insomnia

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[Put some quote from a Pink Floyd song here]

I’m writing this on my smartphone after having walked to the train station this morning.  It’s cool enough weather that I even wore a hoodie for the walk (though if the sun had been up but the temperature the same I probably would not have done so), and I certainly don’t feel dehydrated.  I didn’t walk back from the train last night, but that was only because we got out of the office late, and then the later train I caught was a further 20 minutes behind schedule.  That was really irritating.

The 610 train is just arriving now, but I will catch the next one (and I only feel a little bit of anxiety over that decision).  I made good time, and I also got up a bit earlier than scheduled, because that seems to be the general trend of my life.  If this continues long enough, I might end up getting up in the morning before I go to bed.  I need to do something about this before I arrive at a contradiction and make the World Program™ crash and shut down.

I wore my boots this morning, and as I had intended yesterday, I did not overtighten the laces.  This has helped a little, at least, but I fear it’s not enough.  My right Achilles tendon is burning, and the arch of my left foot, just a bit behind the 1st metatarsophalangeal joint, is already feeling tight and achy.  That’s not too terrible after five miles of walking at a pretty brisk pace, but it didn’t seem to happen with the New Balance walking shoes at all.

I’m very disappointed, but I may need just to nix the boots.  It’s very sad to me, though I know it’s not truly a big deal.  I think I’ve just gotten to the point of having so little of value or meaning in my life that the loss of even the option to use the shoes that most aesthetically appeal to me feels like the death of an old friend.

It’s all rather pathetic, and not in a good way.  Still, I must do what I must, tautologically speaking.  So, I’ll try to do the walk again tomorrow morning, wearing the walking shoes, and see if it really is easier on the joints of my feet.

By the way:  of course, I have not started writing any kind of short story, or any other story.  What’s more, I haven’t practiced my guitar at all, nor have I listened to any more of the Spanish version of Harry Potter.  I also didn’t translate beyond the first sentence of the Japanese version of Harry Potter.  Nor did I read more than a few paragraphs past the preface or opening note or whatever he called it of Robert Sapolsky’s new book.

I didn’t even finish listening to the podcast with Sean Carroll and David Deutsch.  I tried to listen to a playlist of my favorite songs yesterday while waiting for the train in the evening, but after skipping about a dozen or so of my favorite songs because I just wasn’t interested in listening to them, I concluded (correctly) that I just didn’t want to listen to anything.  Nothing is interesting.

Of course, a famous (and fatuous) saying is that only boring people are bored, but in my case it’s not completely inaccurate.  I am dreadfully boring, even to myself.  Having to listen to me talk, or even just to be around me, for any length of time would probably count as cruel and unusual punishment.  I know it’s punishment to me.

I just got on the train.  It’s mildly interesting to note that there was enough breeze blowing up the tracks as I waited that, given my underlying sweatiness, I actually felt a bit chilly, and had to put my hood up.  That worked well, though.  And once I get to the office, I have other clothes into which to change.

This week has already seemed very long, and it’s just now Wednesday.  It’s kind of a weird inversion or subjective tension when one compares this to the lyrics of the song Time.  Whereas those lyrics note that “every year is getting shorter”, to me it feels‒though the year thing still seems true‒that every day is getting longer.  If the two tendencies continue, I could run into another paradox, in which a day eventually feels longer than a year, and then, again, the world might come to an end because of a logic error.

Actually, I guess it’s not always a contradiction for a day to be longer than a year.  If memory serves, for instance, Mercury is almost tidally locked with the sun, so its days and years are nearly the same length.  And if I recall correctly, I think that a day on Venus‒meaning a complete planetary revolution‒is longer than a year*.

On Earth, though, days are much, much shorter than years.  That’s even truer on Jupiter, where the days are about ten hours long, but the years are nearly a dozen times as long as Earth’s, because of its greater distance from the sun**.

Anyway, all this trivia is beside the point.  I am almost entirely without any sustained joy or happiness, nor do I see any reasonable prospect of that changing.  What would change about it?  I don’t really even care about the upcoming 60th anniversary Doctor Who special!  There are no books or movies or shows or whatever that seem interesting.

And I’m very tired.

*I did recall correctly; that is in fact true.

