insomnia

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So it begins, and so it goes, and so it shall end

Well, it’s been a mixed-auspices start of the first work day of the first full week of the month of December in 2023*.

I arrived at the train station almost exactly on time for the first train of said first day—that was a positive thing—but as the train pulled in, I and all the other people waiting at the station saw that it was arriving on the opposite side from normal.  There had been no announcement of the track side change, so I and all the several other people waiting had to scramble up the stairs, over the bridge and down the other side to get on.  Fortunately, the train did wait a bit, since apparently they realized that the announcement had not been given, but still, it was a bit maddening.

So far, I have no chest pains or other indicators of any cardiac event, though it is taking me a while to catch my breath.  I’m mildly disappointed in that absence of angina, because not only would it represent a potential break for me of some kind or other—temporary or permanent—it would also be only too appropriate for the Tri-Rail to face some consequences of their poor management in changing track boarding sides without informing riders who were waiting.  A lawsuit, in such a circumstances, might not be inappropriate, out of spite if nothing else.

However, I suppose I’ve been relatively protected, since I have done a fair amount of reasonably serious endurance (though not speed) exercise until about three weeks ago, when I got sick.  I’m still quite a bit heavier than I want to be, but at least my cardiovascular fitness isn’t too horrible.  Should I be thankful for that?  Maybe I should regret it.  I don’t know.

I haven’t really slept well at all this weekend, and certainly not last night, but at least I did rest, as far as that goes.  By that I mean that I did nothing that was productive, and almost nothing that required any exertion at all.  I watched the second of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials, but though it was good, as far as it went, I wasn’t as moved or interested as I thought I would be.  I fear that the huge time gap since the last special—The Power of the Doctor—was just too much, and I rather lost my momentum for the show.

It’s disappointing, but it’s not unique.  I’ve lost my momentum for pretty much everything lately.  I don’t play or even listen to music, anymore.  I don’t write fiction.  I don’t watch any new shows or movies.  I’m even getting sick of reading.  I haven’t read anything at all since Friday evening, fiction or non-fiction.  I didn’t watch any football games or golf yesterday (or Saturday) which I have been known to do if the urge strikes me.  It didn’t strike this weekend.

Hanukkah is coming up this Thursday night, and I’ll send my kids each a rather unimaginative present, since I don’t really have a good idea what to give them specifically that they would want, other than things I’ve already gotten them.  I don’t really know what they like or like to do.  I don’t really know my own kids, anymore.

Mind you, I don’t really know anyone else, either.  I don’t even know if I know myself.  And, I guess, if you don’t know whether or not you know yourself, then it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know yourself, because if you knew yourself, presumably, one of the things you would know is whether or not you know yourself.

Something like that, anyway.  Possibly I’m wrong.

I don’t really have much else to say today that I haven’t said a million times.  I’m still in the process of crashing and burning; it’s just happening slowly, like something that’s been filmed by an ultra-high-frame-rate camera, so when you play it back, it looks like barely anything is happening.  But it is happening.  In the end, I’m sure it will be possible to “play it back” at full speed, and you’ll make out clearly the whole sweep of the event.

But no one is watching for that right now.  No one really cares, and I’m afraid that I can’t blame them.  What use am I to the world and what cost would it be for the world to lose me?  “Vanishingly little” is the proper answer to both questions.  Indeed, I’m probably more of a net detriment while I’m around, so the loss of me would probably be to the world’s gain.

I guess I’ll never know, myself, but maybe some of you will know, eventually.  I wish I could find out for sure.  I imagine it would make certain decisions easier.  Then again, maybe it wouldn’t help at all.

Oh, well, that’s enough for today.  Have a good day and a good week, everyone.

*Hereinafter I’ll just assume you know I mean CE or AD when referring to the year, and will only put an acronym—if that’s the proper term—after the year if it is other than that era.

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At LEAST three thresholds

It’s Friday morning, and it really is the end of the work week for me this time.  I’m at the train station waiting for the first train of the day…

…aaaaaand now it’s arriving.

And now, I’m on the train.

It’s a bit strange—there were only four people waiting for the first train at Hollywood station this morning, and that’s counting the Tri-rail™ security guy who was just waiting there for his pickup to start his workday (I think that’s what he was doing).  Still, the train itself seems to have roughly as many passengers as it usually does, so I don’t think today’s some weird, low-usage day.

It is, of course, the first of December, and if one uses monthly passes, today is the day to get one*, so maybe some people put that off a couple of days, since they probably also have to pay rent and that sort of thing.  I don’t know.  Possibly I’m overthinking it.  It may be nothing more than ordinary fluctuations and ebbs and flows of numbers of people doing particular things.  Who knows?  Also, who cares?

(It seems that I do, at least in passing, though why I notice and bother to think about such things is not clear even to me.)

I’m going to try to keep this brief today, mainly because I’m very tired.  Of course I didn’t sleep well; that’s why I’m here on the first train.  At least this really is the end of the week for me, though it’s the beginning of a new month.  But it’s the month that’s at the end of the year, so that’s two to one in favor of ends over beginnings, at least for today.

I’m still having trouble seeing and commenting on, or at least following, the website I usually follow, and that’s very discouraging, though I have evidence that at least it is not about me, personally.  My paranoia wants to tell me not to believe that, though.  I mean, just because other people are suffering similar troubles, and they are certainly not being singled out, doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be having troubles and be singled out because I’m an annoying git.  They’re not mutually exclusive states of reality.

Anyway, that’s one daily source of assurance or comfort or whatever that isn’t working like it usually does.  I’m also getting pretty bored with a lot of the YouTube channels I watch.  I am also bored with almost all of the books in my Kindle library, though I’m rereading at least parts of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies.  It’s an excellent book—really it’s a collection of blog posts he did over quite a long time on a site called “Less Wrong”, or something like that.  I know the book has been published split into two parts as well.

I highly recommend the book, in whatever form.  Since it’s a collection of posts, each individual section is relatively brief and easily digestible, so to speak, so don’t worry that it’ll be a slog.  Yudkowsky is also an engaging and entertaining writer, and he’s really effing smart and knowledgeable.

