insomnia

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…sore labour’s bath, blog of hurt minds, great nature’s second course…

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, and as I warned you would happen, I am writing this blog post on my laptop computer.  You have no one to blame but yourself if you’re reading it in spite of that fact.

I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel absolutely wiped out this morning.  It’s not that I couldn’t fall asleep.  Indeed, I fell asleep several times throughout the night.  But, of course, one is really only supposed to fall asleep the one time at night, and then wake up the one time in the morning, at least under ideal circumstances.

I know that many, perhaps most, people often have some interruptions to their sleep; it’s not unusual for bathroom trips to be required at some point.  But this was a deeply fragmented night, even by my standards, and I’m utterly exhausted.  I’m sure I’ve said that before, possibly more often than not.

At least this morning there is a slight breeze, with occasional accelerations to being a noticeable wind, and that’s pleasant while I’m sitting at the train station.  I did not walk to the train this morning, because, again, I’m trying not to overdo things in the short term.  It would have been a comparatively pleasant morning on which to walk, though.

Still, yesterday I did just over eight miles total, so it’s not too bad for there to be a brief respite.

One of the issues with my sleep last night was that one of my house-sharers’ dogs started barking incessantly at around midnight or so.  I had succumbed to the blandishments of Amazon Day or whatever the special thing was yesterday, and had ordered several items that I was considering ordering anyway.  Most were due to arrive Friday or so, but there were a few things—allergy meds and the like—that were due to arrive “same day”, yesterday, in the evening, which was handy but not essential.

They were to have arrived by 10, but as that time approached and they had not been delivered (according to Amazon’s site) I decided it wasn’t worth it to wait up for them.  I had taken half a Benadryl to try at least to help me get to sleep, which it seemed to do.

So, when I woke up, maybe two hours later, I thought perhaps the package had just been delivered, and the dog was barking at the delivery person.  Alas, it was not so.  In fact, the Amazon site indicated that this delivery was running late, and would now be arriving sometime today before 10pm, even though it had been listed as “out for delivery” since 4pm yesterday.  I don’t know how it went from “out for delivery” to “now arriving today by 10pm”, but it’s terribly irritating, since they are the ones who offered the fast delivery.  It’s not as though I cajoled or pressured them into saying they would do it.

Anyway, I decided to go out and make sure the Amazon report was correct; sometimes they are not.  Also, there was the bare possibility that some human or other kind of animal was puttering around in front of the house.  I almost hoped that was the case.  I grabbed my stainless steel baseball bat from among the four or so weapons I keep by my side when I sleep, donned the slip-on shoes that I use for going outside on short notice, and headed out.

I inadvertently scared a tiny and cute opossum away from the cat food I put out for the two remaining cats (who were just milling about, unconcerned about the interloper, so I wasn’t worried either), and I walked around to the front of the house.  There was no sign of the Amazon package, nor was there anyone on whom to practice my swing with the baseball bat, so it was a mostly fruitless trip.  At least it seemed that the dog was able to see me, and it started barking harder as I turned and walked back toward the rear of the house.

As I went, I heard, inside, the neighbor getting up and yelling at the dog to shut up, so there’s at least some compensation.  They need to train their dogs, if they’re going to keep them.  The dogs are nice, but they have almost no discipline.  So, it’s right that the dogs’ owner(s) should be awakened at night by the fruits of their lack of labor.

Anyway, I got back to my room and was generally very irritated.  If Amazon had said from the start that the few items in my now-late order were to arrive today, I would have been fine with it.  But they offered, without me asking, to deliver them the same day—if one ordered $25 or more worth, anyway—so I did order that much, and now it’s late.  Out of frustration, I cancelled all the other, unshipped things in my upcoming order.  It was not a small order.  I almost just canceled my Amazon Prime membership, but I’m not quite at that stage, yet.  For now, it’s still useful.  But it won’t be useful, to me or to anyone else, much longer—at least I hope not.

Of course, that wasn’t the only interruption in my sleep, but it was a big one, and it put me in a grumpier mood than I would have been in otherwise—if you can believe such a thing is possible!  So now, in the morning, at the station, I feel as if my very mind and soul are tattered shreds of cobweb, riddled with dust, flecked with tiny flakes of old, decaying paint and gnats that were never eaten by any spider but had simply become trapped and slowly died there.

Something like that.

I also have a bit of a belly ache, and I’m not just speaking figuratively.  I wish I didn’t have to go in and work today, but I’m not sure that my coworker will be back, though he’s supposed to be.  People are unreliable, so obviously, I cannot rely upon his return.

I almost wish I could believe that my abdomen would develop some kind of deadly process that would kill me or at least hospitalize me today, but given how unpleasant abdominal pain tends to be, I suppose I don’t really want that.  Still, it would be nice to have something happen that would take this all away from me, since I’m too strongly conditioned to be able just to quit everything on my own, for my own sake…at least, so far.

Eventually, I’ll reach my limit, no doubt.  I hope to do so very soon.  I was on the verge of it two or so weeks ago, when my coworker’s vacation plans came to light and then changed, and I had to postpone things or else make the occurrence of my quietus something that caused more disruption than I was willing to tolerate at the time.

Perhaps I’m making excuses.

Anyway, I’m tired beyond easy belief, and I’m tired of dealing with and doing all this bullshit.  I need to go.  At the very least, I need to go to sleep, and just be able not to keep waking up over and over and over all the time.  I need to escape.

I don’t like my chances.

Anyway, I hope you all had a better night than I had.  That would at least be some consolation for me.  And I hope you all have a very good day.

TTFN

sleep-no-more-altered

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Vamonos a escuchar mientras caminamos

I am writing this post on my smartphone today, as opposed to my computer.  Though, of course, a smartphone is a computer, and indeed, is far more advanced a computer than any I’d used prior to the turn of the millennium.  It’s a lot more advanced than the computers that ran the Space Shuttle™ and vastly more advanced than the ones used in the Apollo moon landings.  Thankfully, Newtonian mechanics is straightforward enough to be computable using quite simple systems and some smart humans, of which there were many involved in that program, and Newtonian mechanics is all one really needs to get to the Moon and back.

Anyway, I walked to the train station this morning, as was my plan, which was why I did not bring my…my folding computer back to the house with me yesterday afternoon.  I plan to bring it with me this evening, and to take tomorrow morning off from walking, just to avoid overdoing things in the short term. There will be plenty of time for overdoing things; I need to pace myself at least a little bit.

I feel that my sleep has been getting even worse recently than it usually is, and it’s really quite frustrating.  Yet, even though I’m deeply tired, I can’t seem to get sleepy.  I’m not sure what I can do about this, but it’s quite frustrating.

