also that it’s the holiday time of year, and that the US is in a political state reminiscent of the single available port-o-john after a major rock festival.

I’m overwhelmed and I’m very tired, and I don’t see any reason to expect things to tend to get any better than they are now.  Just as all political and regulatory and economic forces are in place to make the stock market tend to go up in the long run, despite many local ups and downs, my system seems set up to deteriorate over time.  I don’t just mean that in the sense involved in the second law of thermodynamics, though that obviously comes into play.  I mean that so many events of life seem prone to knock me downward, mentally, often in big steps, but my attempts to crawl back upward are plodding and scrabbling, like someone trying to reach the summit of a mountain of loose gravel.

Anyway, geez, sorry again.  I shouldn’t even post this, really, but I don’t have the energy to start over and write a different post, so I’ll stick with this, apologizing yet another time.  If I write a post tomorrow and/or Saturday, it/they will appear here.  If not, it/they won’t.

I hope you all are doing well.

TTFN

*With which I’ve had a particularly bad result in the past, and toward which I am therefore quite wary.

**This is only appropriate or at least predictable.  Believe me, no one wants to be around me much anymore.  I don’t even want to be around myself.

***I know, I know, that’s just what a person with a drug problem might say.  But while that may be true, nevertheless, among the number of people who would say that they don’t have a drug problem when asked, the vast majority really would be people who don’t have a drug problem, because most people don’t have a drug problem.  Bayes saves the day again.

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Wednesday woes of a weary worrier who wishes he would write more worlds

It’s Wednesday now, and I’m writing this on my mini lapcom for the first time in 12 days.  Well, actually, I’m writing this for the first time, full stop.  I’ve never written this particular blog post before.  But I haven’t written anything at all using the lapcom—the mini one, anyway—since December 5th, twelve days ago.  I know because that was the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, a fact easy to discern since I save all the files with the date as part of the title and list them in order from most recent to oldest in my blog post saves file.

Am I ruining the magic?  I work with this stuff, you know.

Anyway, I’m not going to get into explorations of the nature of days or human interactions and inadequate equilibria like I did yesterday.  At least, I don’t think I’m going to do that.  I wasn’t planning  to do it yesterday, though—it just sort of spewed out when I opened my figurative mouth, as much to my surprise as to yours—so I cannot rule out the possibility entirely.  Still, it would be a strange thing indeed for me to start writing about the same subject(s).  I don’t even remember very clearly what I wrote yesterday.  That’s one of the side-effects of writing it all down:  I don’t need to use my own disk space to store it in my head.

But I don’t feel like writing anything about external reality on any kind of large scale today.  I don’t really feel like writing anything at all; I’m just doing this out of habit, which has tremendous power over me.  Of course, it’s my habit, initiated by me, so in a way I’m saying that I have tremendous power over me.  Unfortunately, that power is not something readily consciously seized.

I had a good habit going when I was writing fiction for a long time there.  Starting when I was up at FSP West I wrote three to four pages of fiction every day, and kept that up for nearly ten years, I think, writing or editing on every work morning but Thursdays, and I produced a lot of material given that time frame.  Here, just take a look on Amazon at my list of author’s works*.  There are many titles there.  Mind you, there is some redundancy, in that my short stories that are available individually only for Kindle are also collected into Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities** along with two stories that don’t appear elsewhere.

I was “triggered” to think about such things yesterday afternoon when my coworker was telling me about watching It: Welcome to Derry, and discussing how other things from the Stephen King universe are involved in it, as well as other characters.  It sounded pretty nifty, though I don’t know that I’ll ever watch it.  What it made me think most, though, was how my fictional universe(s) is/are interconnected in many ways, and that they’re all also connected back to the first full-length novel I ever wrote back in high school, called Ends of the Maelstrom.

I lost the original draft of that when I lost nearly everything else I owned—and things far more important even than all that—back in 2012.  But I know the story, of course, and I could probably rewrite it more or less as it was, if I just chose to do it.

But I bemoaned the fact—as I said to my coworker—that I don’t seem able to write fiction anymore, even though thinking about that combined universe writing makes me think about my many unwritten stories.  As I said to my coworker, I really wish I could finish Outlaw’s Mind, though it will end quite sadly, and is already very sad.  I gave him some minor spoilers, which I felt were fine, since he’s unlikely to read any of it, ever.