I don’t really know what I’m going to do this weekend, other than watching Doctor Who on Saturday and doing my laundry on Sunday.  I probably won’t really do much of anything.  Hopefully I can at least sleep a bit.  I plan to take some Benadryl® tonight.  I know its effects don’t engender truly healthy sleep, but even an increased amount of physical rest—even just an increased amount of oblivion—is worth quite a bit.

I’m very tired.  I think I said that before.  I’m also very discouraged and rather lost.  I feel increasingly like a ghost of myself, and I also feel increasingly that my hold on a superficially normal life and lifestyle is slipping.  I don’t think I’d want to go on, even if I could, but it’s a moot point, because I don’t think I’m going to be able to go on much longer.  I think I’ll end up in some type of hospital or the morgue or something similarly non-ideal soon.  At least the morgue would be a cool place (in the physical, temperature-related sense of the word).

I’m running on empty, running on fumes, near the end of my rope, teetering on the brink; I’m also running out of figures of speech.  Anyone who knows me well enough will know how unusual that is.

I wish I had something fun or funny or “clever” with which to leave you for this week.  Nothing’s coming to mind, though.  All I can say instead is, as always, I hope you have a good day, and a good weekend, and that you have a good beginning to the month of December.  Major Holiday Time® is coming, but try not to be too stressed about it.  If you can, try to look forward to spending some time with your friends and family.  Try to spend time with people you love and who love you.

I guess if you love yourself, that last bit is easy enough to accomplish, though I wouldn’t know from personal experience.

*Actually, today is the first day to get one for the month whether or not one uses them, but it’s not really a relevant fact for people who don’t.

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“A hideous throng rush out forever, and laugh—but smile no more.”

It’s Wednesday morning—quite a bit before five o’clock and well before when the day “begins”, at least if the day begins at sunrise.  That will come…let’s see…at 6:49 am.  So says the weather app on my smartphone.  I’m at the train station today even earlier than yesterday because I woke up even earlier than yesterday and the day before.

I occasionally entertain the whimsical—and clearly untrue—notion that a person’s lifespan is limited by the time they spend awake, and so I expect to die quite a bit earlier than most other people (on average) because I’ve spent more of my time not asleep than most people have.  I’d say I get on average at least two fewer hours of sleep a night than most people I know.

Many nights, it’s quite a bit worse than that.

In a year, that’s 730.5 hours (roughly, ha ha) of sleep deficit, which is just over 30 days.  Although, come to think of it, if we’re counting awake time as a day, and the “usual” waking day is about sixteen hours, it’s more like 45 days—which makes sense, since 24 is one and a half times 16, and 45 is one and a half times 30.

Yes, I did that figuring in my head.  It’s terribly impressive, I know*.  I did not, however, calculate the sunrise on my own, as I noted.  I don’t really know how to go about that.  I’m sure it could be done, but probably not with the data available to me this morning at the train station.  Clearly, when people started tracking and plotting the days and seasons and sunrise and sunset and all that stuff, they did not have smartphones or the internet.  Those were days even before Commodore 64s and TRS-80s!

Anyway, the point I was making is that with all those matters taken into account, if I average only two hours dearth of sleep (a conservative amount, since the deficit is often larger), given my notion of a fixed amount of time awake determining the length of a life, I’m chewing a month and half extra off my life every year.  That’s one eighth of a year per year.  Which would mean that, just since I was in my teens, when I already slept less than the other people in my family and the other people I knew, I’ve lost five or more years of my life.  And every year that I get older in real time, my ultimate lifespan shrinks another eighth of a year.  Eventually, those time fronts will collide, and that will be the end.

This raises an interesting coincidence**:  Autistic individuals are known to have a much higher incidence of sleep disturbance than the general population, and recent studies found that, in the UK specifically, the average lifespan of an autistic male is about 8 years shorter than that of the general male population.  That’s in the UK, where they have a National Health System and actual programs and support services in place to help people with autism, imperfect though those systems are.  I shudder to think what the expected lifespan reduction is in the United States; I think I have encountered estimates of ten and more years’ reduction in healthy lifespan.

Still, it would be silly (and foolish) to attribute that decreased lifespan to number of hours of sleep loss.  There are many ways in which people on the autism spectrum have difficulty optimizing their health, even when they are otherwise “high functioning”, as the term goes.

If you don’t think those difficulties really matter, consider my circumstance (and I’m not even sure that I have ASD; it’s very difficult for me even to seek out, let alone avail myself of, resources to get evaluated).

I have strengths and talents of various kinds, but I’m living in a single, modest room in an old, cinderblock house in south Florida where I sleep on the floor on a futon and eat only microwave or order-in food; I work as a sort of office manager/record keeper/verifier in a phone sales office; I don’t have a driver’s license or any of that stuff anymore, nor do I do anything socially or spend any time with friends or family.  I supposedly have an IQ in the low 160s, I graduated with honors*** from an Ivy League university (which I attended on a full scholarship), I won a National Council of Teachers of English Award in high school, I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, became a doctor and did that job pretty well while I was doing it (though the record keeping and management functions were anathema to me).

But I could not thrive in the human world for long.  My back injury and chronic pain contributed to my specific failure, but I’d already had many instances in which depression and difficulty with certain kinds of administrative and record-keeping tasks caused me to land in personal crises.

I’ve written six novels and (self) published five, as well as several “short” stories (published individually and/or in two collections).  I’ve recorded and released four original songs (poorly produced, by me, on free software and with cheap, cheap recording equipment), and have written and shared a few others.  I can draw (and paint a bit), I can sculpt (with clay), I play piano and cello and guitar, I can sing, and I can even act reasonably well (how else do you think I pretended to be human for such long periods of time?  I even fooled myself).

All these abilities just make me even more of a failure, don’t they?  “How the mighty have fallen!”

