insomnia

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A mad moon and a mopey Monday morning

Well, here I am at the train station, waiting to get on the train to go to the office to start another week of work.  Yippee.  Yippee, I say.

I’m writing this on my phone, but the base of my thumbs are feeling sore, so I’m going to try to keep it brief*.

There appears to be some issue with the Tri-Rail this morning; the first train of the day is apparently delayed, which is going to mean that the second one is as well.  I may just Uber to the office and blow yet more money.  At least part of that money will go to someone who’s trying to earn a living by driving.  And late trains are always crowded.

I think I’ll do that.  I should’ve walked to the train, anyway, but I didn’t feel like starting the day sweatier than I already am.  Hopefully I’ll have the willpower to walk in the evening.

***

I’m in the Uber now**.  There’s been no sign of any of the trains approaching, and even the Tri-Rail tracker and the main Tri-Rail websites are not responding.  One might be inclined to guess there had been some kind of cyber-sabotage, but the automated (but specific) overhead announcements were working fine.  Probably it’s all something (or things) far more prosaic.  But the 1st train of the day was announced to be arriving 35 to 45 minutes late, which is already later than the second train of the day, so that one’s likely also to be late.

It’s a bit of a challenge to type on the cell phone while in a car going up I-95, and I wonder whether it would be easier or harder on the laptop (computer).  I’m not planning to write the whole remainder of the post here in the car.  I like to keep track of an Uber trip both on the app and outside, sort of watching how fast (or slowly) it updates.  It’s not important, but it’s oddly engaging, and I can’t do that and write at the same time.

I can see the rising crescent moon outside the right window as I’m heading north (obviously).  I saw it first thing when I stepped out this morning, and thought it looked like some kind of insane (lunatic, if you will) exaggerated grin.

Of course, when the crescent moon is bright and near the horizon, it will always be a grin, not a frown.  The crescent always faces the sun, so if it’s “frowning” it will be following the sun in the morning or leading it down in the evening.  Thus, a frowny moon is going to be a daytime moon, and so less visible than a grinning one.

I think I’m right about this, based on positions and optics and stuff.  I’ve never read about it specifically, but it seems that this is the way it has to be.  Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

My Uber driver is driving a Tesla, which means I’m sitting in a Tesla.  I must say, the front end of Teslas look disquieting to me, because there is no grill (there doesn’t need to be air intake for an electric motor, other than perhaps for cooling, since it doesn’t use combustion).  Though it makes sense, it always reminds me of the scene in The Matrix, when the Agents made Neo’s mouth disappear, or the fate of the formerly shouty sister of Anthony in the Twilight Zone movie version of It’s a Good Life.  A human face with nose and eyes and no mouth is disquieting to see.  Still, they seem to be good cars, and the lack of a grill probably improves the aerodynamics.

***

Now, here I am at the office.  Though I could finish this on the desktop (the computer, that is‒I am sort of leaning on the desktop at the moment), I’m continuing it on the phone because it feels better to finish where I started.  I’ll do the editing on the desktop (computer), though.

There is a crosswalk on the way to the office****, and the walk signals there have been hosed for months, and nothing seems to have been done about it.  When one is on the west side of Military, waiting to cross Hillsboro, the walk signal never activates.  This is despite the fact that I push walk signals buttons in ascending primes.  In other words, I first push twice, then I pause, push three times, pause, push five times, pause, seven, pause, eleven, pause, thirteen, pause, seventeen, pause…and so on.  It rarely gets that far.  Usually, during the main part of the day, the simple needs of traffic on Military make the thing turn before too long and stay turned for a decent duration, despite the fact that it is, as I say, hosed.

However, this early in the morning, the wait is longish‒there’s much more Hillsboro than Military traffic‒and then when it does change, the change is very brief.  This, at least, demonstrates that it’s not merely a problem of the signal, i.e., it’s not just that the walk sign is not lighting up while the system is otherwise processing things as it is supposed to process them; in other words it’s not just an indicator light problem.  No, the actual walk signals’ input and activation systems (north and south directions) on the west side of that intersection are not functioning.

I had to cross, though, so once the light turned green for traffic in my direction (and once I was reasonably sure the guy in the eastbound truck on Hillsboro, who was going way too fast coming up to a red light, was going to stop before the crosswalk) I scuttled off to cross the street.  But the light turned after the one car each going north and south passed, and it was red before I was much more than halfway across the street (and green for cross-traffic) even though I walk rather quickly.  So, if anyone works for Broward County in the division that manages such things, or knows someone in that division, please let them know this thing needs fixing.

