insomnia

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“…the emptiest of feelings…”

Ugh, boy, wow, do I feel wiped out this morning, which seems mildly peculiar after a night’s sleep, however inadequate.  I didn’t have the energy to do my usual morning pull-ups today, even, and that’s rare.  Well, I say “usual”, but I actually alternate:  on even days I do pull-ups in the morning, on odd days I do dips, and on Sundays and on those Saturdays on which I don’t work, I do neither.

<sarcasm> Isn’t that exciting to learn?  I know that I can barely contain myself; I can’t imagine how it must be for all of you! </sarcasm>

Anyway, I don’t know why I am so enervated this morning.  I mean, I slept an entirely inadequate amount, but that’s not atypical or unusual for me.

Yesterday was even a decent day as far as it went.  We only worked a half day at the office, but sales were nevertheless pretty good.  Then afterward, I had a discord call with my youngest and we watched two excellent episodes of Doctor Who.  This is their first time watching, and it’s nice to be able to introduce someone to the show, especially one of my two favorite people ever.  The show is being quite well-received.  This is not a surprise.

Of course, I went back to the house later than I would have if I had not watched the Doctor, but not as late as usual.  Then I went to bed pretty sensibly.  That doesn’t translate into a good night’s sleep‒not by a long way‒but I did what was within my power.

It’s not as though I can do anything that’s not within my power.

So, yeah, I don’t know why I feel so beat this morning.  I don’t feel like I am coming down with some infectious illness (unfortunately), and I don’t have the symptoms that would go along with some rather severe medical process that could cause acutely worsening fatigue, like a GI bleed or something.  There’s no faintness/lightheadedness, no rapid heart beat, nothing of that sort.  I also have no new pains that I have so far noticed, and as far as I can tell I am not jaundiced, so my liver is probably okay.

Well, whatever.  The point is I feel a lot like crap.  But, unfortunately, I don’t feel sick enough not to go to work (or to write this blog post).  And I am not allowed to take breaks of any kind unless I am legitimately incapacitated.

“Not allowed” you ask?  Not allowed by whom?

By me’m, is the answer, albeit a deliberately ungrammatical one.  I cannot seem to let myself stop trying to do shit unless I am actually ill enough that I cannot really do anything.

I have been like this for as long as I can remember.  Even back in my early grade school days, I remember fantasizing about getting seriously hurt so that I would be able just to lie about and rest for a bit.  Honestly.

When I had open heart surgery‒it was August 7th or 8th, 1988, 2 weeks before I was to go back to university‒it was quite unpleasant of course, and quite painful.  Indeed, I remember that my first thought upon beginning to regain consciousness was more or less “damn it, I survived”.

It’s not great when you’re 18 (or probably any other age) to get your chest sawed open and your blood artificially circulated and oxygenated for a while, then to wake up restrained and intubated and cortically blind (I didn’t put that last thing together completely until quite some time later).

But it was, nevertheless, freeing.  I didn’t feel the need always to be doing something, to be accomplishing something, because I couldn’t.  That was kind of amazing, and it felt so at the time.

I wasn’t even afraid when I was going to get my heart surgery (or the catheterization before that).  It’s not that I was brave; it was nothing like that.  I was just too intrigued by the whole process, which was admittedly pretty cool and amazing, and I was almost unconsciously looking forward to having everything taken out of my hands for a while, whether I liked it or not.

Of course, in a sense, everything is always mostly out of our hands.  Our own agency, such as it is, is something we don’t choose, and we don’t choose our nature and our “specs”* and our talents and capacities.  Even our will is something that starts as it is without our input, as does the universe itself.  The best you can do is try to surf on the chaos.

But I’ve always felt the need to do something whenever I’m conscious and able to act.  Even if the “something” is a fun thing, or just a distracting thing, there’s always a pressure to do it, and it’s been there for as long as I can remember.  And it’s just a relief to have it taken off line temporarily, to have it rendered moot for a while.

When I had my heart surgery, I knew that it might kill me.  I certainly knew it intellectually, just as I also knew that the odds were very small‒roughly one in a thousand according to the statistics my cardiologist had shared with me.  Even back then, I had a good enough intuitive grasp of probability and statistics to know that, though immensely higher than the chance of winning the lottery, these were odds about which it was not worth worrying.

But I also just wasn’t horrified by the prospect of dying.  Even then I didn’t really believe in any kind of afterlife.  And I experienced (or, rather, I did not experience) more or less as complete a simulacrum of death as it was possible to undergo, one far more closely approximating it than mere dreamless sleep:  deep general anesthesia including hypothermia and cardioplegia, and the non-pulsatile cerebral blood flow that heart-lung bypass entailed.