I do have one rather fun thing to report:  this morning on the walk to the train, I listened to a new audio-book I’d ordered with this month’s Audible credit (which hit my account yesterday).  That book was the first Harry Potter book…but in Spanish!  If there’s one set of books I know well enough to be able to fill in the gaps in Spanish, it’s that set.  The only potentially better one would be The Lord of the Rings; all in good time for that!  So, my tentative thought is that I can listen to the whole Harry Potter series in Spanish and this should help me improve my spoken (and heard) Spanish skills.

Audible also has the Harry Potter books in Japanese, and I almost started with that, but I figured Spanish would probably be the one in which it would be more useful to improve my skills.  I am in south Florida, after all.  The other people who share the house in which I live are primarily Spanish speaking, for goodness sake.

There’s nothing that says I can’t do both, of course, and that is my tentative plan.  I mean to do a lot of walking, so there will be plenty of time to listen.  Even in my hour and a half walk so far this morning, I only got to chapter 4 of the first book, and it’s the shortest of the Harry Potter books.  Just wait till I get to book 6!  I read that one seven times between when it came out and when book 7 was released, because I was impatient.  By the time I finish that, maybe, the audio will feel completely natural.

Once again today, I let the 610 train go while waiting for the 630.  I’m glad I did.  Today’s weather was warmer and muggier than Monday, and there is essentially no wind to cool one down, so that time is well used.  The wait is only somewhat effective, of course.  I brought along a second shirt to put over my “athletic” one, just so that I’m not sweating all over the back of the seat on the train.  My shorts are designed to be very good at letting go of sweat, but even so, given the pattern of accumulation, I look almost as though I had wet myself‒though only if I had done so while lying on my belly.

It’s not that bad, I guess, and I have my little “scent bomb” spray to hide any bad odor…and I’ve been told that my initial sweaty smell isn’t too bad.  Far worse (to me) is the odor of mildew.  If it gets going, I feel nauseated.  I hate that smell.

This is probably why I can’t stand to eat pretty much any kind of mushroom; they all smell vaguely like mildew.  Also, their texture is gross.  I suppose if I were to eat a magic mushroom in order to try to treat my depression, I could probably just force a bit down.  But it would have to be in specific, deliberate, and controlled circumstances.  At least I’m highly unlikely to eat poisonous mushrooms accidentally, which is good, because by all accounts of which I’m aware, they bring about a slow, painful, and horrifying death when they kill, and there are generally no known antidotes.

I don’t have much more to report.  It’s been a weird few days at the office, because my colleague is out of town, on his delayed vacation.  It’s a bit hectic and I am slightly behind schedule on payroll, but that is largely due to a region-wide Internet outage we had yesterday afternoon.  The phones in our office are VOIP, and of course, the reports we get, from which I render the payroll, come through email.  We left the office not long after lunch, after waiting a bit to see if the Internet would return.

The irony is that, after everyone had left and I was just getting ready to lock up, the internet connection came back (earlier than predicted by Comcast, who I suspect use a sort of Mister Scot technique when estimating repair times).  It was too late to do anything about it, and I was practically heading out the door already, but it’s both mildly frustrating and rather amusing.

That’s about enough for today.  Tomorrow, I plan to write using my laptop computer, so the flow might be better.  It seems appropriate for what may be one of my final traditional Thursday blog posts.  In the meantime, please have a good day, today.

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Annotations Pending

Well, against my prior intention, I’m writing this on my laptop today—meaning the laptop computer.

God, why can’t I just accept the fact that “laptop” is obviously a word referring to the computer on which I’m writing this, not the top of my personal lap as part of my body when in a particular configuration?  Surely, every person with the savvy to read this online knows what I mean when I say that I’m writing this on my laptop.  At the very least, it is extremely unlikely that they don’t.

And if, by bizarre chance, people are reading this some decades or centuries after it was written, and laptop computers are no longer a common item, or no longer exist at all, there will probably be scholars who will put little annotations in to tell those future readers what we meant back in this era by “laptop” when we’re referring to writing on something.  It’ll be like those side notes when one is reading Shakespeare, notes that let everyone know—who doesn’t already—that “bodkin” for instance, as used in Hamlet’s soliloquy, means dagger, and thus, someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin is killing himself with a dagger.

Somehow, though, I have a terrible time not clarifying that I mean “the computer” when I refer to my laptop.  There’s an actual tension, a feeling of significant stress involved.  I suppose some might call it an anxiety, but that doesn’t feel quite like the correct term.  I don’t really feel worried or in any sense scared or threatened, not even at a social level or whatever it might be.  I feel as though it would be wrong not to clarify when there are multiple meanings of the word “laptop”, in case someone might have the bizarre misunderstanding that I’m writing on the top of my actual lap.

It’s pretty stupid, and it really gets to me sometimes.  It makes me want to peel the skin off my head by grabbing my hair and pulling my scalp apart, it’s so frustrating.

To be clear, I don’t really want to do that.  I don’t know, frankly, that I would even have the strength to do it, since skin is tougher than it seems, and also the skin of the face, at least, is pinned down to the underlying tissue by an intricate and interwoven network of tough fibrous tissue*, causing it to follow the movements of the facial muscles, allowing expression (a resource often wasted on me).

Though, of course, the scalp is much more loosely held to the skull and tissue under it, so that part would be peelable if one were strong enough to make the initial split.

I’m not really that tempted to try, but when I get so tense and stressed out (I almost wrote “sense and tressed out”) I can imagine myself reaching up to grab the sides of my head by the hair and yanking steadily, and it feels as though it would be some form of release.

It’s a bit like slapping oneself in the face when one does something stupid—though in that case, I do actually slap myself in the face.  The trick is to do it hard enough that you actually get a real punishment for your own stupidity and thus might actually learn something.  It’s not quite as intense as banging one’s head against a wall or against one’s desk (which I also do when I’m stressed out enough), but the latter is not really so much a punishment as it is just a way of trying to overwhelm stress with pain.

Or, well, it’s something like that.  Even as I wrote that, I realized it didn’t quite seem like an accurate description, or at least not the full answer.  Sometimes I think it’s just a form of giving in to my desire to lash out when I’m very stressed, but to do so against the only person I have a right to harm.  I’ve at times given myself actual swollen, black and blue (initially subcutaneously red with extravasated blood) marks on my forehead, but usually it’s not that bad.

I don’t want to give myself a concussion or anything, after all.  My brain is dysfunctional enough, and I don’t want to lose the few good things it can do.  There are other ways I can hurt myself when necessary.

Speaking of the good things, I keep trying to get myself back into writing fiction or something, maybe, just to see if it makes me feel any better, which it had a tendency to do in the past.  That’s a minor part of why I decided to bring my laptop today (the other laptop is with me whenever I sit down, so it requires no effort to bring it).  But I don’t know; I can’t feel any excitement or anticipation about HELIOS or Changeling in a Shadow World, or DFandD, or Outlaw’s Mind, or any other stories, and I certainly don’t think anyone else is excited about the prospect of those stories being written, either.