I’m not sure how one would go about alerting them to the problem.  I suppose there might be some phone number or email system online.  I often toy with the thought of deliberately getting hit by an oncoming vehicle while crossing that street and, assuming I survive, explaining that the signal was broken.  It would be making a point and chastising reckless drivers at the same time.  It would also give me a break‒figuratively and perhaps literally.

I doubt I’ll do that.  I tend to be much less careful about entering crosswalks than I used to be, though.  I figure, if I have the right of way and get hit by someone driving inappropriately, well, that might kill two birds with one stone‒or two anthropoid idiots with one vehicle.

I doubt I’ll kill myself using traffic, though I suppose I might act on an impulse if the circumstances were just right.  It’s just generally rude to the innocent drivers out there‒people commuting, all that stuff.  I’d much rather do something quieter and less messy and more polite.  I’m working on it.  I’m reasonably clever and creative, so whatever I choose from among the options I’m considering, it will probably be both effective and not too messy.  Unless I change my mind about avoiding that.  My mind is not my friend, in many ways, so I can’t be sure it will always stick with my preferences.  After all, I’d prefer not to be stressed and angry and depressed and insomniac and in pointless chronic pain, but, oops, it’s all there.  I would rather be reasonably happy and together and have friends and my family and have all of us be reasonably healthy.

I would also prefer you all to have a good day and a good week.  Look after yourselves and those you love; you can’t count on anyone else to do it.

mad morning moon

*I did not succeed.

**I’m not behind a plow***.

***Or “plough” if you prefer the British spelling.

****They do not call it the Rising Sun…or even the Rising Moon

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“Although I laugh, and I act like a clown…”

It’s Friday, and I’m sitting at the train station, writing this on my laptop—by which I mean I’m writing it on my laptop computer.

I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this knows that, when I say I’m writing on my laptop, I mean I’m using my laptop computer, not that I’m doing some bizarre form of self-decoration by writing on my actual lap, and then—presumably—recopying it onto the web sometime later.  That makes little to no sense.  Nevertheless, I feel compelled to clarify that when I say “laptop” I mean “laptop computer”.  I try to make it into a joke—I do this with a lot of things that I find it impossible not initially to take literally—and it is indeed funny sometimes.  However, it is not simply my choice to try to be jokey.  I cannot resist thinking that way, it seems.  At least, I don’t tend to be able to resist it.

I brought my computer with me because I didn’t walk back to the house (which is not my home) from the train after work, and I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning.  I was a bit physically wiped out yesterday by noon.  I was also psychologically wiped out, even more than usual, to be honest.  I started the day ever so slightly giddy after having walked to the train station—I’m a person who responds well to accomplishments, and I also tend to get good endorphin rushes (apparently) from endurance exercise.

I guess in a way my “crashing” is probably like coming down from any kind of drug—you get a rebound effect.  So, even if the endorphins and enkephalins or whatever are endogenous, if you get in a state where you have a high concentration of them—or, rather, a high degree of activity in nerve cell groups that are associated with those neurotransmitters—when it stops, the overstimulated postsynaptic nerves are going to become more inactive than they were at baseline.

I’ve noticed that I often have this sort of experience with comedy.  If I’ve been watching lots of funny videos, for instance, afterwards I’ll often have a powerful come-down feeling, and actually get depressed—more so than I am at baseline, I mean, which is pretty flipping low.  This used to happen to me especially badly when I would read through my former Dave Barry collection.  He was so funny, so consistently, that by the time I’d read very much of his stuff, I was apparently strongly prone to shift the other way, and sometimes got very depressed afterwards.

Maybe the opposite of this phenomenon is why so many people like sad stories and sad songs.  If you listen to a particularly heartbreaking song—it would probably have to be a good one, of course, if it’s going to elicit particular emotions—and feel very sad for the duration of the song, maybe afterward you get the equivalent of an upward rebound.

This doesn’t seem as persistent or prolonged in most cases—the sadness from a song or similar, I mean—as does the potential for laughter from good comedy.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never noticed any tendency to get happier after feeling sadder from a song (or a story).  Then again, I don’t tend to be happy in the first place.  Once my brain gets depressed, that tends to be a self-reinforcing process, like a hurricane forming over the ocean when it’s hot at the end of the summer, which becomes a self-sustaining cycle.

I’ve used that metaphor for depression before, and I’ve even mentioned it here, I think.  In a sense, I could just characterize my tendency toward depression by thinking that I’m just a tropical ocean late in the summer.  How lovely.