Of course, not too long ago I wrote my little sci-fi story Extra Body, which is really meant to be kind of funny, in a way, but I couldn’t even get to the point of editing that very much, let alone publishing it.  And I haven’t made any further progress on DFandD.

I wish I had the energy to write new fiction, but all my energy reserves seem to be used up, or at least I am trying to get the dregs out of the container every day.  But every day it gets harder just to make it to the next day.  I’m exhausted, I’m always in pain, I have no real rest and nothing to which I look forward.  If I had a simple “off” switch, I might just flip it.

The trouble with that, of course, is that if it literally just stopped me, it might be possible for someone else to flip it back on and I would have to resume just as I had been when I flipped it off (so to speak).  It might be better to go into a cocoon like Adam Warlock and metamorphose into the next stage of my existence, but I don’t appear to have that option.

I’m very tired.  So very tired.  Indeed, I’m so tired that I’m writing sentence fragments.

Maybe I’ll try to share my various works on social media, to see if anyone picks up on any of them.  I doubt they will, but it’s possible.  After that, I don’t know.  It’s nearly the end of another pointless year, albeit one with one saving grace, perhaps two.  I don’t really look forward to seeing the next year.

But I probably will see myself to writing tomorrow’s blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing okay.

*There’s some book in there by someone else that has a sort of similar title to one of my books (Son of Man), but the author’s name is nothing like mine, so I don’t know what the heck is up with Amazon’s software that it put that there.  It’s sort of annoying, but it’s not worth the effort to try to get them to fix it.  They didn’t even carry any Hanukkah-themed gift card boxes or envelopes this year, which really makes me feel a bit disinclined to buy from them as much as I have in the past.

**That one is available in hardcover, and it ought to arrive before Christmas for most people if you wanted to order it as a gift for someone.

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“As it is lasting, so be deep!”

Well, it’s Monday again.  It’s also the first day of Hanukkah, which technically started at sundown last night‒which means it started not only at different times for different time zones, but also in different latitudes, since in the winter the sun sets earlier farther north than closer to the equator*.  It also rises later.  This is all due to the curvature of the Earth.

Of course, in summertime, the sun sets later the farther north one goes (or south if one is in the southern hemisphere).  If you’ve ever been in northern Europe in the summertime, you’ll know what I mean.  It can feel very strange for it not to be dark out yet at nearly eleven at night (for instance) if one is from the US, where things aren’t quite so disparate.

Anyway, I’m not really celebrating Hanukkah this year, any more than I celebrated Thanksgiving or any more than I will celebrate Christmas or New Years or any other such holidays.  I have a little stylized menorah graphic that I used to put up on “the board”, with an increasing number of candles with the days and everything, but I don’t think I’m going to do that this year.  It’s actually more depressing to do little superficial things to mark a holiday when one has no one with whom to celebrate.

Speaking of all this, by the way, I’m very sorry if some people are put off when I talk about my depressed and stressed and self-destructive thoughts.  I know they bother some people, though that in itself is a bit curious.  After all, they’re not your depressive and anxious and self-destructive thoughts.  Or maybe they are in a sense.  I don’t know.

I do know, though, that it seems that my dark, morose, and pro-mortalist posts seem to garner higher readership than my ones where I discuss some kind of mathematical or scientific or philosophical or political point. They are certainly more popular than my fiction.

The number of people who reliably read this blog, or at least click on it daily, is greater than the number of people who have ever bought a single one of my books or even my short stories**.  I don’t know why more people click on or “like” the dark posts, but I don’t mind it.  At least I can feel that there are people who hear it, even if there may be little “listening” involved.

Of course I’m heading in to work today.  Things have been slow at the office, and some of the people who work there are going through various events‒some positive, some negative‒that mean that some of them are unable to work as regularly as usual or to work at all in the short term, and it makes things slower and a bit dreary.  Of course, unless I’m sick, I go to the office.  I have nothing better to do (nor, really, anything worse, since that might be tempting also).

I do keep being tempted to go back on antidepressants, but they never seem to quite work out as I would hope, in the sense of actually correcting my depression for any significant length of time.  I’ve tried at least one member of nearly every class of antidepressant, and more than one of some.  They just tend to make me more disconnected and dissociated, honestly.  Maybe ECT would help more, but that’s hard to get nowadays, and the potential memory issues associated are worrisome.