I don’t know what to do**.

As usual, of course, I have written much more quickly on the laptop computer than on the smartphone, which should come as no surprise.  But I don’t know if it has any effect on my style, or on how good a post comes of it.  I would welcome your evaluations, of course, but I know it’s hard to judge from one instance.  It may be a better or worse post than usual for reasons that have nothing to do at all with my choice of tools for writing it.  There are too many variables at play.

A reasonably controlled experiment could be done, with me writing a long series of posts, randomly (perhaps) alternating between smartphone and laptop and asking readers to evaluate each post for quality without knowing which kind the post was.  But that would be far more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t mind subjective and non-rigorous impressions, if anyone wants to give them in the comments below.

I don’t really have much more to say today.  I just feel stressed and tense and frustrated and angry and just…squeezed by reality.  I feel almost as if there’s some metaphorical, inverted mountain suspended above me that I have to hold up or it will crash down and, I don’t know, bury me, crush me, impale me on its peak…something like that.  I don’t think it will harm anyone else; there’s no one else for my collapse to harm, really, certainly not in any deep way.  So far, I’m just holding it up out of habit, and because people will say that “you’ve got to try to hold on” or things along those lines.  But it’s tiring and it’s stressful and it’s wearing me out at the same time that it’s pissing me off.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  Sorry to waste your time.  I hope you haven’t been too disappointed.  And I also hope you have a good day.

*The skin of the palms of the hand and the working surface of the fingers is even more tightly and intricately bound to the underlying tissue; this contributes to the way one’s fingers wrinkle up when your hands soak in water for a while.  The soles of your feet and bottoms of your toes are similarly tacked down, though it serves a slightly different “purpose” there.  Dissection of the palms to look at the underlying muscle and tendons and so on is a laborious process in Gross Anatomy class.  Ditto with the face.

**Am I always in the dark, living in a powder keg and giving off sparks?  Probably not.  That was a pretty good song, though, wasn’t it?

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“…no one here but me, oh.”

Hello, everyone.  In case you were wondering, no, I did not write a blog post yesterday.  I did not go to the office.  I wasn’t sick, exactly, unless you want to count “sick in the head”, which was most certainly the case, in the sense in which it’s usually meant.  I more or less literally did not sleep at all on Wednesday night, and I was exhausted, but still not really sleepy, by the time arrived for me to get up on Thursday.

I almost wish I could say that I’d gone on some indulgent binge‒alcohol, drugs, casual or even not-so-casual sex, whatever‒or, better yet, that I had been feverishly pursuing some new invention or potential scientific discovery.  Even working on a poem or a song or a short story would have been great; I’ve told you all about how I wrote my short story Solitaire over the course of a deliberately sleepless night, and it is probably my darkest story, though I was pretty happy at the time.

No, I simply could not seem to quiet my mind enough to go unconscious.  There may have been snippets of sleep, such as when I would play some compilation comedy video on YouTube that I’ve seen dozens of times before.  That sort of thing often is able to lull me down into at least a temporary bout of slumber and is much more effective than any rain or forest sounds recordings have ever been.  But Wednesday night they didn’t seem to make me sleep even past the end of the video most times.  Anyway, I was usually too restless even to try one of those.

I don’t know for sure why I had so much trouble sleeping.  I can speculate, of course, and I can come up with hypotheses which are unlikely to be the full story‒for instance, Wednesday was my Dad’s birthday, and I miss him and my Mom (and my former Father-in-law) a lot, I think*, and maybe that was hard to process and kept me awake.  That’s unconvincing, though.

I admit that, in some sense, I often “envy” my parents‒sometimes prosaically, as in admiring the fact that they all had lifelong, successful marriages, but often envying the fact that they are dead.  I’ve said sometimes, mainly to myself, that I want to go be with them, but that’s figurative language.  I don’t actually believe in an afterlife.  To visit them would require a time machine, or a memory that is even better and more concrete than mine is.  But I envy them that they no longer need to try.

I don’t consider death to be a state of rest exactly.  Death is simply oblivion, a final cessation, the end of whatever could experience either rest or toil.  A computer isn’t resting when its power is cut, it’s just off.  Actual rest has a rejuvenating quality, and that would be preferable to mere temporary (or permanent) oblivion.  Maybe if I was able to rest in that way, I wouldn’t feel the yearning for a more final solution.  I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep or relax or let go or rest, so at least oblivion seems like an escape.

It’s not an escape, of course, for escape implies a subject that is escaping, and death makes the subject simply cease to be.

It nevertheless often seems preferable to endless exhaustion without anything else in one’s life to provide a counterbalance.  At some point, there’s got to be a surrender to the notion that, while there will always be momentary fluctuations in the state of one’s well-being, the overall trend is showing no signs of upward movement and, if anything, is sloping downward.

What is one to do, then?  Seeking help, of course, is a major (and probably good) option, but the very thing I discuss in the footnote below seems to make seeking help extremely difficult.  It’s evidently impossible for me to convey to others my sense of true and horrifying (and yet horrifyingly bland) desperation.  I can’t even really grasp how to go about asking, or begging, for help, nor indeed to imagine what anyone is going to be able to do to help me.

I have certainly tried therapy and medications of many kinds, and meditation and self-hypnosis.  I’ve used the crisis hotline in its old and new forms‒once, that led to a very brief hospitalization.  I’ve even tried to find some comfort in religious notions, but the ideas one encounters there tend to be so staggeringly incoherent and manipulative that they make me feel even more depressed.

So, here I go again, “sendin’ out an SOS”, but there’s no one on patrol and certainly no search parties.

I think the worst thing would be if my own kids ceased to be “real” for me.  They are among the only people for whom I have a strong sense of existence, even when they aren’t near or around me.  I think about them every day.  But my son is still, in my head, the young boy with whom I last interacted about 10 years ago.  I’ve seen recent pictures of course, but that’s a form of him that I don’t know‒and I fear I never will.

My daughter is more updated, so to speak.  I interact with her somewhat regularly through texts and emails.  But though I dearly wish I could spend time with them again, I don’t have any idea what I would do if they suddenly came back into my life.  I have nothing‒I am nothing‒worth sharing with them.