I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish by writing that stuff, honestly.  I guess I’m probably not actually trying to accomplish anything other than “writing today’s blog post”, which is what I am usually setting out to accomplish when I start writing every day.  I won’t be writing tomorrow, though.  I have the weekend off, and that’s good.

So many little things stress me out, and I don’t know why.  I have a present for my daughter’s birthday—really, a collection of presents—and I need to write out the card I have and finish boxing things in the box I have, and tape it up and address it and bring it to the nearby post-office and send it away, but even the thought of writing the card—deciding what to “say” and how to put things, even though I’ve written millions upon millions of words in my time, and my daughter is not a harshly critical audience—and then of actually going to the post office and going up to send the package are just so inducing of anxiety that I tend to put it off.

It’s weird because I know it’s not a big deal.  I’ve done many much harder, more stressful things in my life.  Yet, even thinking about it and writing about it fills me with tension and stress.  It’s really quite pathetic.  I hate that part of myself.  Which makes it pretty much like every other part of myself, come to think of it.

Anyway, I haven’t started writing any new fiction, of course.  I idly searched through Amazon for spiral-bound, top-flipping writing pads, imagining that, if I got something handy and convenient in which I could write with pen on paper, the “old-fashioned” way, maybe I’d start writing some new fiction.  I’ve tried to do analogous things to myself many, many times in the past.

It doesn’t work; I don’t think it ever has, for me.  I write fiction if and when I’ve decided I’m going to write fiction, and when that’s the case, it doesn’t need to be on any particular, special device or surface.  I wrote two novels and a novella while I was in prison, for crying out loud.

Maybe I’ve stopped writing (fiction) just because I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted.  I don’t sleep well at all—it’s so bad that I hardly even talk about it, because it’s just the same fucking thing all the time, anyway.

I don’t have any real joy in the work I do, I don’t have any real friendships, certainly not with anyone with whom I spend any time other than at work.  There’s nothing that I do for “fun” other than watching YouTube videos and—to a steadily diminishing degree—reading nonfiction (a rapidly shrinking pursuit) and fiction (all but completely gone).

I found a meme yesterday that I guess I’ll share here, showing the difference in what it looks like from outside to be reading, and what it feels like from inside, to be reading.  That used to be abundantly true for me.  Reading was probably my single favorite thing ever—and not just reading fiction, obviously.  I’ve always said that the written language is by far the single greatest invention of the human race.  I have encountered no reason to change that assessment.

reading

But now, steadily, I’m losing the joy of reading, and I have been for a while.  There are no dragons or rainbows or other mystical and mythical things going on in my head, like in the picture.  Reading, for me, is just a desert (but not a dessert, alas) for the most part.  Even nonfiction isn’t that interesting—the good stuff I liked I’ve read quite a lot about, and I have reread my favorite books on various subjects over and over.  None of it is engaging any more.  I force myself to do it, because without it, I don’t even know what I am, let alone who I am.

But I can’t really seem to read fiction of any kind anymore.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it to the end of this month.  I don’t truly expect to make it to the end of this month.  And I honestly don’t very much want to make it to the end of this month.  I’m reminded of the lines from a Beatles song:  “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.  I would hate my disappointment to show.  There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear…”

Several people in the office—or, well, three of them at least—are on vacation at the moment, and I guess that’s good for them.  I honestly wish them the best of times.  But I don’t know what I would even do or want to do if I took time off.  I can’t think of anything fun that I would want to accomplish or experience.  And, frankly, the prospect of trying to make arrangements for going somewhere and doing something is so stressful and intimidating that even thinking vaguely and nebulously about such a non-specific trip or vacation makes me feels so tense I’m surprised you cannot hear me vibrating.  Maybe you can.

What I need is a dirt vacation*, I think.

Oh, well.  It’ll come quite soon, I suspect.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, necessarily, except that it would be worth feeling nothing simply not to feel so stressed and depressed and lonely and so bloody tired all the time.  It’s just a regression to the mean, if you will—and the mean is zero, or vanishingly close to zero**.

Have a good weekend.

*That’s like the proverbial “dirt nap”, but it lasts longer.  Ha.  Ha.

**This is somewhat related to the fact of why perturbation theory can work in things like quantum electrodynamics.  Most positives are canceled out by negatives, leaving finite answers to things like path integrals and so on—a converging, rather than a diverging, infinite series.

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Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what blog thou wilt.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and I walked to the train station this morning, but I did not walk back to the house from the train station last night.  It had just gotten so late, and I was tired, and I wanted to get back to the house early enough that I could relax and at least try to get to bed at a reasonable hour, even if I never do sleep through the night.  But I committed to walking this morning, and I fulfilled that commitment.  Bully for me!