**This follows from Kepler’s 3rd law of planetary motion, which states, if memory serves, that the period of a planet’s orbit is proportional to the 3/2 power of the length of its orbit’s semimajor axis.  This would mean Jupiter orbits at just under 12^(2/3), or 5.24, times the distance of Earth…and indeed, according to Wikipedia, Jupiter’s semimajor axis is indeed 5.2038 astronomical units.  See, all that math we learned in school is useful for something.

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Sprechen sie David Deutsch? How about Japanese?

I’m writing this blog post on the laptop computer, which I brought back to the house yesterday with just that intent.  I did not walk to the train this morning, though I feel that I could have done so, had I chosen.  The weather is even more pleasant and cool than it was yesterday—62 degrees (F) out, which is even better for walking than 69 degrees.  I’m even wearing my hoodie to sit at the train station!

I’m also wearing my boots.  I thought that I might be lacing them too tightly—I might have mentioned that yesterday—particularly on the left foot, but also potentially on the right, which might explain the increased torque that’s caused strain on my right Achilles tendon.  If everything is reasonably well during the day today, and I’m able to resist the temptation to tighten the boots up too much, I mean to try to walk back from the train station to the house this evening.

I’m at the station very early, right now.  I woke up early, of course, and I had too much nervous energy even just to loll around, so I got up, did my things, took out some garbage, put out food for the stray cats, and then got to the train station well in time for the first train of the day, which should arrive in 3 minutes.  It’s all very exciting.

I’ve been packing some coats and a raincoat that I have in bottom of a large, hiking-style backpack, with a somewhat crazy idea in mind.  It’s relatively heavy, so far, but certainly not too heavy.  I’m going to need to get myself a new belt, though.  I had to punch a new hole in the one I’m wearing, since it’s tightened up a bit, but the next size (supposedly) of the same make and model belt—the one that I like—doesn’t quite reach to the first hole.

This doesn’t quite make sense to me, since there’s not supposed to be that much difference in their maximum length.  Something’s gone awry.  When I ordered that belt, maybe they sent me one that had been mislabeled.  But I don’t want to order another one of that kind to find out, because if it’s not an error, then I’ll have two belts that both don’t quite work yet.

So, I mean to get a fully adjustable belt, like the ones I wore in the Boy Scouts and then in the Navy.  To be honest, they were always a good style of belt, and if I make sure to pick one with good Amazon ratings (or similar) it should work well.

It looks like the first train is running approximately six minutes behind schedule.  I’m not sure quite how that happens as often as it does; the schedule is the same every day except Sundays and holidays.

I thought of an idea for a very short, rather gruesome story yesterday, when I was approaching the last bus stop (on foot) right before the train station.  Someone was sitting at the stop, wearing bright sneakers but otherwise dark clothes.  There are a fair few trees shading that bus stop, and it looked almost as though there was only the lower half of a person sitting there, until I got quite close.  That triggered an idea for what would be a very short story—especially for me—but might be fun.

We’ll see whether I write it or not, I guess*.  Well, you guys all might not see, even if I do write it, but I guess if I do, and if I find the time and the inclination to edit it, I may post it here, or I may just publish it direct to Kindle.

When I was first working on Mark Red and even The Chasm and the Collision, I intended just to publish them as serials via Kindle.  I think that’s not entirely unheard-of, and it’s almost the way Japanese “light novels” get published.  Each volume of such things—the truly “light” ones, anyway—are too brief to be full novels, and the story, like that of a manga, is expected to continue through a number of volumes.  Sometimes each novel is really a separate “adventure”, as in the Haruhi Suzumiya series, and sometimes they are truly ongoing, single overall stories chopped into sub-events, like Toradora.

I wish I could find the full, English translation of the Shakugan no Shana series.  I loved that anime, and have read what there is of the manga; it’s one of the most original fantasy stories (set in the modern world) that I have encountered.  But they only ever seemed to have released the first two volumes in English.  If it had come out after the advent of the light novel availability on Amazon (Kindle and otherwise) and the readily available purchase form thereof, I think it would have done well.  But I got mine at good ol’ Borders, back in the day, and of course, my copies are long gone.  I can reorder them from used book sellers via Amazon, but it won’t get me the later volumes.