If I had died on the operating table, there would have been no experiential transition for me.  That’s rather fascinating.

Anyway, sorry to bother you with my fantasies about, and my missed opportunities for, a painless death (or just for the chance to rest because there was nothing I could do).  Maybe I’ll feel better by tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll feel deader by tomorrow.  I could even be wetter by tomorrow, this being Florida.

I hope all of you are feeling and doing better than I.  I mean, come on, it’s not a very high bar to clear.

*By which I mean “specifications”, as of a machine or process, not “spectacles”.

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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I can’t think of a good Shakespeare quote, but there’s a little Milton below

Hello and good morning.  Welcome to another Thursday.  Please wipe your feet on your way in.

Just kidding.  It’s all crap here, anyway; don’t worry about wiping your feet.

I don’t have much to say today.  I don’t think I do, anyway.  Not that such a thing has tended to stop me in the past, but I don’t know.  I feel that maybe it’s at least slightly different this time.

Let’s see…updates.  I took my third small-dose of lithium this morning.  We’ll see how it goes.  I don’t think one would expect to see any major effects already, so be patient.  I tend to be patient, at least about some things.  What’s a doctor without patience, right?

Oh, yesterday afternoon, I had a near episode of esophageal spasm.  I’ve had that before‒the first big time it got me to the ER (I was already working in the hospital, so it wasn’t far to go), where I was checked for potential heart attack, which it was not, of course.

It wasn’t one yesterday, either, in case you’re worried.  It responded, albeit somewhat stubbornly, to drinking warmish water (and finally some Coke) to help soothe and relax my esophagus.  I don’t think anyone else in the office even noticed.

If it had been like the first time they would have noticed!  That time I had an apparent vaso-vagal response and my blood pressure went down way low, and I almost fainted.  That was part of why they brought me downstairs:  a BP of 80 over 40 in a 29 year old man who did have a history of heart surgery is somewhat concerning, and when you’re a medical resident at the hospital, they tend to treat you with urgency.

Okay, well, I think my esophagus yesterday had been irritated by my recent upper GI illness.  It’s not impossible, I guess, that lithium could have been involved.  I have noticed that, if I accidentally take too many multivitamins‒i.e., more than one in a day‒I am prone to esophageal spasm.  Perhaps electrolytes (etc.) are involved in at least increasing the chances of it happening.

I doubt they would be enough to trigger it all by themselves, though in severely misadjusted amounts they could cause severe pathologies of various kinds.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found out electrolyte “imbalances” had caused such a thing all by themselves if they were off enough.  I don’t think that’s the case with me, though.  I have no other signs or symptoms of electrolyte dysfunction that I have noticed.

Okay, that’s enough discussion of that for the moment.  I don’t want to trigger an event by thinking about it too much, but since my upper GI tract is still a bit sensitive, it’s not impossible that I could accidentally do that.  “The mind is its own place, and of itself / can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, as someone said.

I think I may try to do another audio post today.  The few that I did recently seemed surprisingly popular, and conversely, my readership numbers have been going down pretty steadily since the last time I did one.  Maybe doing them in the first place was a bad idea, like giving a dog a taste of human food so that now it doesn’t want to eat its usual stuff.

Of course, dogs are practical, about food at least.  They rarely avoid their usual meals because they get treats.  They just eat them both.  At least, that’s how the dogs I have known have behaved.

Cats are a little more persnickety.  There are situations in which cats really will go dangerously hungry because the food on offer is not their favorite.  I would do that with eggplant.  It’s not the only food about which I could say that, but it’s the worst.

Anyway, again, I may do an audio today, partly as an experiment.  That may even become the subject of the audio, but I don’t think I’ll leave it at that (knowing me, which I do, at least a bit).  That would be kind of lame.  I guess we’ll see.

I might as well do something though.  I haven’t played or sang (or really listened to) any music in nearly two weeks, and I haven’t been reading, and I certainly haven’t been writing fiction.  I haven’t even been doing any exercises on Brilliant dot org.  And I’m possibly writing worse blog posts lately, and it’s causing people to stop reading.

I don’t know, maybe the declining readership numbers are related to the fact that I’ve been posting a bit earlier in the morning.  My insomnia has been generally increasing, and I’m getting up earlier and earlier, and so going to the office earlier and earlier.  Some people might just miss the posts because they’re arriving before they look at their notices (or email, or what have you) and other things follow and drown my little whimpers out.