I must be getting in better shape, or maybe I just left earlier or summat, because even though I stopped to get a beverage* and tried to take my time after that, I still arrived in time to catch the train that leaves twenty minutes earlier than the one I usually get when I walk.

My feet and knees and ankles are doing tolerably well, so the shoes I did choose seem unlikely to lose when it comes to my long-distance walking.  I also find‒curiously enough‒that wearing spandex knee braces helps keep my ankles, especially my right ankle, from acting up.  It seems that something in the way I move (ha ha) when my knee stability is not optimal is adding torsional, irregular forces to my right ankle and Achilles tendon.

It’s often quite surprising just how non-straightforward the source of damage or pain is in the body compared to where one feels the discomfort.  Spandex helps with some of this because it adds one’s sense of surface touch to one’s ongoing awareness of the position of one’s joints from within**.  The sense of surface touch is much more precise than many of our other senses, which makes sense***, since it has much more of a role to play in guiding our targeted moment to moment actions regarding injury, obstacles, insects that might bite, and so on.  It may also be that spandex helps decrease excess fluid accumulation in a joint by providing counter-pressure in a fairly uniform way, and this can certainly be expected to improve a joint’s stability.

I’m sure that’s all quite boring.  Apologies.  I don’t mean to be tedious; it’s just a talent I have.

Switching topics:  I like listening to good podcasts (or audiobooks) while I walk, and this morning I listened to the AMA (ask me anything) podcast for the month on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.  Well…I listened to part of it.  His AMAs are usually three or four hours long, because he tries to get through as many questions as he can, and he tries to answer them as carefully as he can.  It makes for some very interesting listening, because he is a theoretical physicist who also works in philosophy.  Formerly at CalTech, he is now at Johns Hopkins and also works with the Santa Fe Institute and is just in general broadly interested and interesting and quite thoughtful.

I still like Sam Harris’s podcast (and his guests) a little bit better, but that’s not particularly important.  I like them both, and I learn a lot from them and their interlocutors.  I have noted that I like long podcasts but prefer short videos, which is interesting and seems on its face odd to me.  Perhaps it’s simply that one can listen to a podcast while doing any of a number of other things, but not so with videos.

Anyway, it’s nice to be able to hear about and potentially learn about interesting things while walking.  It’s also occasionally fun, in a rather silly way, when someone asks a reasonably complicated question to which I know the answer and then to hear Sean Carroll say the same thing I would have said (this is far from common, but it does happen).  Of course, people rarely ask him questions about medicine or biology, because he is not a specialist in those areas.  If they did, I would probably usually be able to give better answers than he, but that would hardly be particularly impressive.

It’s also hardly important.  I’d rather be listening to someone talking about things I know less about than they, because that’s how one learns.  I sometimes try to do brief “podcasts” or “audio blogs” of my own, but I don’t get the impression anyone ever really listens to any of them.  I don’t know.  Maybe they do.

Oh, I wanted to address the very nice comment left by a reader yesterday, in which‒among other things‒he said that he liked the idea of the manga that I had mentioned.  I just want to make clear, although HELIOS started out as a comic book idea, and then became a manga idea later (at around the same time I thought of mangas for Mark Red and for The Dark Fairy and the Desperado) I don’t see myself ever actually doing a manga now.

I think that the work involved in making a manga‒from the initial script to the storyboarding to the penciling to the inking to the screen tone‒would all be just too much and it would be difficult to work into my schedule.  Perhaps if someone were paying me to do it full time, I might try.  But I don’t think that’s very likely.

I really only have the notion of perhaps writing a “light novel” of HELIOS, rather akin to the light novels that are popular in Japan which are often turned into manga and or anime.  Mark Red and DFandD and HELIOS are probably stories that lend themselves more to manga/anime style settings, but I am much more of a prose fiction writer, even though I do draw sometimes.

Anyway, I think that’s probably enough for today.  I intend to keep doing my walking and hopefully that’ll help me be healthier overall.  I’m also trying very hard to completely eliminate sugar and most starches or refined carbohydrates from my diet; that certainly helps me feel physically better.  We’ll see how everything goes.

Maybe, if I do well and my mood starts to improve consistently, I will start to write fiction again, on HELIOS or on DFandD or on Outlaws Mind or on Changeling in a Shadow World or even on Neko/Neneko****.  Who knows?

I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*The water fountains at the Hollywood Tri-Rail station have been “temporarily out of service” for, I don’t know, it must be most of a year.  I would very much like to be able to get a drink of water when I get to the station after walking 5 miles, but I think the people who run the place are happy to try to coerce people into buying something from the ridiculously overpriced vending machines at the station.  I would not seriously consider doing that unless my life depended on it, and I might not do it then.  I’d even rather pay twice as much somewhere else than buy something to drink at the station when they have water fountains but just haven’t fixed them.