Enough.  I’m almost at my stop (the train arrived just as I mentioned the TRS-80, which sounds like an omen…but an omen of what?), so I’ll wrap it up.  I guess I’ll write another post tomorrow, for what it’s worth.  Have a good day.

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*I know, I know, it’s not actually impressive.  It’s easy enough to figure with multiples of 2, and 2 hours a day times 365.25 days per year is simply enough 730.5.  I left the extra digit just to be silly; it’s not significant, especially since, in the very next operation, I needed to divide that number by 24 hours in a day.  Since 3 times 24 is 72, I know that 730.5 hours is just ten and a half hours more than 30 days.  I could then simply have applied the 24 = 1.5 x 16 to do the next calculation, but that only occurred to me afterwards.  Anyway, it’s more fun to note that since 9 time 8 is 72, 16 goes into 72 four and a half times, and then multiply by ten, since 730 is ten times 73.  The remainder there is the same as with twenty-four—ten hours and a half—but that’s a bigger fraction of a sixteen hour day than a twenty-four hour day.  All this silliness at least can serve to remind us that the Phoenicians or Babylonians (I forget which) were not foolish to do things in 60s and 24s and 360s and so on—all these numbers are so readily divisible into fractions that they’re terribly useful.

**And yes, it is all coincidence.  Please don’t take my “lifespan limited by time awake” notion seriously.  Though it is certain that chronic sleep loss diminishes one’s health and can reduce one’s lifespan, it is not a simple arithmetic process, and there’s not the slightest reason to think that human lifespans are determined specifically by number of hours awake.  That’s even sillier than the notion of a lifespan being determined by the number of heartbeats one has.  I’ve had sinus tachycardia all my life; I would have been dead years ago if a lifespan were determined by numbers of heartbeats.

***I wrote my 50-page honors thesis in one weekend after it was revealed to me that I had misremembered the due date as being a month later than it was, and having been grudgingly given that one weekend extension to get it done if I wanted to get honors.  It turned out decently, because even then I could write very quickly tolerably well under pressure, and I knew my subject.  But this demonstrates all the more how, despite having talents (and some skills), I am rotten at navigating the ins and outs of human society (I’ve only gotten worse since then, because I’m just more and more worn out).  It wasn’t even my idea to try for honors; that was my then-fiancée’s idea.  It was something that looked good on resumes and applications.  Such thoughts, about self-promotion and seeking advancement in that fashion, have never been natural to me.  They are, if anything, worse now that I am on my own.

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I am become Doc, the destroyer of worlds

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’ve just boarded the first train of the day again, since I wasn’t sleeping anyway.  I didn’t have quite as fragmented a night’s sleep as I often have, but it was short.  And yet, as usual, I don’t really feel sleepy, just fatigued, just weary, just [fill in random synonym for “tired”].  This is part of the reason I haven’t started walking in the morning again yet, though this morning the weather would have been reasonably congenial for such a thing, being relatively cool.  I just have difficulty summoning up the will and mental energy to do it.

I’m a bit frustrated—what else is new?—with something to do with WordPress or with a blog that I regularly follow and even upon which I comment somewhat frequently.  I had thought that the “Reader” function in my WordPress account was glitchy, because I could no longer see, let alone make, comments on the site to which I go every day.  It’s one of the things that sustains me, ever since the first time I began reading it, and writing comments on it and replying to them is one of the few pseudo-social things that I do (other than interact with people at the office, which doesn’t really count, since it’s almost never about anything of significant interest to me).

But then I realized that I could see (and make) comments on at least some other sites, even on the “Reader”.  Yet when I went to the site in question, even at its primary, official page, instead of through my “Reader”, it didn’t recognize me, and I had to sign in to make comments, giving my credentials each time, even though I’ve been following that site for years.

I even keep trying to hit the “subscribe” rectangle—let’s face it, it’s not really a “button”—on the WordPress “Reader” thingy, though I’ve long since been subscribed to the site, but as soon as I go back to it, it seems to think I haven’t done it.

I don’t know if that site’s owner is blocking me (it doesn’t seem like something he would do, but I can be insufferably annoying, I know—just ask me) or if WordPress is glitching only on my connection to that site.  It’s nothing to do with any one computer, as far as I can tell, because it happens on each one I have tried.

It’s very depressing.  I can’t even read other people’s comments when using the “Reader”.  It’s like losing friends, in a way, though of course I know that I’m not really anyone’s friend.

Maybe I should take it as a message from the Universe.  Not that I think the Universe actually sends me personal messages, apart from the obvious occasions when actual people, who are parts of the Universe, send me messages from them locally.  But that’s not really the idea about which I’m thinking.  Or maybe it is, I don’t know.  I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, at this point I’ve basically become little more than a detriment or a distraction or a disruption or a defect in the world.  It turns out I’ve been a defect since I was born, in at least two different objective ways.  I’ve struggled most of my life to be useful, at least to people about whom I care, if only to try to make up for how much I corrode and dysregulate things, but it’s been a losing battle.  To turn one of the last lines from Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 on its head and make it more appropriate to me:

I wasn’t born to be a dad; I was born to be a destroyer.

I wanted to be a dad.  I loved being a dad.  But I think I wasn’t a very good one, because…well, anyway, I haven’t seen either of my kids in over ten years, apparently by their choice (well, at least for everything after 2015).  I should probably just give up and accept the other role, though it sucks to give up on ever being with my kids again.  But I should just accept the other role.  And, of course, I don’t have a right to destroy other people, so there’s only one legitimate target for that part of my nature.

Well, I’m sick of writing for today.  This is going to be it for the moment.  I’ll write at you tomorrow—as always, barring the unforeseen.

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It’s Monday morning, y’all.

Everyone seems to say “y’all” now, don’t they?  Or, at least online, a great many young people who are distinctly not from the southern United States say it.

I’m not complaining.  It’s actually quite a good and useful contraction—unlike those that presage the births of the vast majority of people.  It’s better than, for instance, “you guys” because the latter cannot easily be shortened to one syllable, and also, although in plural “guys” is often used to refer to any group of mixed sex and/or gender, the singular, “guy” almost invariably refers to a male.  Just try to consider referring to Jennifer Lopez as “that guy”.  It doesn’t quite work, does it?