So, if you’re interested, keep your eyes (and ears) open today for my possible audio thingy.  I’ll try not to disappoint, even though that’s something I just tend to do ceteris paribus.

Whatever the case, I hope you all have a truly good day.

TTFN

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Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…

Ugh.  I don’t feel quite well this morning.  I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy.  I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.

Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.

Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day.  So, that wasn’t very good.  It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.

On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week.  This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.

Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow.  Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course.  It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically.  But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.

And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract.  I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books.  And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.

Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now.  But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.

Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me.  Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday.  I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time.  I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought.  Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.

Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it.  For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do.  At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.

Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard.  It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek:  The Next Generation when he was younger.

I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek.  Before long I loved the new show.  But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting.  I hated the idea.  I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.

I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes.  I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.

And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…

…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.

Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship.  So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.

In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.

Unbelievable:  that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!

I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.  But, of course, I do.  Hey…it’s me after all.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.

I know I do.

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I haven’t found a good Shakespeare-based headline

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and there is no lapcom involved in writing this post, at least not on my part.

Maybe “involved” is too broad a word.  One could argue that all the posts I’ve written before on my lapcom(s), of which there are many (posts, not lapcoms), set the stage and set the pace and set the precedent for this post.  And so, in a sense, they are involved in this post, and thus so is it.  However, that is reaching a bit.

So, I will clarify.  I am writing this post on my smartphone, not on my lapcom, which is still at the office, which is not where I am writing this.

I feel very groggy this morning, perhaps even more so than I have the previous three mornings, though the residua of my migraine pain appear mostly to have gone.  Between that* and the fact that I am writing on my smartphone, I may not write much today.

I appear to be very tired.  Actually, I say “appear”, but it is my own state to which “very tired” refers, and it is a subjective sensation (though it is also an objective fact), so if I appear tired to myself, then the odds are good that I really am tired.

Speaking of being tired to myself, it feels like I’m being so very tedious here lately.  Perhaps I am no more tedious than I’ve ever been.  I don’t know.  For all I can tell, I have always been tedious, my entire life, starting long before blogs (BB if you prefer).

Certainly, no one has wanted to stick around me for any very long period of time, not my parents, not my (former) spouse, not my children.  I seem to be an unpleasant fact and presence eventually to those around me.  Maybe it’s time I took the hint and got gone.

I still haven’t been able to read.  I think I’ve spent less than twenty minutes reading over the last two weeks or more.  I don’t know if you quite realize what a departure that is for me.  I haven’t even been reading audio books‒which would count for me, since I always read auditorially, meaning that I “hear” the words I am reading.

I also haven’t played guitar (and sang) for more than maybe half an hour in that same time.  That happened when I started watching a video of “Groovy Grace” reacting to the Pink Floyd album Animals, which is one of my favorites.

As the album began, with Pigs on the Wing Part 1, I could not resist pausing the video, picking up my own black Strat, and playing and singing that song.  I played the combined song, parts one and two, including my own tortured** version of the guitar solo by Snowy White, which was the version one could hear on the old 8-track tape, or so I’m told.

After that, I played and sang a few more songs, including Wish You Were Here, which starts and ends on the same chord (G) as Pigs on the Wing.  I might have also played the Radiohead song Lucky, and probably The Man Who Sold the World.  That was it.  I didn’t even do Nothing Compares 2U.

Other than that, I’ve just mainly been distracting myself.  But I’m a bit foggy even for that right now.  You can’t tell (probably) because I edit these posts, but I’ve been making a lot of typos again.  That’s more likely to happen when I use the smartphone just at baseline, but today’s rate is still an outlier from the mean (see my post from the other day).

All right, let’s wrap this up.  I don’t have anything more to say (not for the moment, at least), so I will emulate the habit of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer and seal my lips.

TTFN

*How groggy am I?  Well, I initially wrote “between that…” (by which I meant, my level of grogginess) “…and how groggy I am, I…”.  So, yeah, pretty groggy.

**I nevertheless actually like my version of the solo better than Snowy’s.  Go figure.

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You can’t CURE a headache by banging your head, but you CAN make it all go away…

I am writing this post on my lapcom for the first time in quite a while*, but I couldn’t honestly say why I’m doing it.  I just decided yesterday afternoon that I wanted to bring my lapcom with me when I left the office, and since I have it with me, it would be a minor shame not to use it to write today’s post.  As far as I can tell, there’s nothing more to it than that.  I certainly don’t care much anymore.