Anyway, I got something like my usual three to four hours of (frequently interrupted) sleep last night, and I was still wide awake so early that I decided to take the first train of the day to the office.  And here I am, at the office, finishing this post.  I don’t work this weekend, so I guess I’ll bother you all again on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

*Though perhaps not in the way that most people seem to miss people, at least if you believe their words.  I think I’ve said before that, when I’m not with someone, literally, they don’t feel precisely real to me.  It’s not that I think they actually cease to exist‒I’m far from being such a solipsist.  It’s just that I don’t really feel them when they’re not around.  I can’t imagine what they might be doing, and it doesn’t occur to me to try.  The concept of them is out there, implicit, I suppose, but there’s no “theory of mind” simulacrum of the other person running in the background processes of my brain.  I’ve read some hypotheses that the concept of an afterlife may have arisen from people still having a model or sense or image of a person operating in their mind even after the person dies‒that it still feels to them that the person is present somewhere, somehow.  I don’t seem to function that way.  People are certainly very real to me, and when they’re in my presence they can even be overwhelming, with all their emotions and noise and everything battering away at me; they are all but impossible to ignore or not notice.  But then, when they are not present, they pretty much go away, other than intellectually.  I sometimes wish it were otherwise, but I’m not sure.  This may be part of why I have never wished I could somehow trade places with someone else.  Other people really are other to me, and it’s hard to “feel” them with any depth, though I can write people decently enough.  But then, in a sense, I am in their heads.

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Apologies in advance for the subject matter

I’m writing this at the office this morning, because I came in quite early.  I had a bad night, secondary‒apparently‒to having eaten something that didn’t really want to stay in my GI tract any longer than it absolutely had to, so I’m kind of wiped out.  I decided to take the most expeditious, if not most cost-effective, way in and just kind of take it easy here while waiting for the day to start officially.

I don’t expect I’ll make this post very long, and I’m probably not going to write it all in one sitting, because I feel very tired.  Probably I’ll intersperse it with a nap or two.  I seem a bit dehydrated and volume depleted after last night, but at least I have what appears to be an effective dose of Imodium in me, and that’s good.  It’s a very clever product:  an opioid that doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, so one doesn’t get high from it, and it has no real abuse potential*.  It is, however, particularly prone to produce one of the inevitable side-effects of opioids‒shutting down (or at least turning down) the motility of the GI tract.

So, I’m feeling a bit poorly on the physical level, and my mental level is blunted by a combination of worse sleep than usual and the loss of some of my fluids.  The latter are, at least, easily enough replaced.

The schedule for my coworker is more or less set now.  He will work next weekend, then he will take his trip on the following Monday through Wednesday, the ninth through the eleventh.  Unfortunately, I will be working the weekend of Friday the 13th (though, to be fair, I enjoy the day and its subsequent weekend, as I think I’ve mentioned) but the following Friday is a personally significant one‒though one that, in many ways, I had hoped not ever to see again.

Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that I have some more dangerous GI bug than seems to be the case‒I give this very low odds‒and that will take the whole situation out of my hands.  That would be okay, as I think I’ve said before.  In many ways, it would be nice to have something happen for which I could not, in practice, be blamed or held responsible.  It’s at least not too terribly painful.  In fact, it mostly is just slightly unpleasant but very fatiguing, in that I really want to try just to go back to sleep.  I think I will take a brief nap before finishing the first draft of this blog post.

***

Okay, I haven’t taken a nap yet, but I think I’m going to draw this to a close.  I don’t really have much to write about today.  I certainly don’t have much to say that’s new and/or interesting.  I apologize.  I would just add, by way of exculpation, that I really didn’t expect to be writing this now, today, or this last week, and so on.

Tomorrow begins October, which has often been my favorite month for various reasons.  Even in my current mental state, I can’t completely resist the appeal of the Month That Used to be the Eighth and Is Now the Tenth.  I’m hoping that the weather will soon begin to cool down a little, or at least to become a bit windier.  It would be nice to be able to walk without becoming more dehydrated than I am right now.

I guess I can tolerate my delays of time when I think of the fact that, though Frodo left Bag End on his birthday, he arrived at Rivendell on my birthday (which he rudely neglected to celebrate).  So perhaps the latter can make as decent a boundary point as the former.

Anyway, it’s all silly and pointless when you get right down to it.  In reality, every day is like every other, and the differences between them from a human point of view are trivial, arbitrary, and inconsequential.  Any day will do.

I hope you all have a good one.

*Except rarely, very desperate addicts to some forms of opioids‒so I have read‒will sometimes take ridiculous amounts of Imodium, sometimes ground up into a kind of milkshake, when they cannot get their drug of choice.  I can only imagine how constipated they must get.  Well, no, I can more than imagine it, because I’ve treated people with bowel obstruction/shutdown due to opioid abuse.  They’re often very skinny people, but their bellies are bloated and distended by way more digested and partially digested material than they were ever built to handle, but which cannot be expelled correctly because the whole GI nervous system has been stunned into somnolence.

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…or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, against almost everyone’s better judgment, and so it’s time for another Thursday edition of my blog post.

I had a subjectively bizarre day yesterday, or a disquieting day, or a disheartening day…something along those lines.  Outwardly, it wasn’t that strange, I suppose.  Inwardly, I’ve been feeling increasingly weird and disjointed.  I don’t know if that’s showing itself in my writing at all or not; there’s no good way for me to tell.

There have been two closely spaced opportunities to have palindromic number sequences in the 8-digit recording numbers this week.  If it seems strange to you that there should be two that come close together, just think about how, up until a number sequence is centered on “99”, the stepwise increase in those middle two numbers to keep them the same is 11, 22, 33, 44…and so on.  Then, right after 99, it immediately flips over to “00”, and the sequence restarts.

Anyway, we passed the 99 one earlier this week.  I think it was Tuesday.  Then, yesterday morning, it turned over to 00 and then it was just a matter of the last 3 digits being a reverse of the first.

It was getting close, and the numbers were increasing only slowly, because it was early in the day.  Then, there was a long break between deals, and I took a moment to dial the verification line just to see what number we were on.  It was only 12 shy of the palindrome!

Then, I had to use the restroom, and during the half-a-minute while I was in, a new deal closed and my coworker went over to begin verifying it.  Shortly after I came out, he sort of waved me over.  I thought he was going to give me the paperwork so I could begin processing the deal, but he pointed at the recording number:  26500562.

He knows I’m into number patterns, and he figured I’d like that.

Afterwards, I asked him the (probably strange) questions, “That’s really what the number was, right?  You didn’t just write it down that way because you knew I’d like it?”  He chuckled, obviously understanding at least some of my wish to confirm the result.  But no, it was real. It was a palindromic number.  I should have been pleased and even thrilled.

All I really felt afterward was a deep and profound worsening of my feeling of depression.  I didn’t feel like I’d gotten a message from the universe, but even if I did, it was way after the “due date”, which would have been last Friday at the very latest (and that was a date that had been pushed back repeatedly).  I could think of excuses to invalidate it, like saying I had skewed the results by calling the recording line earlier.  But that’s all just a silly way of messing with oneself.  What it really came down to was:  the number wasn’t enough to give me motivation.  It was definitely cool, but it didn’t mean anything deeper to me.