On the other hand, weirdly enough, the term “bro” seems to be used without any reference to sex or gender or what have you nowadays, at least if one goes by various movies and shows and videos and postings and the like.  Various people reacting to various things can sometimes be heard to speak to anyone using the shorthand “bro”, regardless of gender or sex.  This is quite strange, to me, because it is only too obvious—and true—that “bro” is a shortened version of the word “brother” which refers to a male sibling, whether literally or figuratively, as in “he ain’t heavy; he’s my brother” and the like.

It would actually be rather funny if one started to hear guys referring to other guys* as “sis”, wouldn’t it?  One could remake the old Connect 4 commercial, but with two brothers playing, and the first one saying, “I win,” and the other objecting, “Where?  I can’t see…” and the first replying, “Here, diagonally,” and the second then grumbling, with barely disguised admiration, “Pretty sneaky, sis”.  And the first would not be offended!

All of that’s just a load of nonsense that came to my mind as I wrote it.  It was not what I planned to write; I know this because there is almost never anything about which I really plan write.  Rather like the Joker, I just write things.

I did, however, plan to state my hope that all of you in the US who celebrate it had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend.  I hope you ate one or more delightful meals with family and/or friends, with people you love and who love you, and were at least implicitly thankful for it.  If you did spend time and dine well with family and/or friends, with people you love and who love you, and you are not in any way thankful for it, well…fuck you very much.  You’re an asswipe.

Not that I’m not asswipe, myself, but I’m not that kind of one.  I did not spend Thanksgiving weekend with friends or family or with people I love or who love me.  I did eat a few decent meals by myself, but nothing really Thanksgiving-worthy, apart from some leftovers a coworker brought to the office on Saturday.

I watched The Star Beast, the new Doctor Who episode, on Saturday; it was not a great episode of Doctor Who, but it was a good one.  It was nice to see Donna Noble and the Doctor (and the Doctor Donna) back together again.  We have two more episodes over the next two Saturdays, and then, I believe, a Christmas special coming up in late December.  After that, I don’t know how long the delay will be before the next season, but I’m not sure I can wait for it.

I really don’t feel well, and I really don’t feel good (I deliberately used both of those words and, in my use at least, they have different meanings).  My life is just a decaying ruin, and the forces of erosion and rot and radioactive decay (to say nothing of the Red Death) and every other kind of relatively active entropy are eating away at it every moment.

I’m tired of everything.  I’m tired all the time, and yet I cannot stay asleep, even when I’m able to get to sleep.  I woke up this morning at roughly two o’clock, and I could not get back to sleep.  So I got up and caught the first train of the day, because there was no point in delaying.

I’ve been getting a fair amount of uncomfortable esophageal spasm recently, presumably from reflux, though I haven’t had symptomatic heartburn.  I would imagine it was chest pain from my actual heart, but I had some bad bouts of esophageal spasm way back in my late twenties, and this is pretty similar to that pain.

I guess I could be wrong, and it could be pain from my heart.  Still, it would probably be a good thing if I had a heart attack, I guess, so that’s not so troubling.  I do worry that I’d panic and try to go to the hospital or something if I had one—it’s hard to fight those fear/survival urges in the heat of the moment.  It’s like an addiction, or a bad dietary habit:  it’s so hard to stay on a diet in the face of temptation, and it’s so hard to let go of one’s life when one is in immediate danger.  Evolution has not left such things easily up to the control of the conscious mind.

Of course, the conscious mind can be wrong about things.  It would be supremely ironic if I were to have a catastrophic health emergency and suddenly come to the conclusion that, actually, you know what, I love my life…only to die shortly thereafter.  At least it would be funny, though.

Thant’s enough nonsense for today.  There will probably be more nonsense to follow, tomorrow through Friday, but I will be off this coming Saturday.  Of course, some would say that I’m “off” every day.

They are not without justification.

*See, “guy” tends to want to refer to a male.

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I almost forgot to give this a title

I seriously considered walking to the train station today, but after I finally arose—I’d been awake for hours, already—I realized that I just wasn’t up to doing it, physically.  Or maybe I wasn’t up to doing it, mentally.  In any case, it’s not as though there’s any actual difference or separation between the two things, despite the wishes of dualists* of many stripes throughout the ages.

I simply am this thing that is writing this, and it’s all instantiated in this body—though I store aspects of my persona and records of various things and highlights of information in external media, as people have done for quite some time to greater and lesser degrees.

In any case, I really don’t feel very well, and I don’t mean just my usual depression/dysthymia, though it may be related to those things.  Perhaps it’s just an exacerbation.  After all, dysthymia (now officially called persistent depressive disorder or some such boring name, because that’s what really matters, making sure that things have optimal names, right?) can episodically increase into a full blown episode of major depression.

Also, it’s that time of the year for those whose symptoms are affected by the seasons—in the northern hemisphere, at least—to feel the detriment of longer nights and shorter days (so to speak).  I am at least somewhat “seasonally affected”, though I’ve always loved autumn.  This may seem superficially contradictory, but in my youth, autumn was a time that brought birthdays and holidays and the start of school and all that good stuff that I liked.  Also, probably when I was quite young, I didn’t have any real evidence of depressive disorders to come, at least as far as I recall right now.  Although, if I do have ASD, it was present then.  There is some evidence in my recollections that it was.

In addition, of course—speaking of holidays—this is a rough time of year for people who are already depressed and who are also socially isolated**.  Thanksgiving is in two days, and that is a traditional, very positive and social family holiday, which I will not be celebrating again this year.  I will have the day off work, though—all the better to drive home the fact of being alone in a single room (with attached bath) and having no one with whom one shares life at pretty much any level.  Then of course, the Hanukkah season (and Christmas season) and New Years and all that is coming up—extremely family-and-friends-oriented holidays.  I again am not planning on trying to spend any of them with anyone else.