I continued to feel pretty rotten all day yesterday, and I became quite stressed out and frustrated, even snapping at a coworker with whom I normally get along very well—actually, it was somewhat more than “snapping”, and it was not justified—before repeatedly banging my head on my desk.

This, of course, did not help my residual migraine discomfort, which was partly responsible for my horrible mood.

It also hurt my neck.  I wasn’t surprised by this fact, though, since I’ve done this before, alas.  Indeed, I can tell you this tiny bit of potentially useful information:  banging one’s head on one’s desk is uncomfortable and somewhat injurious (I’ve been known to raise visible lumps on my forehead in addition to causing neck pain), while banging your head on a sheetrock wall is not as bad.  However, banging your head on a concrete wall is quite unpleasant.

And I really don’t recommend hitting your head on the top of a door (or “hatch”) in an aircraft carrier, but that was purely accidental, born of overenthusiasm**.  I’ll just add, for emphasis, that an aircraft carrier does not notice that you hit it; it does not give in any measurable way***, only your head and body do.

By the way, head-butting a human is comparatively laughable.  But mind their teeth; you can get cuts from them that are prone to bad infections because of the nasty bacteria that often live in the human mouth.

Anyway, all this nonsense is just to emphasize that I am not doing well.  I feel physically quite uncomfortable, from my head to my tail as it were, and down into my legs, too.  And my mood is worse than the rest of me****.

Some of this may be related to the weather.  The heat and humidity down here are utterly oppressive, and they make it all but impossible to exercise outdoors (such as by walking) unless one is committed to possibly dying or becoming quite ill in the process.  I am not entirely averse to dying in that process, and I contemplate trying to walk from the office to the house almost every day.  But I’m not committed to it yet, so it’ll have to wait.  It would be just too pathetic to start it and not carry through.

It’s also been very sunny lately, which just adds sunburn (which I have from Sunday) to the mix, but that doesn’t bother me as much; for unclear reasons, I don’t get as uncomfortable from sunburns as most people seem to get.  This is probably not a good thing, especially when you have an inherent fish-belly complexion like I have.  It might also have contributed to my migraine.

I’m coming to hate nearly everything about Florida.  Of course, it’s the state where my youngest was born (and where my kids still live), so it will always have that going for it, and that’s hard to overpower.  But even my kids unfortunately didn’t have the greatest scholastic experiences in Florida—which is no surprise, since Florida is known to have subpar educational system overall (though it has definite bright spots at the university level).  Just look at who our governors have been and are, let alone our legislators.  If Tallahassee were wiped off the map by an asteroid impact, the average IQ of the state would rise by 10 points, at least.

The trouble is, it’s entirely possible that I would hate things wherever I happened to be, because really, it’s myself I hate.  And yes, I know about the self being nonpermanent and really an illusion and not a consistent thing from moment to moment let alone from day to day or from one part of the brain to another.  That’s true but trivial, and it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself, whatever you want to call my self.

And while the self does change from moment to moment, it still has way more in common with its past and future states than it has with, say, the state of a different person, or with a dog or cat, or with a slug or with a tree or with a fucking rock.  There is a four-dimensional continuity of structure and identity to what I call my self, as there is with all of you, unless I am greatly mistaken.

Okay, sorry for that little diatribe, if that’s the correct word (“diatribe” I mean, not “sorry”).  I’m just frustrated with and angry at more or less everything.  Which, of course, implies that I am the problem, since I am the common factor in all the things that frustrate me.

Unfortunately, I cannot swap me out for some other person, and I don’t think I would if I could.  I’ve often wanted to be like certain other people in certain aspects, but I’ve never actually wanted to be another person.  In fact, I think the very concept is vacuous; I could explain why that’s so, but it may well be obvious already.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  You should all probably just stop bothering with me, to be honest.  I am only going to bore you at best and more likely cause you pain of one kind or another.  It’s what I do.  I’m not a good person by nature, though I try to act as if I am when I have the energy to do so.  But my energy is lagging and seeming to get worse all the time.

Honestly, I wish I could just sleep until I feel truly rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  Of course, the universe is not set up in such a way as to make the first thing necessarily achievable, but at least I know I can achieve the second.  It just takes commitment—or time, I suppose.

All right, that’s enough of that.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, of course, this is the only time I have ever written this post, and it is the only time that I will write this post.  I apologize for the somewhat misleading language, but I suspect you know what meant.

**I’m not likely to experience that again.

***Yes, yes, physics shows that it does indeed movie a little.  I suppose I could do some math to try to figure out just how much, but it won’t be much more impressive than how far the Earth movies in the other direction when you jump straight up in the air.