Had I but world enough and time, I would seriously consider just getting the whole series in Japanese and honing my skills with the language by slogging through them, “translating” as I go, and trying to get the most out of them.  It wouldn’t make as much sense as, for instance, getting the Harry Potter books in Japanese, since I know those practically by heart, but it might still be useful.  Maybe I could get the English translations of the first two novels, just so I could get going.

I think I threw away my Kodansha Kanji Leaner’s Dictionary in a fit of pique a while back, but with the advances in Google Translate, one can draw (sort of) the Kanji one is trying to translate.  Also, Japanese books geared toward younger readers tend to have hiragana characters next to the kanji, so that readers can pronounce the words and recognize the meaning (since they probably know the words by sound), and can learn their Kanji in the meantime.

This is all pipe dream stuff, anyway.  I mean, I could do it, and I’m sure it would be interesting, but I don’t know that I could sustain my interest.  I can barely sustain interest in anything.  Robert Sapolsky’s new book, Determined, should have come out overnight**—I preordered it months ago—and I don’t have much desire to read it yet, though he’s a very interesting and wonderful writer and scientist (a behavioral biologist and neuroendocrinology professor, who himself has struggled with depression, apparently, and for which reason he too has been leery of things like psychedelics and so on).

Maybe he’ll be on Sam Harris’s podcast again now that he’s coming out with the new book, though with recent horrible “political” events, Sam may be distracted a lot in coming weeks.  Well, “distracted” is probably not the right word; but his attention will likely be elsewhere.

I have been listening to Sean Carroll talking to David Deutsch on the former’s podcast, and that’s good, though it’s lamentably under two hours long.  Still, one of my favorite physicist/writers is talking with another that I like even more in some ways—what’s not to like?

I wish Deutsch would write another “popular” science book, but he doesn’t crank them out quite like Carroll does (the latter’s books do not disappoint, at least).

Maybe I should start looking for some of Deutsch’s academic stuff.  Some of it may still be on arXiv or similar, and there may be public domain editions of the non-preprint material.  He is a terrifically original and deep and quick thinker, one of the first pioneers of quantum computing, an advocate of Everettian quantum mechanics, founder of what he calls Constructor theory (an approach to how knowledge and explanation work in intelligent life forms), and a guarded optimist.

He thinks, following Turing’s mathematical demonstrations about the universality of computation (which he fleshed out himself regarding quantum computation) that there is, ultimately, only one “form” of intelligent computation.  He sees, therefore, intelligent extraterrestrials, human beings, and potential AGIs all as “people” or “persons” in the same right.  The only real differences would be due to specific “software” and memory and processing speed.

Trust me, he makes very convincing cases for these things.  He is a rigorous thinker.

Again, though, I don’t expect really to make any progress in exploring more of any of this.  But it’s interesting to think about for them moment.

And now, my stop is coming up, so I’ll draw this post to a close.  Please have a good day.

deutsch Deutsch

nihon deutsch

*I doubt it.

**It did.

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Trivial nonsense on a pseudo-ominous day

I’d intended to walk to the train this morning, so of course I didn’t bring my portable, foldable computer designed to be suitable for use resting upon one’s lap with me yesterday.  Therefore, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone*.  However, I did not walk to the train.

I just felt really wiped out still this morning; my sleep wasn’t quite as bad as it had been the night before, but it still was rotten, and I feel rotten.  Also, this morning it’s three degrees (Fahrenheit…so one and two thirds degrees Celsius) hotter than it was two days ago.  I’m sweating even more than usual even though I’m just sitting at the train station right now.  There’s also, again, no breeze of which to speak, so everything is stagnant, and sweat doesn’t really do any work toward cooling one down.

I hope that, by this evening, it’s either cooler or at least breezier, and that I’ll have a bit more energy, so I might feel up to walking back from the train.  At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about sweating on train seats.

My coworker did come to the office yesterday, bearing pictures and stories of his brief family trip, mainly focused on his very young daughter.  It was quite charming.  Another person I know is currently on a trip as well‒two of them together, really‒and all these reports got me nostalgic about trips I had taken to (or times I had lived in) their various destinations.  I fear to talk too much about my own experiences in such circumstances, though I feel the urge‒I suspect that I’m just being horribly obnoxious when I catch myself doing it, and internally rebuke myself with things like, “No one gives a shit about all your stupid stories” and so on.