SSRIs do tend to help my anxiety/social discomfort somewhat, but they affect my judgment, with negative outcomes.  For instance, I did not see the fact that I could end up a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years when I was only trying to help others who also had chronic pain, like I have.  And therapy has never given me many durable results‒this is, I’m led to understand, not uncommon in people with ASD‒though it was often nice to have someone with whom I could speak freely and who would at least give me sympathy.  Still, it was pricey.

I certainly don’t want to disrespect my various therapists‒I do very much respect them, and they did their best for me, I’ve no doubt about that‒but I might have done as well having weekly visits to a sex worker.  I don’t think I would have wanted to partake in their regular “services” though; I think the prospect of having sex with someone you don’t know, let alone to whom you have any deep attachment, is very strange and seems uncomfortable.

It might sound like it could be good, but I think it would be unworkable if I tried it.  I don’t even like being patted on the shoulder by people with whom I am not close, and sometimes, depending on my mood, even by people with whom I am close.  But still, one hears stories of men who go to sex workers largely to have someone with whom they can freely just talk.

That would probably cost more, though, and possibly lead to legal problems, not to mention the facts of exploitation and so on, in which I have no desire to participate.

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  But it doesn’t matter.  I’m just tired of all this.  I don’t want to do it anymore.  I just want to sleep.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day.  And Happy Hanukkah, if you celebrate it.

*The mirror image of all this occurs in the southern hemisphere.

**Though people who actually read my stories do seem to enjoy them.  I’m just really not good at promoting myself.  This is probably tied to my whole self-hatred, self-destructive attribute cluster.

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“And, to SLEEP, you must slumber in just such a bed.”

Well, it’s f*cking Saturday, and I’m going in the to f*cking office to f*cking work, because it’s not challenging enough for me to recover my limited mental equilibrium when I have two days off, so I should try to do it with one as often as possible.  Oh, and the one day I supposedly still have to take off is the day I have to do all my laundry, which means I have to go into the other part of the house and, more often than not, deal with their overly energetic and poorly trained dog‒and it’s a big dog.

I’m not afraid of dogs.  I like dogs, even very large ones.  But I have little sympathy for dogs that have not been trained, and who act like they’re still teething or something.  If it were my dog, I could rapidly train it out of the habit of putting its moronic jaws around peoples’ forearms, and it and I and others would be happier overall.

Maybe next time I’ll go out with suntan lotion or even pepper spray all over my arms, so it gets an unpleasant mouthful if it tries.

Honestly, sometimes I’m tempted just to slip it a few chunks of the rat bait/poison that I have.  It’s not the neurotoxin one, which is supposedly less harmful to people and pets than to rats.  It’s the super-coumadin, blood “thinning”, anticoagulant one.  To be honest, though, I would probably not be willing under nearly any circumstance to poison a dog, since the agency of such a creature is limited and its poor behavior is largely due to the humans in its life.

And yes, of course I have a big, multi-pound bag of rat poison.  Who knows, I might get peckish at some point and want it as a snack.  The holidays are upon us, after all, and it can be so hard to stay on a diet at this time of year.

Anyway, that’s just one possible nosh that I have for potential last meals.  I even have a couple of emptied out fiber capsules that I’ve refilled with broken glass pieces.  They would actually go nicely with the previously mentioned snack, wouldn’t they?  Like salted caramel, the two components could really enhance each other.  You might even call it synergy.

Enough about such tempting treats.  The point is, I’m going to the office today.  Then I’m heading back to the house.  Then I’ll be trying to rest if I can for the remainder of the weekend, though when I think of my own mind, I am inescapably reminded of Boromir describing Mordor:

That works pretty well to describe my very annoying brain/body.  I cannot seem to sleep very long, and I never feel like I sleep “all the way” if you will.  I am always somehow on yellow alert; I don’t know why.  It’s exhausting.  There are plain few upsides or effective distractions, and almost never any relief.

I don’t even know what I’m writing about right now, really.  I just feel a general, free-floating hostility and even hatred for most things in existence.  Sometimes I just want to wipe out the whole universe.  It can be done rather easily, at least from a certain perspective.

Incidentally, creating a new local source of the hypothetical inflaton field would probably not do the trick, assuming that inflationary cosmology is correct.  Most of the mathematical solutions to that possible situation indicate that, such a field would initiate a new, rapid, inflationarily expanding “universe”, but from the perspective of our universe the created bubble would just plop through and out of spacetime.  I haven’t done the math myself‒I am not adequately trained to do it at this time‒but I have this from more than one fairly reputable and reliable source, including people who actually do have the necessary expertise.