**This is called proprioception, as most of you probably know.  It’s not a very precise or reliable sense, being quite coarse grained, and it also seems to deteriorate with age and with damage to joints.

***Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be any form of pun, but it is the best way I can find to put it right now, so I won’t change it.

****The story of a cat (named Neko, the Japanese word for cat) who is devoted to her human, a lonely but upbeat and gainfully employed young man (who is fond of anime and manga and light novels, among other things).  When the man buys an odd, exotic fish, the cat intends to eat it, being a bit jealous and also just having the instinctive desire to do so.  But then, the fish reveals to the cat that it is magical (evidenced well by the fact that it can talk and that the cat can understand it), and if the cat spares its life, it will grant her a wish.  She agrees, and chooses to be able to become a human woman (at will) to be a potential companion for her human.  Surprised when she first encounters him, he asks her name, and she stammers, Ne…Neko.  He takes this as her having the Japanese name Neneko, and she accepts that.  Thus, the title.

Neko/Neneko

[The above is a concept drawing of a potential scene from Neko/Neneko]

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Meet the new month…same as the old month?

It’s the first of September (in 2023 A.D., in case anyone is reading this far enough in the future for that to be unclear and yet interesting) and it’s a Friday.  I’m at the train station again, waiting for the train.  I thought about walking to the train this morning, but I was just too tired.  I didn’t walk last night, either, because it was quite rainy, and that was annoying.

I’ve had persistent digestive sensitivity this week since my bout on the weekend, and particularly starches and things like that seem to be giving me lots of trouble.  So, I’m going to try to keep them to a minimum.  That also tends to make me feel physically better in general (though it does seem to lead to lowering of my baseline mood).

It’s a bit of a frustrating conundrum, that foods that let me feel physically healthier and more capable lead me to be more dysthymic and depressed.  Sometimes, though, I think I prefer plain depression to tension/stress/anxiety.  At least with the former, I can, if I find the time, try to take a nap.

I’ve been trying to find books to read, and it’s becoming ever more difficult.  Fiction is almost impossible‒even the silly light novels aren’t able to hold my attention, though maybe if there were a new installment of a series I’d already been reading, it might be okay.  But I read those things within a day, even when I don’t have much free time.  And none of them seem enticing at all.

Worse still, even nonfiction is getting difficult.  I’m in the “middle” of a comparative slew of books‒three or four about computer science/hacking/AI, another about the mathematics of probability and statistics as applied to daily life, one about the history of the sugar industry and the effects that has had on global health (not good ones), two broad physics books, and just general stuff like that.  I have no new physics books that interest me, though I have a few of which I haven’t read much, yet‒I’m in chapter 2 of the Feynman lectures on Physics, which is wonderful, of course, but even the great RF can’t seem to hold my interest.

I can’t even read my own stories, and that’s usually an escape route for me.

I also haven’t found music to be interesting, though yesterday, for a very brief while, I listened to a bit.  But that waned quickly.  I certainly haven’t played anything in quite a while.

If I can’t listen to music, and especially if I can’t read, then I really don’t see any point in continuing.  I mean, I’m obviously able to write this blog, but I can’t seem to write fiction anymore.  Or, at least I have no desire to write it.  And there’s only one movie that I haven’t seen that I really have even a modicum of interest in seeing.  But I’m not that interested in it, to be honest.

Frankly, writing this blog feels pretty boring right now, and I’m sure that reading it can’t be very gripping.  I don’t think I have anything to say that I haven’t said a godzillion times.  If anything, the only message I’m truly trying to convey‒the only one I care about trying to convey‒is a futile one.  It certainly hasn’t done what I dreamed it might do.  I have little to no hope that it will ever succeed.

Oh, yeah, and I forgot to mention before that we slid right past another potential palindromic recording number sequence yesterday.  It seems (surprise, surprise) that the universe is not going to send me any messages regarding whether I should continue living or not.  Or else, it’s sending me a message by not sending me one.  But, of course, the universe doesn’t actually care about me one way or the other, nor about anyone else.  It just is, as far as I can see*.  It is simply a magnificent desolation, to quote Buzz Aldrin.

And here I am, a tiny little speck of that vast emptiness.  I’m much less magnificent, but certainly, I am a desolation.