The weird irony is, when I imagine actually trying to spend holidays with other people—yes, even when I merely imagine it—I feel tremendous tension.  I guess it’s what one could call significant anxiety.  It’s a strange kind of…not exactly a contradiction, but a conflict, a tension of ideas.  I am depressed and gloomy when alone, which is my usual way to be, but I feel almost terrified at the thought of being around other people socially.

I particularly wouldn’t want to have a group of people just bring me into their celebrations of holidays just so that I could have someone with whom to celebrate.  It’s not that I dislike people I don’t know.  How could I dislike them if I don’t know them?  I just don’t feel a sense of camaraderie with most people; I don’t feel like a member of the same species.

The guy, Paul Micaleff from the YouTube channel “Asperger’s from the Inside” (well, now it’s “Autism from the Insode”) made a great analogy that struck home with me about that kind of thing.  He said that, if he goes to a pond and sees a lot of ducklings playing around and swimming and all that, he might really think they were great and enjoy watching them, but it would never occur to him to try to join them in their pond.  That would make no sense.  He wouldn’t know how to act, they would be terrified of his presence, and he would never be able to fit in or enjoy trying to pretend to be like them, in any case.

I think it’s a really good analogy.  One doesn’t have to hate a group of people or even think them uninteresting not to feel that one has any business trying to join the group or attempting to act as if one were like them.

I don’t know what my species is.  Even though I find people like Paul more relatable than most, I still don’t really feel like I could connect even with the people in those communities.  I think the closest guy online I feel like could be my kind of person is Dave, from Dave’s Garage (his book was also very good and extremely relatable).  But I don’t think that he would find me very interesting, partly because our backgrounds are so dissimilar.  Anyway, he’s doing his thing and putting up nice educational videos about computers and stuff, and that’s good enough for me.

Actually, I don’t know that there’s anyone I might possibly want to spend time with who would truly want to spend time with me, except for family of course.  Even more so, I would not feel comfortable imposing myself upon anyone, even if I wanted to spend time with them and they were interested.  I’m just not selfish and cruel enough to inflict myself upon people I like.

I’m very tired and just utterly pointless—in the sense that I have no particular reason to do much of anything; I just have biological drives and habits, none of which provide any purpose or sense of satisfaction.

I have been thinking about using this month’s Audible credit to get Stephen King’s On Writing in audiobook format.  It’s read by King-sensei himself and his two author sons (Owen King and Joe Hill).  I’ve read the print version before, of course—more than once—and it was certainly inspiring in its way.  Stephen King’s nonfiction is sometimes even better than his fiction.  His style and substance and personality are quite engaging.  So, maybe if I get that audiobook, I’ll listen to it, and maybe just feel inspired to start writing fiction again.

Possibly, it’s worth a try.  If it doesn’t work, well, I don’t know what will happen.  That’s not new, though.  No one knows the specifics of the future in other than trivial senses until it happens.  And then it’s no longer the future.  We’re falling through time, in that sense, facing backwards, only seeing where we’re going once we’re past it.

It seems like a weird way to run things, but of course, it’s the only way that makes sense, given that complexity and life and memory are all driven by processes that harness increasing entropy.  And being fairly close to the surface of an extremely low-entropy state in space-time (AKA “The Big Bang”) explains why things like life and mind exist at all.  You wouldn’t see stalactites and stalagmites form in a place without a local strong gravity differential providing a sensible “up” and “down”, and you wouldn’t see life or consciousness forming in a spacetime with already uniform entropy, thus leaving no local “past” or “future”.

All right, let’s stop before I go off on a tangent, even a sine or a secant.  Have a good day.

*Not to be confused with “duelists”, a group or set that could certainly overlap with dualists, but need not do so, and which is defined by quite unrelated characteristics.

**Not in the sense of avoiding spreading disease, but just in general lack of social contacts or supports.  I am very “challenged” in that area.

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Is there such a thing as Von Oldmann architecture?

It’s Wednesday morning, and here I am at the train station, writing my blog post for the day.  It’s quite wet and windy, which might have been a decent situation in which to do some walking, but I’m still feeling quite under the weather, so I haven’t done any walking of more than a mile at a time this week.  Last night/yesterday evening, I walked to the train station from work, and I had an umbrella, but it was terribly windy, so even though I was able to keep my head (and my backpack) mostly dry, my legs were soaked by the time I got to the station.

This morning, it’s not raining as hard, but it is drizzling and windy.  I considered just wearing a rain coat today, but I realized that wouldn’t protect my legs any more than the umbrella would.  I do have a long, duster-style coat that I guess I could have worn.  Maybe if it’s still windy and rainy tomorrow, I’ll wear that.

I also considered not going to the office today, but it’s Wednesday, which means it’s payroll day, so I need to go.

I started a new mantra (of sorts) yesterday, consistent with the way I expressed myself in yesterday’s post—indeed, I started it even as I walked from the train to the office in the morning:  I said, “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself.”  This was, to no one’s surprise, not at all difficult for me to maintain, unlike my former attempt at saying that I loved those things (as if to convince myself) which made my metaphorical tongue turn to metaphorical sand in my metaphorical mouth.

The new mantra is strangely freeing.  It didn’t make me nearly as tense or uncomfortable as I worried that it might.  If anything, it allowed a sense of detaching.  I didn’t feel any actual hostility or malice toward the world—there was no weird desire for revenge or destruction or what have you.  I don’t think the world ever even pretended to owe me anything good, and it certainly does not owe me anything good.  So I can’t feel any sense of affront, or wounded pride, or anything idiotic like that.

Don’t get me wrong; I can be and am idiotic in plenty of other ways.  I’m just not idiotic in that particular way.  As for hating my life and hating myself, well, what else is new?  Accepting it, saying it, has its benefits.  If I hate myself anyway, why would I care what happens to me?

I realized that this might not be the healthiest thing to have going through my mind, so I decided to provide a counterpoint by listening to the David Burns book on Cognitive Therapy, Feeling Good.  I’ve read the book before; I was recommended it by a therapist.  I’ve even done many of the exercises therein.