****Those of you who saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs might recall that “the rest of me” in an anagram for Hester Mofet.

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Migraines, after-effects, lesser evils, and greater goods

I’m a bit wiped out this morning, so I may only write briefly.  For those of you who may not know it, I developed a migraine headache yesterday.  It started with the surprisingly rapid onset of a “classic” migraine aura, which is to say a deficit in one’s visual field, marked by apparent, weirdly twinkling, almost rainbow-like lights.  It is not as lovely to see as one might suspect if one has not had it.  This first time it happened to me, way back in my early teens (while I was caddying), I worried maybe my retina had become detached.  Weirdly, this concern did not lead me to panic, nor to seek help, nor even to stop in the middle of that golf round‒work is work, after all.

The classic migraine, which is what this migraine with twinkling lights is called, seems to begin with a rapid, spreading depolarization of cells in the brain cortex, particularly (in this case) in the occipital lobe (thus the visual aura, because that is the region of the vision centers of the brain).  It spreads from there, and as part of its spread it seems to lead to vascular swelling and pressure in the meninges, which causes some of the pain.

The science has probably improved since the last time I studied it, so some of this description may be inaccurate.

In any case, as soon as I realized what was happening, I took steps to head things off.  Although I had taken a naproxen that morning, I popped three ibuprofen right away.  After a few minutes, as the aura progressed, I added two acetaminophen (extra strength) as well.  This was probably not ideal for my body‒kidneys, liver, and to a lesser extent, stomach come to mind‒but I didn’t really hesitate, because I have experience with migraines, and not just with treating them.  I also made sure to drink lots of water.

Anyway, I did get some dull pain (as well as just dull dullness) centering loosely on the left side of my head, but the Motrin™ and Tylenol® seemed to have done their work well, since I took them so quickly.  I did have pain, but it was not nearly as severe as it usually is, though I took one more ibuprofen a bit later when it seemed to be increasing.

With migraines, though, the pain is more an effect than a primary part of the process.  In a way‒and only in a way‒a migraine is a bit like a slow-moving seizure.  As such, it tends to cause quite a lot of fatigue in one’s central nervous system, and I certainly felt that yesterday and continue to feel the after-effects today.  For instance, I am making many more typos than I usually make right now.

I do seem to have slept slightly more than usual last night.  Tiring one’s nervous system by internally, directly causing the hyperactive discharge of whole populations of neurons seems to lead to slightly deeper sleep, no doubt because for the nervous system, it is something of an emergency and it must be cleaned up.  Trust me when I say, while the slightly longer sleep is nice as far as it goes, it is not worth it.

Even though I was able to prevent the worst of my migraine pain, the other effects were still quite palpable and unpleasant, and their after-effects remain.  They aren’t good.

This is not to say there aren’t many, many worse things in the world, and certainly when one has only two choices, one should choose the least bad of the two.  For instance, I would choose many migraines over a kidney stone.  The lesser of two evils is, mathematically, the greater of two goods.

If this fact is confusing‒I don’t know why it should be, but apparently it is, and that confusion has been consequential on large scales‒think of the old grade-school level number line, centered at zero.  If you have two negative numbers, such as negative two and negative twelve, you can certainly say that they are both negative.  But that’s a function of where you put the origin (where the zero is), which you can shift and put anywhere else, given the infinity of the number line and its inherent symmetry.

But even if you move the origin 100 places to the left, so that you now have 98 and 88 instead of -2 and -12, the distance between the two numbers, and their mutual relationship based on that, is unchanged.  One of the numbers is still less negative than the other.  And if that number measures the usefulness or the desirability of something, and if one has only the two choices, then one should pick the less negative one, which is by mathematical definition the more positive one.

A billion is less negative than a million.  And negative a million is less negative than negative a billion.

I’m not sure how I got from migraines to here, but that’s okay.  I’m sure it will make at least some sense during the edit.

Anyway, I hope that my mental fog will clear a bit today.  It would be nice to be able to sleep better without requiring general neurological, pathological exhaustion.  But then again, many things would be nice that are simply not so.  By which I mean they aren’t real, that they don’t exist, that they aren’t the case, not “many things would be nice that are simply not nice”, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

If wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in horse shit.  And then we’d probably wish for it to go away, which would just produce more horse shit.  Alas.

I hope you all have a good day.