I’ve experienced similar phenomena before.  From time to time, I’ll be slightly torn about a particular course of action‒nothing momentous, just usually choices of a meal, such as whether to eat something healthy or something indulgent‒and I’ll flip a coin about it, usually one of my collection of dollar coins.  Sometimes I’ll flip three or five or even nine of them, as if taking a vote.  Then, when I have the outcome…well, I’ll often realize that, no matter the result of the coin flips, I want to do something other than what the result directs.  And so I ignore that result.

It’s a psychologically interesting phenomenon.  The coins don’t act as a true decision maker, but they do clarify, for me, what my real wish or inclination is.  So it’s useful in some ways.

The palindromic number is similar.  Maybe if I did have some kind of stupid, quasi-mystical idea of what the numbers symbolized, I would find it more compelling.  But, of course, I have no actual belief that the universe is sending me any messages.  In a way, it’s good that one turned up‒way after my original deadline and idea‒because now I know that it doesn’t give me any more reason or drive to live at all.  Rather, it just highlights the fact that I have no such drive or reason, and it was absurd to think an eight-digit number sequence could provide it.

Yesterday it also turned out that my coworker’s wife‒who is also a coworker‒is coming down with a cold, and so it looks like they aren’t going away this weekend but are going to reschedule to go next weekend.  This would have me push any plans or tentative ideas back yet another week.  I almost started to cry in the office, and just had to sit and look at my computer screen or down at the top of my desk for a while.  My coworker asked if I was okay, and I said, honestly, “No.”  He then asked what was wrong and all I could reply was, “Nothing new.”

Anyway, since then I’ve acclimated slightly to the schedule change.  I know that the palindromic numbers don’t actually mean anything to me, and that realization made me feel even more depressed.  And the timing of the date pushback is also more depressing.

But, on the other hand, this coming Sunday is October 1st, and when the first of a month falls on a Sunday, that always means that there will be a Friday the 13th in the month.  And that will begin the weekend after my planned-to-be pushed back work weekend.  So, if I want a good day to take some special action, and I can’t use Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, then after a Friday the 13th, especially in October, is at least mildly ominous.

Well, okay, not really.  Not to me.  I like the number 13, and Fridays the 13th are good days, especially in October.  Also, both my niece and my daughter were born on the 13th of their birth months, albeit different months and widely separate years, so I can’t feel that the 13th, Friday or otherwise, bodes ill, and I never have.

Really, I see this coming Friday the 13th and related events as potentially…well, not good, maybe, but at least as good as things are going to get.

In the meantime, I must say I’ve been having a lot of bizarre sensory impressions recently.  It’s not that anything particularly strange is happening‒I myself am the strangest thing in my own life, to be honest‒but I keep having this odd feeling that things aren’t actually the way they seem to be, though they seem “normal”.

It’s not a feeling of déjà vu, but it’s almost similar in character.  It’s as if the familiar things I’m seeing and doing and feeling are actually simulacra or illusions‒or perhaps that the memories I have of having been in these places before is an illusion, a false memory.

Also, the flow of time feels a little off.  For instance, when I’m waiting for one light to turn green after another turns red, it seems to take several seconds, way longer than usual, to the point where I find myself looking around impatiently while at the crosswalk.  It also seems that drivers are taking longer than usual to start moving after a traffic light changes.  Things all around me seem to be moving more slowly.  This does not, however, really give me any advantage; I am moving slowly too.  I can only observe the phenomenon, not act more quickly than usual, relatively speaking.

I think there has been an increased frequency of me thinking I see movement out of the corner of my eye, or I hear a noise of movement just beyond eye-shot.  When I see such movement or some shape out of the corner of my eye, I first suspect that it’s a bug of some kind, but that’s not new.  This is south Florida in the hot and wet part of the year.  Seven times out of ten, such movement really is a bug.

I’m also feeling the need to check my pockets even more frequently than usual to make sure that I have my wallet and keys and phone and all still with me.  I never feel secure about that.  I’m not sure that I want to feel secure about such things.  I’d rather be anxious than overconfident and wrong about keys and wallet and phone, etc.

The tension does wear me out though.

Anyway, I don’t feel that reality is illusory, though I feel increasingly distanced and separate from it.  It’s more as if, perhaps, I myself am an illusion.  It would be an elaborate illusion, of course, since I would even have illusory thoughts and experiences and dreams and all that, but hey, according to some Hindu beliefs, all of reality is but a dream being dreamed by Brahma.

It’s reminiscent of something Stephen King described in Danse Macabre, and which was quoted in the Vsauce video about “creepiness”:  Imagine coming home and realizing that everything you own has been replaced by an exact duplicate.

It’s not that I actually think that.  I don’t.  But it almost feels vaguely that way, only it’s all of reality that feels like it’s a replica…perhaps including me.

I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway.  Our experience of reality is always a form of constrained dream.  It shouldn’t make a difference if it sometimes feels more like a full-fledged dream even while awake, especially for someone like me, who has such bad and long-standing insomnia.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t really know what, if anything, my point has been‒here in this blog post, or the point of my existence in general.  I hope you all have as good a Thursday as you can.

TTFN

dagger of the mind merged down

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Feel free to imagine your own illustration to accompany this post

As so often seems to happen, I arrived at the station this morning just in time to see the first train of the day arrive and pull out.  That’s fine; I hadn’t been planning to take it, anyway, and there was really no possible way for me to have done so.  If I had gotten up and left five minutes earlier, I very likely would have caught that one, but of course, there’s no true point to getting on that earliest train, since I’ll either be killing time at the office or at the train station or at the house.

I prefer to leave early, since I’m awake anyway, and have been for hours, and traveling early means things are less crowded.  I used to spend time in the morning practicing guitar after writing, but I don’t do that anymore, so there’s no huge benefit to being at the office.

Now, I’m sitting at the station and writing this post on my smartphone.  I’ve been writing all my posts on the phone, lately, since it’s just so convenient.  In fact, I took my little 11-inch laptop back to the house with me last night and I left it there.  I don’t think I’m going to be writing on it again.  I may, possibly, use it for something else, but that’s an iffy possibility.  I guess I’ll have to see.  Anyway, there isn’t much point in keeping it at the office.

I threw out some other things at the office that I don’t need, so it’s getting a little less cluttered.  That’s good, I guess.  It’s probably more pleasant for everyone else.  I still need to clear out some more of the crap there, and even more at the house.  I live in a small room, but there’s still too much useless drek in it, stuff that no one is ever going to want or need.  Better to do my part to contribute to the unsustainability of landfills.

I tried out a corrected-size pair of boots yesterday, since I think part of the issue with the others was that the sizes made by Timberland might be a bit larger than my usual.  Anyway, half a size down seems very good.  I had no adverse effects, and I plan to try a longer walk today, heading back to the house from the train after work.  I wasn’t going to do that yesterday, after a 24 hour food and water fast.  The food wouldn’t be an issue, but I might have become a bit too dehydrated.