I recognize the value of the ideas in the book, and I know that CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) has been tested well and provides good results for many.  It’s also logical and rational in many ways, and that’s always appealing.  So I started listening to the audio-book, even as I waited for the train and rode on it.

It did help me take a nap on the train; maybe that means some of its messages went into my subconscious.  It was a nice little nap, and I didn’t miss my stop, because I wasn’t sleeping all that deeply, despite my horrendous lack of sleep the previous two nights.

It’s sad to say, but I think my body and my nervous system have sort of adapted to getting very little sleep.  I’m not saying that they’re fine with it.  That would be absurd.  Sleep is clearly crucially important to life in creatures with any kind of nervous system as we know it.  This is obvious, even if we don’t quite know why, because every creature in the world that we know of with a nervous system spends a good portion of every planetary rotation in a relatively dormant and quite vulnerable state.  If evolution were able to allow for function without sleep, one would think it would have cropped up somewhere, at least.

Of course, it’s possible that, way back in the dawn of nervous systems, hundreds of millions of years ago, life went down an accidental blind alley with respect to sleep and nerves.  Maybe the common ancestor of all nervous systems just happened upon a form of function that requires what we call sleep, and every descendant of that nervous system is stuck with a requirement that need not have been the case if some different solution to creating nervous systems had been happened upon, but it wasn’t, and so sleep cannot be escaped except by a reinvention of the nervous system by some life form.  That’s unlikely to happen for reasons similar to why new types of abiogenesis aren’t going to happen in an already crowded biosphere:  anything new would be horrendously outcompeted by life forms that have hundreds of millions to three and a half billion years advantage.

I’m dubious, though, about the possible accidental and fundamentally nonessential nature of sleep.  This is at least partly due to the recognition that even our computers eventually need to be updated and, more importantly, rebooted to function optimally.

Computers bear very little similarly to nerve cells or literal nervous systems; they were never designed to mimic nerves, anymore than an internal combustion engine was designed to mimic muscles and legs.  Von Neumann architecture has very little in common with the way nervous systems store and process information.  The former does storage and processing separately; nervous systems seem to do it as part and parcel of the very same processes.

Anyway, my point is, I don’t think I need less sleep just because for a long time I have achieved less sleep.  I think my body, my mind, my nervous system has adjusted as best it can to keep from completely falling apart—literally—in response to truly chronic insomnia.  But the system is still wearing down and suffering damage; believe me, I can tell.

I’m almost sure that at least part of my chronic pain is related to my insomnia, especially the pains that arise other than where the more concrete source of my pain is located.  And there’s clearly an association between my insomnia and my depression/dysthymia.  It’s difficult to say if one causes the other or the other causes the one or if they’re both caused by some third thing—possibly some form of autism spectrum disorder—but I give very low credence to them being only coincidentally correlated.

In any case, I am proceeding in two apparently conflicting directions at once, now:  I’m repeating a mantra that doesn’t seem in any way to come up against resistance in my mind, but which is certainly not what one could consider positive.  And I’m repeating my exposure and exploration of CBT, starting with Feeling Good.  None of it is new to me, nor are there any revelations likely to come.

I understand the points that are made in CBT, I understand and recognize the cognitive distortions associated with depression that it strives to combat.  I’m open to the possibilities, but I’m not sure it’s the right tool for the job, in my case.  I suspect my depression/dysthymia may be quasi-organic, in the sense of being more truly fundamental to the operation of my own weird little alien nervous system.

But I could be wrong, and I don’t like to jump to conclusions too precipitously.  So, I’ll finish listening to the book, and maybe get one of his other books with this month’s Audible credit.  But I’m also not going to try to extinguish the repetition of “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself” in my head.  If it goes away on its own, that’s fine.  Otherwise, it’s at least something consistent onto which to hold.  And it’s weirdly both freeing and calming, and that’s worth a lot to me.

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…but day after day it reappears…

Here we go again.  Or, at least, here I go again.  I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to arrive.  This time I’m not getting the first train of the day, but that’s not because I woke up any later today.  Actually, I woke up far earlier, when my housemate(s) arrived home late or something along those lines and had a fairly prominent conversation in the kitchen, which is right outside the door to my area of the house, at around one in the morning.

I have not been back to sleep since then.  I tried to go back to sleep.  I would lie on my side and relax and close my eyes…and then I would start awake, convinced I must have overslept, only to find that not even five minutes had passed.  After a while, I gave up trying to get back to sleep.

I considered staying “home” today, but it’s not any more pleasant to be there than at work.  If anything, right now, it’s less pleasant.  There are ants (or maybe termites) swarming outside near my door, thanks to the wet and hot weather, and I had to spray around my door to keep them out.  And in the humidity, my wall A/C unit is leaking condensation onto the floor, and I’m sure it’s generating mildew and similar, though I’m spraying the area with Lysol®.  If there were any kind of normal winter time coming, I wouldn’t even need to use the air conditioning, but there’s not exactly a lot of ventilation in my area otherwise.

I can’t go on like this much longer.  I don’t really know that I can go on at all much longer.  I hate the world, and I hate myself even more.  I’m really a horrible person, and a horribly unpleasant person, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, so it’s only a matter of figuring out how long that’s going to be.  I wish I had died on my birthday, like I was considering, or even earlier, sometime on or shortly after September 22nd.  I hate it here.  I hate that I feel the urge, the pressure, the compulsion to keep trying.  It’s so stupid.  I’m so stupid.

I don’t have anything insightful or clever or interesting to say, today.  At least I don’t think I do.  I’m not trying to persuade anyone that I’m right about the stupidity and futility of at least my life or life in general.  I would hate to convince someone of that.  I would like it if all the people who read this happen to love and enjoy their lives, and look forward to each day with eagerness.  I wouldn’t mind if everyone in the world were happy, even if I were the only one excluded, because at least there would be significant compensation in the form of that global happiness.