[PS:  I tried to do a brief audio recording on the way to the office from the train, while walking, because a thought had occurred to me and an occurrence had gotten me thinking, and I also wanted to “experiment” to see how well I’d be able to compensate for the noise of traffic and (to a lesser extent) wind.  It was unfortunately something of a disaster, and to correct it all would have required many hours of audio manipulation that may be beyond my skill.  So I just deleted it.  But I thought I would at least mention it.]

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Yet another pointless discursion

Well, as I warned you would probably happen, here I am, writing a blog post on Saturday (August 15th, 2026 AD/CE), because I am going to work today.  I feel barely awake, to be honest. Nevertheless, as I said, here I am, smartphone in hands, thumbing out the words to yet another pointless discursion, one which I have headlined “Yet another pointless discursion”.  Go ahead, see for yourself.

I’m really pretty foggy and groggy right now, so I don’t know how good or interesting this is going to be.  I mean, I guess I could say that every day, of course, but it feels more acute at this moment.  It’s a bit weird to have a strong, sharp feeling of not knowing something, and of not being able to know it.  It feels like some sort of epistemological contortionism.  Which is itself a rather strange notion.

Of course, I don’t know what to write about today, or rather, “I don’t know about what to write”.  I feel that fact quite acutely at this moment, as well.  Still, it’s a work day, and one on which I am indeed going to work, so I guess I should fulfill my duty as I perceive it.

It’s not as though it would make any significant impact if I didn’t write anything, though.  I know of only a handful of people who consistently read and “like” my work.  Even those who don’t specifically “like” it but do come to read it number only in the few dozen.

But the readership here is pretty much the only regular social interaction in which I engage nowadays, if you don’t count work-related stuff.  At work, though, I think that I am probably quite unpleasant, because I am quite uncomfortable a lot of the time, and so my personality is negatively affected.

I’m not snappish and irritable at baseline, not as far as I can remember.  But for many years now, I have been quite grumpy and ornery.  I still try not to be rude if I can avoid it.  But I think I fail in that endeavor far more than I used to do.

And really, while it’s good not to be rude, ceteris paribus, my energy for such things is often less than optimal.  That dearth* also seems to affect my sensitivity to sensory annoyances, especially general noise and lateness and such like.

My tinnitus doesn’t help, either.  Right now it’s blaring at what feels like maybe 90 or 100 decibels in my right ear.  My left ear has a much milder amount, often zero, but the very disparity leaves me constantly a bit off balance.  Anyway, it’s quite annoying, but it doesn’t distract from my other discomforts, it merely layers itself atop or amidst them, like some kind of sensorineural seven layer dip or something.

There’s such a thing as seven layer dip, isn’t there?  I thought there was.  I could swear I had it at some family get together in the distant past or something.

Anyway, I’m very tired and very uncomfortable, and I’m just bobbing around here like a discarded plastic bottle that once contained one of those “experimental” sodas that never caught on, floating in the brackish, contaminated wastewater canal that is what’s left of my life.  I’m so tired and I am so uncomfortable.

I really want to get out of all this, to rest or at least to escape or even just to cease.  I am doing no good, as far as I can tell, and if I am doing no good for anyone, even myself‒at least not enough to outweigh the natural harm brought about by my very existence‒then why am I doing anything?

I feel rotten‒not morally so, but literally, as if my body were decaying in a more than metaphorical sense, yet still I am conscious and able to experience the sensations of that decay.  It’s not a good thing (duh!).  I wouldn’t say it’s hellish in any usual sense; it’s not as if it were so much discomfort that all I can do is scream.  In some ways‒admittedly, very few‒that might be better, because at least if I were in howl-worthy agony, I would not feel the compulsion to bother to try to force myself to be productive in any way.

Which one is worse, a Prometheus-style agony, where one is immobile and tortured regularly in such a way that one can do naught else but shriek, or a Sisyphean type of situation, where one strains and struggles to carry out some pointless task constantly, but one is at least able to act in that task?

Oh, who cares?  It doesn’t matter, and the answer is probably not precisely the same for any two people ever in the world.  I hope you all have a good weekend.  I guess I’ll probably be back on Monday.  I don’t think I’ll do audio today.  I’m too tired. 

*Does anyone else here remember Dearth Nadir, the Muppet Show’s spoof of Darth Vader, clearly played by Gonzo because his nose was unmistakable?

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This is today’s blog post, in case you were wondering

Well, it’s the start of a new work week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.  Mine was…well, idle, I guess, if nothing else.  Certainly there were no significant activities involved in it, beyond watching various kinds of reaction videos online, because that almost feels like watching something with friends.