I’ve previously discussed vacuum collapse; if one could figure out how to trigger that‒assuming it is possible‒one could literally wipe out everything in the current universe.  Though, of course, it would take a long time, since it could only happen at the speed of light, so really, you’d only be wiping out everything in your future light cone.  There may be no way to destroy the universe that doesn’t effectively take a limitless time to accomplish.

On the other hand, when I spin around, it’s possible to view that action as the universe spinning around me while I’m stationary.  There are legitimate reasons why we don’t tend to think of it this way, but it’s a perspective that can be taken.

From that sort of perspective, when one dies (from one’s own point of view at least) the entire universe ceases to exist.  It’s very simple and thorough!  Of course, if there is an afterlife, that plan would fail, and one would be forced to go back to the drawing board.  But I’ve never encountered even borderline intriguing evidence or argument that might indicate an afterlife exists, unless you count things like a Poincare recurrence*.

So there is at least one reasonably reliable and plausibly achievable way to destroy the universe, from my point of view.  And the good thing about that is, from other points of view, the universe would still exist, and this would be no more contradictory than the fact that someone falling through the event horizon of a large enough black hole wouldn’t even notice it happening, but those far away would see the faller as never even quite reaching the event horizon.

Anyway, that theoretical stuff isn’t really very interesting for present purposes.  What matters is, at the very least, I can destroy the universe in a sense, if I so desire.  And every day it seems to become more and more tempting to do so.  This world is just so disgusting so often, and it’s not just humans that meet that description.

Ah, well.  Try to have a good day if you can for as long as the universe does exist.  After that, you’re on your own.

*Or the possibility of quantum immortality in the context of Everettian quantum mechanics.  But the various other possible alternate versions of me in such a theoretical quantum multiverse are not “me” even now, from my point of view‒not exactly, anyway, not in any sense that I can experience.  So future possible subsets of the wave function of the universe that contain randomly immortal versions of me are not worth taking into account, and they are vanishingly rare**.

**Though I suppose, as time goes by and all mortal things die, the quantum wavefunction of the universe might come to be dominated by such versions of…well, everyone.  None, however, would be able to interact with each other as far as I can see.

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Black Friday Sun, won’t you come?

Well, it’s officially “Black Friday” here in the US at least‒an ironic name that referred to the fact that the day after Thanksgiving was, at least traditionally, the busiest shopping day of the year, so going holiday shopping (mainly for Christmas) was always considered an ordeal.  And therefore…well, therefore everyone went and did it.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you look at it that way.  But that’s the way humans are, isn’t it?  Think of the hoarding of toilet paper that led to self-fulfilling prophecies of shortages during early COVID-19 days.

So, anyway, I’m going to the office today, because we’re open.  We’re also planning to be open tomorrow.

I wish I were sick.  I mean, I’m sick in the head (ask just about anybody, if they’re being honest) and I have chronic pain and all the fun associated with that, but I am not acutely ill, let alone ill enough that I could mentally excuse myself from going to work.

I wonder what would happen if I just decided not to go.  I wonder what would happen if I just didn’t go to work, didn’t write my blog, shut my phone off or put it on airplane mode, and just vegetated until I wilted and became compost.  Not very much, I suspect.

I mean, people at work would try to figure out where I was, because it’s work, and if I’m not there, someone will have to pick up the slack.  And I think my sister would try to figure out what had happened to me.  But that’s most of it.

A few people would worry, but that would only be for a while, and then even all passing thought of me would taper down, asymptotically approaching zero, but in the fashion of a quantum event‒more episodic and sporadic in measurable character than a seemingly smooth decay, but nevertheless getting closer and closer to zero all the time.

I’m tired.  Also, frankly, I’m uninterested.  The two things may be related.

None of the things I do for entertainment‒for distraction really‒are working very well anymore.  I am particularly bored of being in pain, of course.  That gets old very quickly, especially when it’s chronic, and mine has been there for decades now.  It’s not a warning of some life-threatening process happening, it’s just a set of alarms that are broken so they’re stuck in the “on” position.

Of course, my main problem(s) is/are me.  I’m a piece of merchandise that’s defective in many ways and in more than one system.  Believe me, if you got me as a present, you would hope whoever bought me had kept the receipt.