Of course, wishes aren’t much use—or any use, really—if there’s no way to bring them about.  But I just want to make it clear that my hatred of the world doesn’t make me want to make everyone, or the world, miserable, or to make any other people suffer.  I just don’t want to be buffeted by it any longer.  I don’t want to be in what feels like a sewer, surrounded by waste matter that seems largely to be of my own making.

I just need to find a way to screw my courage to the sticking point, to quote Lady Macbeth (admittedly not the greatest of role models, but given that she was written by Shakespeare, she does have some good lines).  I need to find a way to make myself give up completely, so that I can get rid of my resistance.

My train is due to board in “approximately 10 minutes” (on track 2), so I’ll wrap this post up relatively quickly.  It’s going to be a short one, I guess, but that’s okay.  It’s not like I have anything new or interesting or complicated to write or otherwise to get across to everyone.  I think my sentiments for the day are pretty clear and well-defined, and they don’t exactly require a great deal of explanation.

I’m sick of all this, but most particularly, I’m sick of myself.  I can’t stand that guy.  He’s so annoying, so much of the time.  I can’t even get away from him by going to sleep, because almost always, I wake up feeling more tired and worse than I did when I went to sleep, and always far too soon.

I’ll say it again, though:  hopefully you all feel better.  Please feel better.  I need to think that someone out there feels better than I do right now.  So please, have a good day.

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No sleep till…

I’m at the train station quite early even for the first train of the day, today, but I was wide awake for more than two and a half hours before I even left the house.  I didn’t really sleep in yesterday much—which meant that I got my laundry done relatively early, and without having to interact with my housemates, which is always a bit more relaxing than the alternative, but it would be nice if I could just get some rest.

To be fair to me, so to speak, I did do some napping during the day, yesterday.  It’s a bit frustrating, though, that I only nap when I feel like I’m literally losing consciousness, not just slipping off to sleep but as if I’m actually succumbing to some state of disease or something.  It never just feels good to fall asleep, and when I wake up it’s just confusing and groggy and tense and weird.

One good thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression was that it made me enjoy going to sleep.  That was something I don’t think I’d experienced before or have experienced since, though I’ve known people who described feeling particularly good about going to sleep.  However, Paxil had side effects and other issues that overwhelmed the benefits, I’m afraid.

Anyway, that’s enough of that for now.  The point I’m trying to make is that I am not terribly well rested, even though yesterday was Sunday, and so if I’m grumpy and weird and unpleasant in my writing this morning, apart from it being utterly typical for me, the reason is at least partly that I’m not rested.  It’s probably  also just that my personality is grumpy and weird and unpleasant, but that’s a longer-term issue, the solution to which I do not know.  I know how I could make the issue go away, but that’s not quite the same thing as solving it, so for now I’ll wait until I’ve given up on any solution to enact that choice.

And now, I am on the first train of the day, headed north toward the office, to start yet another week of marking time until something changes my life.  In the meantime, I did buzz my hair Saturday afternoon, down to the quarter-inch length of the clippers.

It’s been months and months since I cut my hair, and it was getting quite long, but that didn’t bother me.  What bothered me was that, when I went to see about possibly making a YouTube short or something similar, I saw how unruly my hair looked and how much it made my face look even rounder and more disgusting than otherwise.  This is despite the fact that I wash my hair every day and comb it carefully and all that.  But once that’s done, I tend to forget about it, and I spend as little time looking in mirrors as I can.  So, seeing a few practice videos of my face was shocking and borderline horrifying.

Also, let’s face it, having really short hair is just easier for maintenance.  Even though I recently ranted about the weirdness of the military being into short hair, I have to admit, it’s nice not to have to worry about it except for the occasional touch-up trimming.  It’s still over-warm and humid here in south Florida, and that’s another good reason for shorter hair.  Hopefully it will cool down at least a little as the week goes on.

There’s something weird happening with the sound the train is making on the tracks, or with its air-conditioning or some other system.  For a bit there, there was this nearly-rhythmic squeaking noise coming and going, almost as though there was a big cage full of discontented birds and the occasional hamster on a rusty wheel up in the roof of the train car.  It seems to be a function of how fast the train is going and whether it’s on the inside or outside of a slight curve in the track.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I am writing this on my laptop computer, by the way.  It’s just much easier and more natural for me to write this way.  It’s been over a week since I’ve done any significant walking, because I’ve been sick, and I’m still under the weather, so carrying the computer isn’t an obstacle.

It’s not as though lugging the laptop makes my backpack that much heavier, anyway, so even once I get going back into walking—assuming I do—it shouldn’t be an issue.  When I was biking it could be a worry, because if it suddenly started to rain while I was biking that could be a situation where the computer could get wet in the backpack before I had the chance to adjust.

I haven’t been biking in a long time, though.  I haven’t even tried to replace the inner tube on my all but new bicycle.  It’s been sitting upside down on the patio near my door for months, and I have the equipment and have watched the instruction videos.  There’s nothing particularly difficult about doing it.  I just have no motivation to do it.

Anyway, that’s enough for now, I guess.  There’s nothing interesting or good or positive going on in my life, so all I have to convey is my more or less constant negativity.  Even I get tired of it sometimes (by which I mean nearly all the time), so I can only imagine how it is for all of you.  I apologize.  I know I’m terribly unpleasant.  Even people who love me don’t like to be around me much, as I’m sure I’ve noted before.

I just wish I could rest and sleep and feel refreshed and rejuvenated at some point.  Life can be unpleasant enough as it is, but it’s worse when you don’t feel like you ever really get a break or a respite.  Oh, well.  I guess I’ll continue to continue, at least for today.  We’ll see what happens by tomorrow.

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Meandering thoughts early on a Saturday morning

As I noted above, it’s early Saturday morning, and here in south Florida, it’s already 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) and muggy, despite it being the 11th of November.

The trees here don’t change color, there’s always mold and mildew and stuff like that, annoying insects are pretty much always out and about throughout the year, and I’m sure there are lots of other things worth reviling about the area.  I won’t even get into the politics and the general idiocy levels and the bureaucracies, because they’re probably not significantly worse here than anywhere else; they’re just different and weird, because it’s Florida.