Oh, yeah, I guess this is technically the beginning of a holiday weekend in the US.  Labor Day, apparently, is Monday.  It doesn’t matter much to me, nor does it make any difference.  I work tomorrow, and we will be working Monday.  We don’t tend to take those kinds of holidays off.  I guess that’s fine; I don’t have anything enjoyable to do if I take time off.  I wish I could sleep.  Then I might enjoy having free days.  But even when I’m mentally and physically exhausted, I have trouble sleeping.  When I try to lie down for little cat naps to rest my back, setting a timer for 19 minutes, more often than not I get up before even that much time has passed.

I’ve also stopped sitting through any full cycles of the massage chair I bought a while back, because it doesn’t do anything for my back and leg pain anymore, so sitting in it is just frustrating.

To add further insult, when I sweat, everything smells like mildew, like fungus (to me anyway) and that’s one of my least favorite smells in the world.  I try to wash my clothes (and myself) very thoroughly, and I use Lysol and similar in between.  I think maybe it’s just Florida being a fungal paradise that makes it such a struggle.

I hope this is my very last “first day of the month” blog post.  It probably won’t be my last post of all, not even of this week.  I expect to write one tomorrow, since I’m working tomorrow.  But, great Caesar’s ghost! it’s daunting.  It’s got to be even worse for all of you.  I do hope, though, that you have a good weekend, and if you live in the US that you have a good holiday.  Please, let someone out there have a life worth living, in and of itself, for its own sake.

desolation

*Which is, in principle, about 40 some odd billion light years at most, given the finite speed of light, the time since the last scattering surface, and the expansion of the universe.

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When virtue’s steely blogs look bleak i’ the cold wind

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and it’s also the last day of August in 2023, to which I say, “Good riddance.”  What a crappy month.  The effects of the hurricane have all but completely vanished from here in south Florida, apart from the fact that, at relatively low altitudes, you can still sometimes see streams of fast-moving clouds.  They’re going roughly east-northeast now, as the direction to the distant hurricane’s center has changed.  At ground level, however, and especially during the day, we seem to have lost the wind, and now the air is dead again, humid, and quite hot.

Just sitting at the train station early in the morning, I keep thinking that insects‒probably mosquitoes‒are landing on my neck, but when I reach back to brush them away, they’re just beads of sweat.

I’m slightly annoyed about myself and other things this morning.  I awoke early, even for me, and after lying about for a few hours,  I got up, did some dips, and took a shower and all the usual stuff.  I could’ve walked to the train, I suppose, but I plan to walk this evening, and the weather is just disgusting right now.  Anyway, I recently discovered that there’s a Tri Rail related Uber coupon that gets you $5 off each way (only 2 times a day) when getting a ride to and from the Tri Rail station, so I decided to use that.

The youngish driver, in a Tesla, got there quickly, and we were making such good time that I thought I might even be able to get on the very first train of the day, with a minute or two to spare.

Then, we got to the last turn onto a main street just before the station, and the light was red, and there were three or four cars waiting to go on the cross street, but then they went, and the cross-traffic was then nonexistent…and the driver just sat there and waited for the green (there is no “No turn on red” sign at this intersection).  Now, I’m not comfortable enough talking to strangers to feel fine with saying, “Hey, traffic’s clear, you can go right now.”  So, I just kind of fidgeted in my seat.

Then, when we arrived at the station, the first train was approaching and the gates had just come down, so without sprinting around them and across in front of the train, I couldn’t make that one.  Even if I had run to and up the stairs, across the bridge, and then down, I think there’s almost no chance I would have made it.  So, I walked up along the near side of the track, grumbling, punching one of the pillars as I passed (mainly just to hurt myself a bit, since I was mainly angry with me) and watched the train arrive and then go away.  Now, I’m sitting waiting for the next train, which comes half an hour after.

As I said, my anger is really directed at myself.  I mean, yes, it would have been good for the driver to pay attention and realize he could turn right…but why do I care?  I wasn’t planning to catch that train in the first…

Oh, wait.  They just announced that the train for which I am waiting is delayed “ten, fifteen minutes” (not 10 to 15 minutes, for reasons I’m hitherto unable to guess).  So it really would have been better to catch the earlier one.  I wonder how much an Uber or Lyft to the office would be.

***

Well, I won’t say it’s cheap, but it’s cheaper than a cab would be, and my driver was right there at the station, so I’m going.  You might think that it’s nice that I can afford to do this, but I really can’t.  However, I have no one on whom I need to spend money, and I have no plans for the future, so it’s not as though I’m trying to save anything.  I might as well just burn it all up.