Anyway, I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday if you celebrated the holiday.  I ate a bit of junk food at the house, but it wasn’t very good, and it seemed to give me some gastrointestinal trouble, so that wasn’t a lot of fun.  There was nothing good on TV, unfortunately; I started to watch the Lions game (American football), but got bored very quickly.

I watched some videos on YouTube, but I’m running out of things there that are interesting.  The best thing I saw was a couple reacting to Rogue One, but that’s still very much a simulated, twice removed illusion of watching a movie with friends, so it’s a bit lame.

Obviously‒I hope it’s obvious‒I’m giving you my viewpoint on these things, not claiming to have some definitive, objective take on them.  If people enjoy something and it does no harm, then it’s a positive and “good” thing, so I mean no disparagement.

I am not a good measure for how good things might be, because I tend to see things in a less than optimistic and upbeat fashion.

That’s enough for now.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, though it’s difficult to see why.  Maybe some catastrophe will befall me and become a blessing to you all (and to me) by finishing everything for me.  In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend.

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“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.

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“These our actors…are melted into air, into thin air.”

Well, it’s Tuesday, and for reasons (or, rather, causes) that are unclear to me, I had a particularly poor sleep last night.  I just didn’t feel sleepy.  Even this morning, when I told myself I needed to buckle down and get some shut-eye at least, I was only “out” for a few moments.  I even felt, or worried, that I had overslept somehow, if that’s believable.  But when my eyes snapped inevitably open, I saw that maybe 15 minutes had passed.

Eventually, even someone as stubborn as I must give way to the brute facts of reality, so I gave up and got up.  Of course, even if one doesn’t decide to “give way”, it doesn’t change anything.  Reality doesn’t depend upon the approval or acquiescence of conscious beings, however they might like to flatter themselves that it does.  It simply is whatever it is.  That’s what makes it reality.

This is a good thing, of course.  If reality could simply be changed by the power of a mind‒for instance, my mind‒there would be many, many people who failed to signal or otherwise drove badly who would simply disappear, never again to be heard from by their friends and loved ones*.

In reality, though, if one wants to disintegrate someone, it’s a somewhat laborious and messy process.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to make something like a phaser from Star Trek that can just scatter someone into particles, or whatever it is that phasers do.  Trust me, I’ve thought about potential designs on and off over the course of decades.

You can’t shoot a beam of gluons because they self-interact and are not found outside the nucleus (or a quark-gluon plasma), which is why the strong force has such relatively short range despite having a massless force-carrying boson (i.e., the gluon).

One also cannot shoot W or Z particles, perhaps hoping to initiate some form of decay.  Those bosons interact with the Higgs field, and so they have mass‒quite a sizeable mass for force-carrying particles.  And the W bosons even have electric charges.  So they don’t have a range much longer than the size of a nucleon, if that.

One could accelerate neutrons; or rather, one could accelerate parallel and matched electrons and protons and set them to collide with each other and continue in their initial trajectory as newly formed neutrons (plus some neutrinos).  Depending on their speed, they might just break apart some larger nuclei (or raise the atomic numbers of some others, à la the S process and R process nucleogenesis such as occurs in supernovae and neutron star collisions).

This could do some damage, I guess.  One might even be able to make it lethal if it were strong enough; and it might be a delayed death, which could be useful for assassins of one kind or another, I guess.  But if you wanted to disintegrate someone, you’d have to cause a very large explosion, which would not treat you kindly if you were anywhere near.

If you could generate a beam of antimatter‒positrons or, worse, antiprotons or antineutrons‒you could certainly obliterate someone if you had enough.  But it would be an even worse explosion than the neutrons would give.  A person’s mass, annihilating with an equivalent amount of antimatter, would yield far greater explosive force than any nuclear weapon ever detonated (even the Tsar Bomba, which only involved the conversion of about 5 pounds of matter into energy, much smaller than any adult human).

So, yeah, instant disintegration by a ray gun (or a beam from the eyes like in comic books) using anything we currently understand is unworkable for various reasons.  Whether dark matter particles (if they exist) or even neutrinos (which do exist and do have quite peculiar properties) could be made to disintegrate someone is far from clear or promising.  In any case, they would be likely to lead to some manner of explosion such as mentioned above.