The fast yesterday was interesting, as it always is.  I moved rather slowly and was not quite as mentally sharp as I normally am, though that was more due to lower caffeine levels than anything else.  I had one incidence of “head rush” when rising from a seated position, but it was pleasant and a good sign that I’m probably losing weight, which I want to do.

I’ve had head rushes before, and I’ve even had them bad enough to make me lose consciousness completely, including once while in jail.  I didn’t like smacking my head on the concrete (I didn’t feel it at the time; I definitely did afterwards), but passing out suddenly is not a bad feeling.  Indeed, it’s more or less no feeling at all.  That’s what’s great about it.  There’s just that hint of a head-rushy sensation, then everything goes white and then blank.  Even those sensations are probably reconstructed memories after the fact.

I suspect, based on actual expertise, that this is what it “feels” like to die of a sudden ventricular fibrillation arrest.  I don’t mean a heart attack; heart attacks are almost always quite painful and unpleasant, and in and of themselves, they don’t usually cause one to lose consciousness.  Though they can induce dangerous arrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation, the process leading up to it is decidedly uncomfortable and generally terrifying for the person involved. Trust me; I’ve seen it many times, and I have a very good memory.

But in a V-fib arrest or similar process, the heart basically stops pumping blood all of a sudden, and the brain stops getting perfused‒it’s much like what happens in a sudden fainting spell, but more persistent‒and when the brain suddenly loses all blood flow, it pretty much suddenly blanks out, or at least consciousness does.

There’s no fear, there’s no pain, there’s not any experience of what’s happening.  One isn’t confronted by the threat of permanent cessation*, and there is no potential to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light”, anymore than a computer that is abruptly deprived of all power can struggle to stay “on”.  It simply doesn’t work that way.  The thing that does the raging is what is shut down, and quite abruptly.

Your brain (i.e., you) can no more fight to stay conscious or alive when suddenly deprived of blood flow than your lungs can successfully draw in oxygen if you suddenly find yourself in outer space without a space suit.  Though, even that seems likely to be less unpleasant than movies make it seem, because while you can’t get oxygen, you will still be able to expel carbon dioxide, and it’s the CO2 in your blood that drives your sense of needing to breathe.

So, you won’t feel like you’re suffocating; you’ll just get rapidly light-headed from the lack of oxygen.  Some of the other effects of vacuum might be unpleasant‒your saliva and mucus bubbling into gas phase, perhaps some bubbles forming within your eyes, some other outgassing here and there, but you won’t experience them for long, if at all, because the lack of oxygen will deliver a slightly slower version of the effect of the V-fib arrest.

Oh, by the way, you will not suddenly freeze or even accumulate frost in seconds, like in some movies.  Space is very cold, yes‒the overall temperature of the vacuum is about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero‒but there’s nothing there to conduct your heat away from you, so you only lose it through radiation (mostly infrared and such, but humans do give off a tiny amount of “visible” light), and that is a very slow process.

Think about it.  You can survive indefinitely and even feel pretty comfortable in 70 degree (Fahrenheit)** air, even without much clothing, and that is far from vacuum.  But if you are dropped in water at the same temperature without a wetsuit or similar, you will probably die from hypothermia before long.  And that probably would be quite unpleasant.

Anyway, that’s all quite a digression, but it does reinforce a point I sometimes make:  if you have a choice of how to die, do it by some means that suddenly and completely cuts the blood flow to your brain.

As for other fasting-related matters, well, there was, as always, a slight feeling of detachment from my body by the and of the day, not quite like my numerous experiences of depersonalization***.  It’s a good sort of feeling, a sense of being slightly out of sync with the physical world, but not in a confusing or disturbing way.  Maybe it’s akin to a much slower version of the fainting/V-fib experience.  Anyway, the less I experience being me, usually the better, from my point of view.  Not that I want to be someone else!  That would be even worse.

So, I’ve learned nothing new from fasting, really‒certainly there were no epiphanies‒but I have re-experienced things I’ve experienced before that I found worth repeating.

And now, we’re nearing my train destination, so I’ll let you all go, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

*Or “death” as it is sometimes referred to in the medical literature…but I wanted to avoid too much jargon.

**70 degrees Centigrade/Celsius would be another matter entirely.

**I think that’s the term.

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Please imagine a clever title here

Well, after once again awakening hours before I could even have caught any trains, today I arrived at the station just as the first northbound one of the morning was arriving.  This time, to avoid temptation, I didn’t cross over, but stayed on the near side and took the elevator to the bridge.  I also hoped that I would sweat less by walking a slightly shorter distance (with a stop in the middle).  I think I am sweating a bit less, but it’s still annoying and relatively ridiculous.  I mean, it’s not even five in the morning now, and the weather app claims that it’s only about 75 degrees out!  Why am I sweating so much?

It would be nice if this were a sign of some underlying terminal disease*, but I don’t really have that kind of luck‒whether you want to consider it good or bad or whatever.

I did some pretty good walking yesterday evening, while talking to my sister on the phone.  I can tell it’s been several days at least since I’ve done long walking, because I developed a slight broken blister overlying my right Achilles tendon, where the rear of the shoe rubs it.  They aren’t brand new shoes‒I’ve walked good distances in them before‒so I know it’s just that my skin has gotten more sensitive, and probably, my walking posture has gotten a bit more slack.  Anyway, the blister is disinfected and taped up now.

You may ask:  if I claim to consider the possibility of a terminal illness a good thing, why would I bother to treat a blister on my “heel” and protect against infection?  It’s a good question; I wish I had thought of it, myself.  Well, the answer is, I want to be able to walk potentially quite long distances, without blisters and the like stopping me.  I wouldn’t greatly mind collapsing due to heat exhaustion and dehydration/volume depletion and electrolyte imbalances and kidney failure, but simply being unable to walk because of blisters and similar injuries‒that would be galling.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  I already mentioned yesterday that I have to push my potential plans back about two weeks, anyway, out of deference to my coworker’s family vacation.  I don’t know why I trouble myself, really.  I guess I just really dislike causing more inconvenience to other people‒ones I know, at least‒than I must.

Still, eventually, one must reach a breaking point.  I think that, mentally, I’ve already reached that point, to be honest.  I no longer truly hope for, let alone expect, anything or anyone to “save” me, if you will.  I don’t expect to “recover”, or to rebuild any semblance of a life or career.

I don’t really do anything for enjoyment or fulfillment.  Even this blog is mainly just a habit.  I suppose there is some trace or modicum of the notion that it might end up being useful to me in some way, or might even garner help from some unexpected quarter, but that’s sort of akin to imagining one might win a big Powerball jackpot.  It’s possible, but one shouldn’t make any serious plans about it actually happening.