I’m so tired of being stressed out and irritated.  I wish I could just smile and not worry about things.  You would think that if, at root, someone doesn’t care if he lives or dies‒and indeed, leans toward preferring the latter‒it would be easy enough just to be sort of Zen/Taoist in attitude, but that’s not the case, at least for me.

Perhaps it has to do with the intellectual versus the emotional aspects of a desire/drive.  Someone who lacked a basic, emotional survival drive might very well intellectually want to live and yet be calm, at ease, unflappable, perhaps like Hannibal Lecter as portrayed in the books.  He’s not afraid of dying, or even really of pain, but he enjoys his life (such as it is) and wants it to continue.  Whereas I, intellectually, don’t enjoy my life, and I don’t think much of anything I do or say or experience matters at all, and yet every little thing feels like a four-alarm fire, like a call of “General Quarters”, like there’s an enemy at the gates of the city.

Yesterday, during the day, I wished, wished I had a gun, so I could shoot myself, even right there in the office, and fuck trying to be polite and not disturb other people.  It’s not as though other people make even minor, simple, easy efforts to avoid causing me distress.  I thought that I probably wouldn’t shoot myself in the head‒partly because I would worry about a poorly aimed shot causing brain damage but not killing me, but also, partly, I think it would be too big a hurdle to clear based on that biological drive to survive, which is hard to overcome.  Maybe I’m just a coward.  I’m okay with that possibility.

Anyway, I figured I might go the Van Gogh way and shoot myself in the chest or belly or whatever.  That would be pretty gnarly, if you ask me, and I’ve always thought it was a real ballsy way to do things.  No painless and quick death there, even back in Vincent’s day.

Of course, I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t know anyone from whom I could get one on short notice.  So I ground through the day feeling like my spirit was crawling with metaphysical parasites, stressed out beyond any reasonability.  I mean, come on, I’ve literally dealt with life and death situations many times, often on a daily basis, more than I would be able to count!  Why does my stupid present daily life get to me so much?

Probably because it is such a stupid, pointless daily life.  The fact that I bother with it at all, when there is quite literally no point to it, or to me anymore, is probably what makes it so stressful.  Or maybe, after everything I’ve been through, I have some weird form of PTSD‒that’s fashionable, right?  I have no idea.  I don’t feel like I have something like that.  I just feel…weird.  Which I guess is appropriate, since I am weird.

***

And now I am here at my destination, at which I’ve arrived even earlier than I would have if the second train had been on time.  That’s a nice euphemism, isn’t it?  That would be a nice way to think of dying before your time, don’t you think?  “He arrived at his destination earlier than expected.  It was very thoughtful and pleasant of him.”

Well, anyway, tomorrow begins September, a far better month than August, the month of the equinox and of Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.  It’s a month in which it might be worthwhile to sell Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses and head off on the quest to throw a cursed item into the Cracks of Doom, ending at least one particular evil forever.

We’re approaching another potential palindromic recording number possibility today (already).  I don’t think there will be many more chances for one to come up.  Even if one occurred at this stage, I don’t think I would pay attention to it.  It’s like when you flip a coin to decide whether you’ll go off a diet or something, and it comes out a certain way, and you realize that, no, you’re going to go the other way, anyway.  It’s a good way to test yourself and find out what you really wanted to do in the first place.

What I want you to do, if you’re willing and able, is to have a good day, and to appreciate the ones you love and who love you, and to spend time with them if you have that opportunity.  Just spend time with people who are willing and able to spend time with you, and who matter to you, and to whom you matter.  If you are lucky enough to be with the people you love, don’t take that for granted.  That’s my advice/request, for what it’s worth.  I’m not known for my wisdom, but that’s the best I have right now.

TTFN

vincent in the museum

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Apologies for a blogless Monday

I was out sick with some form of enteropathy* yesterday, so I didn’t write a blog post.  I frankly haven’t done much of anything that’s in any way productive since Friday, and I’m not sure I did anything productive then.  I hope no one was too bereft by not being able to read my writing for three days (ha ha).

I’m now sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to the office (well, it doesn’t actually go to the office, but I think you know what I mean), not looking forward to the fact that I’ll have to do extra catch-up work from both Saturday and yesterday.  I really don’t want to have to deal with any of it or with anything at all.

I don’t know why I keep doing anything whatsoever.  I can speculate on certain causes, of course‒habit, the evolved drive simply to continue to survive, a dislike for causing inconvenience to other people, all that sort of thing.  Also, I guess there is the idiotic hope that maybe, just maybe, I will find some answers, some meaning, or some solutions to at least some of my problems.