I’m sorry to have to say that my one slightly longer than usual night’s sleep (see last week) was indeed a fluke and a rather extreme outlier.  I wonder whether ibuprofen even had anything to do with it after all.  It could have been something I ate for all I can tell.

I’m continuing to use the ibuprofen, but I think it’s just doing its usual thing, because I certainly am not getting the response I got when I took it after ten or so days without NSAIDs.  I did get some similar feelings of fleeting but global relief of some kind since then, which makes me suspect that I really do have some chronic inflammation going on, but that’s really not very surprising.

I would have liked to do more walking this weekend, but it’s been very hot and seriously humid, so the heat index rises to well over a hundred starting quite early in the day.  Also, it was pretty sunny, and that adds to trouble, especially if one doesn’t own any non-black clothes.

I know, of course, that it’s been my decision to buy only black clothes, so one could say that it’s entirely my fault.  And that’s even accurate, if one uses the term fault in the sense of “something wrong or badly designed or badly put together” or even “a crack running through the crust or surface or structure of something”.  I’m definitely a faulty device.  That should be obvious.

But it’s not a fault about which I have the wherewithal to make a difference.  I just can’t stand to wear any colors anymore; they irritate my eyes, or some part of my sensory apparatus.  I can’t change my own bad wiring, so to speak, anymore than a computer can improve its own operating system.

I suppose, in principle, AIs may eventually be able to do so, but though I often feel like a replicant, I am not, as far as I know, actually (or virtually) artificial.  I can alter my programming only the “old fashioned way”, by which I mean, trying to learn new things and master new skills and so on.

And I have tried, and I am trying, and I will probably continue to try, to improve myself, to gain new skills, to get past my mental (and physical) issues.  But though I may have made progress‒who knows how bad I might be, otherwise‒I feel very much like an ant trying to scramble up the side of an ant-lion’s trap.

The shifting sand underneath makes the experience much like trying to go up a fast moving downward escalator.  It’s taking all the effort I’m able to muster to keep myself from going rapidly down to whatever predator or basement or whatever lies at the bottom of the course.  Or, maybe there is no bottom.  Maybe it’s possible to keep sliding down and down, forever, never making any headway at all.

It’s enough to make one want just to stop trying and even to turn around and sit down on the escalator steps and just embrace whatever is waiting below.  I certainly don’t feel any signs that I’m even getting within sight of any next level up the moving stairs, let alone finding a potential exit.

All this is a metaphor, of course, and I suspect it’s a pretty tortured one.  I apologize for that.  I try to be creative, but sometimes it doesn’t work too well, and I come out with some equivalent of purple prose.

I think I try too hard to be clever, just as I try too hard to be funny.  I succeed a little bit, occasionally; it would be truly sad if I kept trying and always failed.  But enough people laugh at things I say that I think I have some intermittent success in the humor area.  I’ve even received compliments about some laughs in a review of my horror novel The Vagabond.

I wonder what I would be like if I were able to break the habit of trying to be funny or clever or whatever you want to call it.  Maybe that would be the equivalent of the aforementioned turning around and sitting down on the descending escalator and just watching as it brings me into whatever depths await.

I’m certainly very tired of trying.  I’m not getting anywhere‒not as far as I can tell‒and it’s just exhausting.  Maybe I need what they call a “grippy sock vacation”*.  Except I think I need more of a “dirt vacation”, which is like the proverbial dirt nap, but more welcome to the person taking it.

Okay, that’s enough out of me.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.

*I’m not liable to be able to take one of those, because I do not have any medical insurance, and I don’t expect (or intend) ever to get any.  One doesn’t build fancy battlements and protective fortifications and set up infra-red and motion-sensing alarms around a poorly maintained outhouse.

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I buprofen, you buprofen, we all buprofen…

I feel that there’s something important about today’s date* (it’s August 7th in 2026 CE, but the year is not what feels familiar, it is the day and the month).  It’s not coming to me yet, but I think it will.  If it doesn’t, I guess I can always look it up, but that would be a shame to have to resort to that.

Please don’t think I have anything against looking things up; that would be quite untrue!  I’m a huge fan of looking things up, especially in ways that can lead one to learn about unexpected things while seeking the answer to one’s initial questions.  This is one of my big problems with LLM-assisted searches; they don’t tend to lead you to unexpected and tangential knowledge, or even to see a nearby entry in an encyclopedia that’s on a different but interesting subject.

But if I already “know” something, and sense that I know it, I feel that it’s a shame not to exercise my powers of recall.  We shall try to do that today.  Or, well, I will try to do that.  Y’all can do what you please.