To be fair, no one has complained to me about it, so I evidently haven’t overstepped the bounds of good taste too much.  I probably do so overstep here, on my blog, but if anyone here doesn’t want to “hear” my stupid stories, they have only themselves to blame for reading them.

Today is Friday the 13th, isn’t it?  Back in the old days, some local network station would probably have used today‒and the fact that we are in the month of October, to boot‒as an excuse to show some highly edited versions of the slasher films named after the day.  For all I know, some of them still do.  Anyway, I tend to like Friday the 13th, largely because 13 is a prime number, and it’s one for which I feel a special affection precisely because it is so reviled by so many other people, for silly, superstitious reasons.  I myself am not superstitious.  I’m just a little bit stitious.  Ba-dump-bump.

I will be working tomorrow, so maybe I’ll walk to the train in the morning.  Timing things like that can be a bit awkward on the weekend, because the trains only run every hour, and none of the departure times is roughly comparable to the place in the hour that I usually catch them.  So if I get up at the same time as usual, whether walking or otherwise, I’m either “too early” or “too late” compared to my preference.  Of course “too early” is VASTLY preferable to the alternative, so I will err in that direction.  It’s not as though I can choose just to sleep in‒not without the use of pharmaceuticals‒so I might as well just get going.

I had a rather abrupt surge in my lower back pain this morning, above the usual baseline (to which I’ve almost become accustomed).  It may be because I didn’t put on my spandex knee and ankle support thingies**, since I had chosen not to walk.  It seems a bit much to think, though, that just the very small amount of walking I’ve done without them, wearing boots that give decent ankle support, would trigger an exacerbation.  It’s possible, I guess, but it seems unlikely.  It’s also possible that I slept in an unusual position, or just that fatigue and relative dehydration and whatnot are taking a bit of a toll.

Ah, well.  I brought my knee and ankle specialty spandex bits of supplemental clothing with me, in case I walk this evening, so I can always slip them on during the day.

I already gave away my folding massage chair.  It wasn’t doing me any good anymore, and it’s one less thing to have around or to leave behind.  I’m trying to farm off or just eliminate as much useless junk as I can.  The less clutter, the better.

That last sentence makes me wish I could legitimately say “and the less butter, the cletter”, but that last word, alas, has no meaning of which I am aware.  I suppose I could make up a meaning for it, but if you have to invent a word to make a pseudo-spoonerism work, then you’re really reaching.

One of the security guys on the train just walked by, and as he did, he muttered, “Damn, it’s hot.”  He’s far from overstating the situation.  The A/C on the train appears to be running***, based on the noise, but it doesn’t seem to be cooling the car much if at all.  I guess that at least means that my glasses (and my phone) won’t fog up when I exit the train, and that’s worth avoiding, so it’s a good thing.  See?  Who says I can’t find the positive in seemingly negative situations?

Some do say that cynics are really just frustrated idealists.  I don’t know that I am or ever have been an idealist, but I certainly am frustrated.

With that, I’ll draw (or write) this post to a close.  I hope you all have a good and lucky Friday the 13th, and that you have a good weekend to follow.  I expect to be writing a post for tomorrow morning, so if you like that sort of thing, come to this space then‒figuratively speaking‒at about the usual time.

*I don’t have any urge to clarify the word “smartphone” because it really doesn’t refer to any other entity in the universe of which I know, and‒certainly compared to any phones I used prior to the last ten years‒it is a very smart phone indeed.

**I’m not sure what the best term for these is.  “Brace” feels most typical, but that, to me, somehow implies hard, hinged, moving parts, which are lacking in the products I use.  “Support” seems reasonable, but it feels a bit vague.  Perhaps “compression sleeve” would work, but that feels a bit confusing.

***I would guess that it’s probably powered by alternating current created by an alternator (duh!) attached to the engine, but it could be run from batteries that receive their charge via rectified current initially generated in the engine.  If that is the case, then we have the rather pleasing situation of an A/C running on DC.  That’s better than butter and cletter than clutter.

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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.