It is rather nice to be throwing away some things that I have kept for a while just out of inertia or habit or a tendency to be a packrat.  Not that I have a great many possessions; I certainly don’t.  Everything I own fits in a single bedroom with attached shower and “walk-in” closet, plus a few things at the office.  I’ve thrown out or given away some of those latter things already, and packed others away.  I hope to pare it all down further still.

I started listening to an Audible version of The War of the Worlds yesterday.  Of course, it’s a heck of a story, the first ever alien invasion story, and still one of the best.  I must say, though‒and I feel slightly bad about having to say it‒that the narrator is a bit disappointing.  I don’t mean the character who tells the story, I mean the guy who read the book for the recording.  This is a dramatic and scary tale, but he’s done only a bit more than reading it straight.  Even the iconic opening paragraphs came out rather lackluster.

I wonder how people find my reading of my stories, like The Chasm and the Collision and my short stories.  They’re up on YouTube, and they’ve been uploaded here as well.  Maybe I’ll embed one or two below, in this post, and anyone who wishes can listen.  I would very much welcome feedback on both the stories and my reading of them.  I tried to do the reading well, but I don’t know whether the effort produced the desired results or not.

I guess it doesn’t really matter much.  “The world will little** note, nor long remember…” yadda yadda yadda.

I’ve always thought those were truly ironic words that Lincoln wrote/said there:  that the world would not long remember what he was saying at the time, but that they cannot forget what the soldiers had done there at Gettysburg.  Meanwhile, there are many of us who can recite part or all of the Gettysburg Address***, but I don’t know how much high school history classes even teach the American Civil War nowadays, let alone any of the specifics of that battle.

Of course, if you believe some YouTube videos, many young Americans don’t even know what continent the US is on, or how many states there are, or from which nation the US declared its independence and when.  Goodness knows most Americans can’t even recognize the opening of the Declaration of Independence, and despite so many claiming to revere the US Constitution, I doubt many of them have read through the whole thing, even once.

It’s really not very long.

I doubt that many of them have even read the Bill of Rights, or would even have a rough idea of what they are (with the possible exception of the 2nd Amendment, which is concise at least, although it’s apparently difficult to interpret unambiguously).

Oh, well.  Individual, actual knowledge of any particular subject is often inversely proportional to the strength of one’s opinions/convictions on the matter.  I guess that’s nothing new, but it continues to sting nevertheless‒rather like a new, recurrent blister in a bodily location one thought had become inured to abrasive forces.

With that, here are some audio recordings of me reading some parts of some of my stories.  The first is my story Hole for a Heart, and the second is Chapter 1 of CatC  If you listen, I hope you enjoy them.

standing on ledge

*Apart from being alive in and of itself, which appears to be uniformly fatal as far as we can tell.

**Rather ironically, Google is suggesting I change “will little note” to “will have little note”, offering a (flawed) correction to what is widely considered one of the most grammatically perfect speeches in American history.  Heavy sigh.

***1863 Lincoln Park Lane, Gettysburg, PA  24601.

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When the train comes, should I run or hide my head?

Here I go again, wasting your time and mine with another daily blog post that accomplishes nothing for anyone.  I hope you enjoy it.

I arrived at the train station just now, literally seconds before the train prior to the one I planned to take arrived.  This is because I got up even earlier than I usually do, so I figured, “What the heck”, and decided just to get going.  I had some old trash and knickknacks I wanted to make sure to get out in today’s garbage pickup, anyway, and since I was awake anyway, I got up very early to take care of some of it.  I’m clearing out as much clutter as I can, throwing out unnecessary clothes, old Halloween costume stuff, beat up old books I’ll never read, magazines, tools…all sorts of stuff, things that just take up space and make a mess.  I gave my folding massage chair at work to my coworker who has a bad back‒it doesn’t really do very much for me, anyway.  And I’m going to give my colored pencils and such to one of my coworkers who has a young son who has used them when he was here with his father.

Oh, right, I was talking about the train.  Sorry.  As I was saying, I arrived at the station just in time to see the first northbound train pulling in, and my strong impulse was to rush to try to catch it.  I probably could have done so.  It would have required just breaking into a jog for a bit, and hoping the conductor saw me and wasn’t in too much of a hurry‒the train was, technically, slightly early.

However, I decided to fight that impulse, partly because I already get so sweaty, and partly because I didn’t want to have to stress myself out with that somewhat irrational impulse to catch the earliest train.  So, I strolled up along the northbound side of the station, figuratively gritting my teeth, watching the train come to a halt and then depart.

That turned out to be very stressful in and of itself, and I’m still stressed out about it now, especially as more people arrive at the track to wait for the next train, which is sure to be more crowded than the first.  I also can’t seem to help thinking about the possibility that this next train might run late, and that would mean it would probably be more crowded still, and also, just, well…that it would be more of a loss of time than I will already experience from not getting on the initial train.  Not that I have any urgent need to get anywhere very soon.  Work doesn’t actually start for five more hours.  But once I’ve decided to get up and get there, being delayed is just extremely stressful.

I get the impression that my stress doesn’t really show on my face or in my demeanor, any more than my depression does, because nobody seems to notice either thing, though I feel as if they must be glaring and blaring like a fire truck with lights and sirens going at maximum level.  Evidently this is not so.  I think I could probably douse myself in lighter fluid and rubbing alcohol and set myself on fire in the middle of the office, and people would just say, “Hey, Doc, how’s it goin’?”*  Or I could go to the roof of the highest nearby building or parking structure and step out onto the ledge, and anyone passing would just say to me something like, “Isn’t that a great view?”

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter, really.

I am possibly going to push some of my “plans” back by about two weeks, unfortunately.  I have this weekend off, but the following weekend, when I am scheduled to work, my coworker and his wife are taking their daughter to Orlando, and if I weren’t available, he might feel that he ought to cancel that vacation to cover for me.  I don’t want that.

There’s always something, isn’t there?

[Okay, my train arrived almost on time just now.  I’m still torn about having skipped the earlier one, but I can’t change that now.]

Anyway, the weekend after that is, more or less, on or around my Dad’s birthday.  I guess that’s both more and less momentous than Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, and certainly it is more directly personal to me.

I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, sorry.  I’m kind of all over the place.  And yet, I’m still going nowhere‒figuratively speaking, anyway.  I mean, okay, literally, I’m on a commuter train heading north at quite a decent speed.

Of course it could be that this is also, as Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler, a train bound for nowhere.  I’ve always thought there was some pretty good poetry in that song:  “We were both too tired to sleep”, “We took turns a-starin’ out the window at the darkness, but boredom overtook us”, “If you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re out of aces”, “Because every hand’s a winner, and every hand’s a loser, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep”, “And somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even”.

Not Shakespeare level stuff, maybe, but still, there were some nice turns of phrase in it.  The chorus, ironically, has some of the weakest lyrics in the song, in my opinion.  They aren’t bad, but the verses are better.