It’s a weird morning for me, and if I seem stranger than usual or more incoherent (or less) than usual, try not to be alarmed.  Something rather remarkable happened to me last night:  I slept nearly six hours without any (remembered) awakenings.  I may even have slept slightly longer.

This did not just happen, though.  There was a series of circumstances that‒I strongly suspect‒led to this outcome.

Yesterday morning, I felt so crummy right from the start of the day that I took a CBD/Delta-9 gummy** first thing in the morning.  It made me groggy to some degree but at least it suppressed some tension.

Then, of course, I took some Tylenol and some aspirin in reasonable amounts, and they did whatever they do for me, which isn’t terribly much, but there it is.  Anyway, I felt kind of crappy and sleepy and low-energy and just miserable, even for me.

I also wasn’t sure that the curtailment of NSAIDs had actually been making any difference in the symptoms (signs, really) that had led me to stop them.  Anyway, I have a bottle of Ibuprofen (actually, I have two) at the office, and I finally gave in to pain and general stiffness and soreness and mental fatigue and just took three of them.

Not long after, I found myself getting pleasant chills all over my body, as well as a general feeling of relative euphoria, and I realized that it was the Ibuprofen fighting my inflammation‒or whatever specifically was having the effect I was experiencing‒and making me feel physically alive and rather well for the first time in a while.

Unfortunately, ibuprofen doesn’t last as long as naproxen.  I took another dose (of 2 tablets this time) later in the day, and then two just before I went to bed last night.  I can only conclude (provisionally) that it was at least part of what led to my relatively sound sleep.

This is, of course, immense, but it is also ever so slightly worrisome.

You see, I stopped using ibuprofen a while back when it seemed to start being associated with occasional palpitations (consistent with premature atrial contractions).  This was not at all certain.  They might have been related to something else I was taking or perhaps some interaction (the palpitations were real, in that they were not merely sensations but were associated with slightly irregular heartbeats; I checked my pulse).

But there are many other medications available, so I decided to switch to naproxen for regular use.  I usually didn’t take the maximum dose, because in my clinical experience, naproxen tends to be a bit more toxic than ibuprofen (possibly related to the latter’s relatively shorter duration of action).

So, anyway, yeah, I think that’s a big part of why I slept last night better than I’ve slept in a good while, or at least longer.  I don’t expect that to continue, necessarily (though I am unlikely to complain if it does).  After all, my rest has probably been quite a bit worse than usual these last ten days or so, because of the eliminated anti-inflammatory medications, so there’s some degree of making up for extra exhaustion, which temporarily overpowers whatever processes lead to my insomnia in the first place.

We’ll see, I guess.  Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  If so, I’m sure I’ll let you all know.

In any case, I’m going to be paying attention to my liquid waste elimination systems, just to be sure I’m not experiencing major difficulties.  I’ll also keep a weather eye on my heart rhythm, but I need to try not to pay too much attention to it, since palpitations can be subjective.

Also, let’s be honest and clear, premature atrial contractions are generally benign, and are not associated with degeneration into worse rhythm disturbances.  I’m sure that I have some scar tissue in my heart‒I mean, I did have open heart surgery for crying out loud***‒and so I’m probably prone to some slight irritability in the conduction system from time to time.

I guess we’ll see what will happen.  I haven’t taken any ibuprofen yet today; despite the euphoria I felt yesterday, I don’t expect it to entail any addiction risk, because that “rush” was a rush of relief, not of intoxication.  But I need to be aware of the kidney and cardiac effects.  Of course, I also must keep protecting my stomach, but I’ve been doing that for a long time (and probably engendering some chronic issues related to the meds needed for it).

We’ll see how well I can engineer the workings of my body, I guess.  I’m pretty good at it, but the tools available are still blunt ones, and PPE for them is limited.  Hopefully, I will at least get a few night’s worth of relatively good sleep this weekend.

Speaking of which, I hope you all have a good day today and a good weekend, yourselves.  I expect I will next write a blog post Monday morning‒as always, exclusis improvisis.

*The more I think about it, the more I think that it might be the birthday of one of my best friends from when I grew up, named Andy Tabar.  If I were still allowed on Meta-related services, I could check, because I followed him on Facebook and Instagram, but alas that is no more.  If it is his birthday, and if any of my readers are in contact with him, please wish him Happy Birthday from me.  Thank you.

**Perfectly legal, OTC, hemp-derived.

***Actually, it was for an atrial septal defect, one that wasn’t discovered until I started working out for NROTC and running fairly long distances.