You wouldn’t want to do that in traffic.  The whole point is to delete people who needlessly make driving less safe for those around them!  You would cause more harm than good, by quite some margin, if you obliterated them, however satisfying it might be to turn an inattentive driver (and their car if they are alone**) into a small but very powerful explosive.

Wow.  I guess this is the sort of stuff that goes through my mind when I sleep very poorly, huh?  It makes me feel a bit like writing some on HELIOS.  I could explain why but that would give potential spoilers for the book, in case I ever write it.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day.  But do use your signals when you drive, for goodness’s sake.

*I know, I’m being unreasonably generous.  Of course, people who don’t signal properly when they drive don’t have friends, and it’s all but certain that no one loves them.  Whether they are, themselves, capable of love is open to debate.

**If they are not alone in their car, or on the road, it would be too dangerous to obliterate them in situ, in terms of collateral damage.  Perhaps the neutron beam that is only lethal after a delay would be useful for that after all, doing damage that only has its full effect over time.  One could similarly use X-rays or even gamma rays for that, but their penetrating power makes it much harder to avoid hitting innocent people.

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“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.

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How should I title this blog post?

I can’t really remember what I wrote about yesterday, other than the fact that at one point I referred to being grateful and in a footnote admitted that my gratitude was probably worthless, like most of my other feelings.  I remember all that mainly because of the comment (and my persistently and perversely negative reply) about it.

Yeah, I was very tired yesterday.

I got better sleep last night (i.e., the one from which I most recently arose and started writing this post, today) than the night before.  That’s not saying a huge lot‒I still woke up slightly after two am‒but it feels significantly better.  I guess to a person who has eaten only a can of tuna a day for weeks, an ordinary bologna sandwich with potato chips on the side would seem a feast*.

There’s that gratitude stuff I mentioned yesterday again, though in a more general sense.

Speaking of yesterday, I’m sure readers noticed that I titled yesterday’s post just “Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday”.  That is the format in which I name my blog posts as I save them when I write them.  It’s concise and specific, and could even be useful, in principle, to future archaeologists***.

It is not, of course, how I usually “headline” my blog posts here on the site.  Usually I’ll try to think of some pertinent phrase or play on words or quote that seems apposite****.  And of course on Thursdays I find a Shakespearean quote that seems vaguely pertinent and replace one of the words with some form of the word “blog”.  This is how the sausage is made, as they say.

But I wonder how my readers would like it if I just did perhaps every title but the ones on Thursday in that format I used yesterday.  Please do say; ink wiring minds want to know.

I’m serious (despite the weird wordplay).  Actually, I would be pleased to get most any kind of comments from more of you on a regular basis.  This blog is the vast majority of my personal interaction on almost any given day, apart from liking some posts on social media and occasionally adding a cynical comment.  Still, my request should be received like a broken barometer:  no pressure.

I suspect that the words in the footnotes of this post may so far outnumber those in the main body (though I’m not certain).  Somehow, that possibility makes me think of the “fact” that gut organisms outnumber all the human cells in a typical human by something like a factor of ten or so.  I’ll need to look that up to see if it’s true*****.

That’s not really important, though.  Actually, probably nothing in this post is particularly important, nor is anything in practically any other blog post I’ve written, nor in any other thing that I’ve written or otherwise created (with the exception of my children, who are important in and of themselves, quite apart even from their importance to me, which is very great indeed).

Of course, from the proper point of view, nothing is important.  And, similarly, from the proper point of view, everything is important.  But if everything is important, that is almost the same as saying that nothing is important.

Ah, whatevs.  I hope you all have a very nice day, whether it’s an important one or not.

*And since, surely, a feast is in the mouth of the consumer, then a feast it is.  This fact highlights the potential paucity of joy in a life where one can and does too readily indulge one’s appetites.  I think Aristotle and the Buddha would both have pertinent commentary on this matter, and so would Marcus Aurelius and his Stoic homies**.

**That might be a good name for a band.

***Such neo-Indiana Joneses will be exploring this part of the world of their past through digital digging rather than hunting through deserts and jungles and temples and tombs.  My blogs are stored digitally-only (as far as I know), in various places and formats, with some redundancy.  There are, on the other hand, physical versions of my fiction.

****I’m trying to think of a word that is the opposite of apposite but also contains the “-posite” ending, just for fun.  I think my sense of humor is rather similar to that of George Gamow.  Anyway, I haven’t thought of a good one yet, so I would welcome your suggestions.