Jeez, Louise, why am I writing about the lyrics of an old Kenny Rogers song?  It’s not a bad song, of course, but how have I come to be writing about it in a blog I originally started as a promotional venue for my fiction?  It’s bizarre.  I don’t quite understand it.

Of course, there’s nothing truly mysterious about the whole thing; it’s just the product of stochastic, drunkard’s walk events.  It has no directionality, no purpose, no meaning.  But it’s still just quietly mind-boggling.  What a catastrophically banal, monumentally tiny, outrageously boring shit-show my life has become.  It’s enough to make you laugh until you choke…or maybe to yawn until you choke.

Anyway, that’ll do for today, I think.  I hope you have a nice day.  Try not to let my words and thoughts infect you with my way of looking at things.  It’s not anything I recommend, and I certainly don’t think I have any particularly wise insights; I can’t even manage my own mind.

tri rail train dramatic

*”Doc” is what people at the office call me.

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Remember what the dormouse said: Decongest your head

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m waiting at the train station for the first train of the day on this first day of the Jewish year.

I took a long-acting decongestant last night, and though it did make me notice more alertness when I had my frequent nocturnal awakening, I don’t think I actually woke up more often than usual.  If anything, as I’ve long suspected, nighttime decongestants improve my breathing (duh), and thus the quality of such sleep as I get.

I have a family history of some degree of sleep apnea, and I suspect that using decongestants‒as long as the side-effects aren’t prohibitive‒provide protection from, and possibly prevention of, that process (This, I suspect, is especially true if, as needed, inhaled corticosteroids are also part of the treatment).

I’ve long suspected that sleep apnea can be a long-term secondary consequence of chronic allergic (and/or vasomotor) rhinitis, with narrowing of the nasopharynx due to inflammation/swelling of the mucosa leading to snoring and worsening sleep, then the weight gain often associated with certain kinds of inefficient sleep and high carb intake secondary to the nocturnal relative hypercapnia (high CO2) and the elevated cortisol that often accompanies chronic insomnia.  That high carb intake, with consequent elevated insulin, may lead to worsening of the inflammation and further narrowing of the airways and the gradual reduction in the quality of sleep, leading to a vicious cycle.

This is hypothetical, of course, and there are many variables that would need to be controlled to test it; I’ve only ever “experimented” on myself, starting when I first had a cat and realized that I was allergic, and that I was sleeping horribly and developing many signs and symptoms consistent with early sleep apnea.  It worked.

I’ve tried (with incomplete success) to avoid having cats since my first one was no longer in the picture.  That helped some and I have intermittently cut back on decongestants, but in south Florida‒and when living indoors in general, I suspect‒it’s hard to avoid all potential airway allergens and irritants.  Over time, the decreased quality of sleep (especially in someone like me who has a deceased tendency to sleep at all) has its effect on my cognitive function, and on my general energy level and appetite.

I have noticed that, when I am treating myself assertively for congestion, I tend overall to be cognitively sharper than when I am not, and I do not think this is simply due to the stimulating side-effects of the decongestants.  Studies have demonstrated that even true stimulants such as amphetamines do not actually bolster measures of intellectual function, though in the short term, they can improve alertness.

The biggest problem with my use of such things is that they tend to increase my level of internal stress and anxiety, particularly social anxiety.  All chains break at their weakest link (at least when under uniform tension), and social interaction is evidently my weakest link.

I’m not terribly afraid of physical danger, though it could never be said that I am fearless nor even particularly courageous, and I’m relatively used to physical pain.  I also don’t worry much about people being “mean” to me or not particularly liking me, or whatever‒for the most part, I don’t really have a clear notion of what other people are thinking of me at any given time, or indeed, what they’re thinking of anything.  When I’m not in someone’s presence, their presence in my brain seems abstract and ephemeral at best.  There are rare exceptions to this rule, but they are countable on the fingers of one hand.

But I do get stressed out about knowing what to say or how to interact, especially with new people, and I worry very much about being a bother or an annoyance to others.  Phone conversations are particularly stressful, except with people I know very well.

So this is definitely a trade-off situation, as are almost all things in life.  The body is an extraordinarily complex Rube Goldberg machine, and to push down on the system in one place almost always causes something to pop upward somewhere else.  I know, that’s not quite a consistent metaphor, but I think it works to convey my point.

Right now, at least, I want to try to improve my sleep quality‒increasing its quantity seems an unachievable goal without using things that make me feel worse overall‒so I can have the energy to do more walking and the like, including quite long-distance walking.  And I want to try to optimize my thinking as best I can, to decrease the risk that major decisions and changes I hope to make are based on poor thinking.

As for social anxiety, well, my social life is nonexistent anyway, apart from work.  I don’t expect ever to make* any new friends or have any new relationships, romantic or otherwise.  That aspect of life just doesn’t seem to be in the cards for me‒certainly nearly all such things have been disastrous hitherto for me.  Maybe if I could find some other member of whatever species I am, it might be different, but I don’t consider the odds of success, or the probable payoff, to be worth the likely cost and the probable rate of failure.

Plus, let’s face it:  I’m no one’s idea of a good prospect for a long term friend or partner of any kind.  I can be quite useful; I tend to be hard working and disciplined, and I’m reasonably bright, but my skills in romantic interactions, for instance, have always been horrible, and if anything they have atrophied over time.

I used to be tolerably good at friendship, but I seem to have no skill at keeping friendships going from a distance.  I don’t naturally think to try to reach out to people‒those times when I do think of it, I always feel awkward and anxious and am sure I’m just going to be an annoyance to anyone with whom I interact and to find the interaction stressful and even heart-breaking.  I’ve said before, even leaving comments on blogs or videos or what have you often leads me to feel real stress afterwards, and to regret doing it.

I just don’t think I’m well designed for this world, though there are attributes I possess that are useful and effective.  Overall, I’m just not a good fit, and the places where that fit is bad chafe and grate and grind away quite painfully at me.  Every day is painful, and not just physically.

If I could find some other world to try, I might do that, depending on what I judged my chances to be.  But I don’t think that’s going to be an option, probably not ever in my potential lifetime.  So, it seems better to consider and prepare for a relatively straightforward exit from this world.

I could say, “Prove me wrong”, like those stupid Internet memes, and I guess if anyone thinks they can do it, they’re welcome to try.  But I don’t expect any fresh arguments or evidence that I haven’t already seen or considered.  I’ve been dealing with this question since I was a teenager.

Anyway, have a good day and a good weekend.  Thanks for reading.

the doctor in the desert

*Google’s auto-correct tried to make me change this phrase, making it “to ever make”.  Yes, it actually recommended that I split an infinitive where I had not done so, though there would be no improvement in the clarity of my expression thereby.  It’s exasperating.  To quote a very sarcastic young Scrooge, “This is the evenhanded dealing of the world!”