I do enjoy being able to see the various reptiles that abound here most of the year.  You definitely don’t get many lizards in Michigan, even in the summer; you’ll see the occasional turtle here and there, and if you go into the woods, once or twice you might encounter a snake.  But it’s mostly mammals and birds (and various Arthropoda when the weather is warm) up there, and in pretty much all but the southernmost US states.

Mind you, Hawaii had no endemic mammals (if you don’t count humans) for quite a long time.  It’s the most isolated archipelago on the face of the Earth; how could mammals have reached it?  Birds, sure.  Insects—well, they can get almost anywhere*.  Amphibians—it’s more difficult, but they can hitch a ride on floating vegetation, as can many reptiles, since they don’t tend to require as much food and fresh water as mammals do.  But how would a population of mammals from the mainland survive an accidental trip to the Hawaiian islands?  It’s not impossible, but to my knowledge, until humans brought them, no other mammals had come to those islands.

Florida, on the other hand—that second most southern of the United States, and the most southern of the continental United States**—has been part of the mainland for as long as human beings have existed, as far as I know.  Plenty of mammals abound here, in addition to the various birds and reptiles and amphibians and insects and other arthropods.

It’s my understanding that, until quite recently, actual jaguars lived in Florida!  I’m not talking about the Jacksonville football team.  I’m talking about the actual, third-largest member of the cat family (and the largest in the western hemisphere).  I’m talking about that brilliant, beautiful predator that can casually fetch crocodiles from the waters of the Amazon to eat.  I’m talking about the member of the big cat family that, instead of going for the throat, like most big cats do, tends to jump down on the back of its prey and crush the prey’s skull in its immensely powerful jaws.

Death by jaguar would probably not be pleasant, but it would at least be stylish and cool.  And if a jaguar eats you, you become part of one of the most magnificent predators on Earth.  While it’s true that humans are better predators—they are pretty much the most powerful predators ever on the planet—there are plain few of them that could be described as magnificent and sleek and imposing.

There are no more wild jaguars in Florida, and there are probably no more wild Florida panthers, either.  Instead, we have this horrible proliferation of Naked House Apes, the vast majority of whom are far from inspiring either to look at or with which to interact.  They succeed by dint of science and technology, of ideas the vast majority of them could not begin to describe or explain.

How many humans who regularly use the GPS system could explain why the system has to account for both special relativity and general relativity, or else it would be utterly useless and inaccurate?  How many of them even understand what is meant by a logic gate, even as they carry around spectacularly sophisticated computers in their pockets, which they use to take selfies*** and watch idiotic nonsense on TikTok?

How many people can’t interact with an idea that requires more than 240 characters to express?

I could go on and on, of course.  And I’ll admit that all of those positive things and ideas—engines and mathematics and circuits and piping and roads and farms and houses and medicine and so on—came from people who at least appeared to be human (though one often wonders if there isn’t some deep level of difference within the species such that some minds are barely the same type as many others).  But those people, and their ideas, are exceptions to the general rule and tendency.

Even nowadays, when we see so many of the fruits of the brilliant ideas of the likes of Ada Lovelace and Emmy Noether and their sistren****, we have to realize that there is such an abundance only because those ideas are so potent—they persist, they spread, they lead to other, subsequent, consequent ideas.

The prevalence or rate of occurrence of brilliance is probably no greater than ever before, as a matter of percentages, but there are more people—thanks to the products of past genius—and the edifice on which they rest is so much vaster and more stable and powerful that newer, still achingly rare instances of genius can build on those monumental, cyclopean, Olympian structures and devise things and ideas that could, in principle, in the long run, change the face of the very universe itself.

I don’t know what point I’m making here, today.  This is almost free-association or even “automatic writing”.  I guess it’s a good way to pass the time while I’m on my way to the office, which is at least a nearly decent way to pass some of my time on the way to the grave.  But I’m impatient to reach my destination.  I don’t feel very well.  I wish I could rest.  I’m really, really tired, and yet I never seem to be able to sleep much.

Oh, well.  The universe was clearly not made for my comfort, so I have no right to feel slighted or misled by it.  Then again, rights themselves are a human invention (or, just possibly, a human discovery), as are laws and customs and social patterns and all that happy horseshit.  The universe at large does not recognize any rights at all, unless you want to count the right (as well as the absolute obligation) to follow the laws of physics, whatever their ultimate nature might be.

That’s enough of my random brain exudates***** for the time being.  I hope you all have an excellent weekend.

*There are apparently endemic midges in Antarctica!

**At latitudes that roughly match those of Egypt, apparently.

***And how many of them understand how LCD screens (or LED screens) are different from the old CRT screens of traditional TVs (or what those acronyms mean), and why some people predicted that color TVs would become “extinct” because the earlier ones relied on certain rare-Earth elements, and why that prediction was incorrect because clever people figured out there were other ways to do the same thing?

****It’s horrible to realize that the reason it’s comparatively easy to list the women who have made astonishing contributions to human knowledge and understanding—these two I just mentioned having done no less than, respectively, basically inventing computer science and programming before the computers had even been built and codifying and mathematically explicating how conservation laws in physics derive from fundamental symmetries—is because women have been prevented from even exploring their potential in such areas throughout most of history in almost every culture.  Interactions with humans throughout my life has made it quite clear to me that the average human female is at least as intelligent as the average human male.  This implies that, over the course of human history, to a good first approximation, half of all potential genius has been not merely squandered but prevented.  It’s heartbreaking and soul-crushing to imagine all the possible art and poetry and science and philosophy and mathematics and music and so on and so on that might have existed already had women not been systematically prevented from developing their skills and ideas throughout most of human history.  If anyone ever wonders why I get depressed, this is one of the reasons.

*****I think the replacement for the term “tweet”, as in a posting on Twitter, should be something like an X-cretion, an X-udate, an X-trusion, or maybe even an X-foliation.