*****Okay, I looked it up, and it turns out that the latest count that I could find among reliable outlets available on quite short notice, estimates the number of gut bacteria to be about 3.8 x 10^13, whereas their count/estimate of human cells in a typical person’s body is about 3.0 x 10^13.  That makes us only slightly outnumbered by our gut bacteria, contrary to popular understanding, of which I was one “victim”.  So, it’s 3.8/3, or 1.26666…, times as many bacterial as human cells.  That’s got to be closer to the ratio of footnote words to main body words in even the most pathologically footnoted****** of my blog posts.

******Like this one*******.

*******Although, even despite the many footnotes here and the relatively brief main body, the words in the footnotes are still outnumbered by those in the main body of this post.  Go ahead, check for yourself.

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Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday

Well, it’s Tuesday and I’m already exhausted after just one day of work for the week.  Mind you, it was a strange day at work, with people struck with family tragedies, people with personal catastrophes (such as a DUI), my coworker out sick, and all that sort of stuff.  The things that were/are not usual were manifold, and they are very unpleasant to me.

Also, I’ve had a dull, kind of pressure-like headache for the last perhaps 18 hours (with some lulls), and it feels almost like a “mini migraine”.  It certainly interferes with my mental acuity.  It may interfere with my writing; I can’t really tell.  If anyone notices anything regarding that, I would be grateful if you would let me know*.

I also feel a bit queasy, which goes along with the low-grade migraine notion.  I am going in to the office anyway, though.  First off, I don’t know if my coworker will still be out sick, and I don’t want to leave other people too much in the lurch.  In addition, if I get behind on things for one day, I’ll just have to catch up on things the next day, eliminating any potential benefit from resting for a day.

Also, let’s be real:  I don’t enjoy spending time at the house.  I need to rest there frequently‒longer than I actually do‒but it’s not pleasant for me.

Speaking of rest, I had a really bad sleep last night.  I mean, I didn’t sleep more than maybe half an hour before 3 this morning.  Then I dozed for a wee bit‒less than an hour.  But now I’m up, exhausted but not sleepy.

What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is the point?  Why do I bother going on?  Is it just fear of death that prevents me from dying?  Or is it also the fear of hurting people who matter to me?

But if they love me, why would they want me to suffer?  I understand that there is nothing they can do for me, of course.  But then they should accept things they cannot change, not wish for some other person to endure without reward or with no assistance.

Actually, all these things, these wishes from other people, are in my head.  Very few people have said they want me not to die.

I don’t think that’s because all the other people do want me to die.  Most people are probably pretty much indifferent.  Most people don’t worry about other people much because they’re too busy imagining that other people are “worrying about” them.

But they aren’t.  It’s just not workable.  People think about other people, of course, and especially about their family and friends.  But they cannot think about them much.  I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s hard enough trying to pay attention to oneself and one’s actions, to try to manage one’s days and nights, one’s work, one’s meals, one’s rest.

The percentage of time spent dwelling on other people instead of oneself cannot be very high in the double digits, if that.  This is not an indictment or a judgment.  I think it is literally just about all that people can do.

This is surely why narcissists are always so unhappy.  They can never get as much attention as they wish and imagine they deserve from other people.

We should all probably let go of our sense of entitlement.  The universe “promises” us all one thing and one thing only:  that everything, all this that exists around us, like ourselves, will end.  It may then begin again in some sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it ended.  Just because there’s another sausage after the link, doesn’t mean the preceding sausage isn’t nevertheless gone.

Wow, that’s a weird analogy or metaphor:  The universe as one sausage in an endless chain of sausage links.

I guess it makes as much sense as many such metaphors, and more sense than some.  I don’t really know what point I was trying to make, if there was one, but at least it ought to be somewhat memorable.  That’s worth something, right?

I’m too tired to contemplate any more at the moment.  I’m going to finish this off now and call it good enough.  I hope you all have a good day (or rather, that each of you has a good day).

But in closing, a thought just occurred to me.  Remember, mushrooms are not vegetables.  As fungi, they are more closely related to your fish and your chicken and your beef (and you) than they are to corn and carrots and peas and potatoes.

Okay, that’s enough.  Please have a good day.

*My gratitude is probably utterly worthless, of course, like my sorrow and regret and disappointment, not to mention my love and my joy and my dreams.