Honestly, when I get sick like over Sunday through yesterday, I get the wild hope that maybe I’ll need to be hospitalized, and while in the hospital, I’ll be able to get some help for my psychological issues as well as my physical ones.  It’s stupid, I know.  I need to stop hoping for anything.  Hope is a waste of my time.

Ironically, it’s hope that keeps me writing about the fact that I’m having problems going on, problems dealing with my issues and my loneliness and my depression and insomnia and pain and all that crap.  I hope that somehow, by talking about it, I’ll either arrive at some insight or ideas or some semblance of understanding that might lead to some modicum of peace.  Or I hope that someone out there in the WordPress world‒perhaps it should be called the WorldPress‒will have some new ideas or insights or some help to offer.  Or maybe some old friend of mine will read what I write and will reach out and offer a hand or something.  I don’t know what they could do, or what I could do.  But anyway, it is hope that keeps me writing, I guess.

But it’s getting old.  I’m getting tired of it.

When I don’t just dwell on morosity (I don’t know if that’s a proper word), I write about weird shit, like I did on Friday.  I could write about current events, I suppose, but most of those are discouraging and boring.  It’s basically about as fun as writing about the interactions of a very large colony of baboons from the baboons’ points of view.  Baboons don’t want to admit to themselves that most of their choices and motivations are almost entirely simple primate dominance, mating, and social jockeying behaviors.

Humans really are just baboons with delusions of grandeur, some of which are excusable, many (perhaps most) of which are not.  They’re weirdly built and strange to look at, with very rare exceptions.  They think their culture and society and civilization were made somehow, deliberately‒by them it sometimes seems they imagine, though that cannot be possible‒when really, it all just sort of happened and continues just to happen, like any weather phenomenon or termite mound.  This is nothing of which to be ashamed‒it’s the nature of everything as far as I can see‒I just find the hubris disgusting and inexcusable.

Even nature itself seems just weird and rather twisted and horrifying when I look at it these days.  Maybe part of it is that I’m down here in Florida, but when you look closely at the very ad hoc, cobbled together, misery-laden natural world, in which even green plants compete ruthlessly against each other, while insects gnaw the tree trunks, and birds eat the insects and cats eat the birds (when they can) and meanwhile ten thousand other such painful and fear-ridden interactions are taking place in every acre, at all levels, from viruses to bacteria, to yeast, to protozoa, to slime molds and lichen and moss and mold and mushrooms up to grasses and bushes and trees and worms and snails and arthropods and fish and amphibians and reptiles and birds and mammals…everything ultimately just churning away at low entropy energy and converting it into high entropy energy…well, it all seems horrifying and discouraging and very, very dark.

Everything in the world seems alien to me…which I guess must mean that I am alien, since everything else is just there, doing what it does, being what it is, and I’m the one that finds it all daunting and repulsive.

I often bring up the concept of Sisyphus, and it now occurs to me that, maybe, Sisyphus is gradually wearing away the mountain on which he rolls his ever-falling boulder, slowly grinding it down until, finally, it’s level, and the boulder will no longer roll but will stay where Sisyphus puts it, and that will be the state of the universe at very high entropy (I want to say at maximum entropy, but I don’t think there is a maximum overall entropy**).

Of course “maximal” entropy is a state that can go on for a very long time.  It’s like the fable (as told by the 12th Doctor) in which the Emperor asks a shepherd boy to tell him the meaning of eternity.  The shepherd boy says there is somewhere a mountain of pure diamond.  It takes an hour to climb and an hour to go around.  Once every hundred years, a tiny bird comes along and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain.  And when, after so many repetitions of that once-a-century sharpening happens that the diamond mountain is finally worn down to nothing…then the first second of eternity will have passed.

Even once the “heat death” of the universe comes to pass‒assuming that is what will come to pass‒and all is a haze of elementary particles, barely above absolute zero in an endlessly expanding but empty spacetime, which will come potentially after more than 10 to the 100th power years, that will only be an infinitesimal instant at the uttermost beginning of the eternity of nothingness.

In that quantum vacuum, even a direction of time will have less meaning than would any possible sense of up, down, left, right, forward, and backward in the heart of one of the intergalactic supervoids, in which not even a single distant star or galaxy could be seen with anything but the strongest telescope on long exposure.  To the human eye, in a supervoid, all would be blackness and emptiness in all directions, and in the heat death, that would apply to time as well.  With no change, the past and the future are indistinguishable.

Yet, eventually, new universes, or Boltzmann brains, or other esoterica might yet come to be.  Eternity is a long time.  Or maybe they will be found to have been in what seems to be the future but which is, eventually, the past of some universe with an opposite-pointing “arrow of time”.

Anyway, my point is, the universe is weird and harsh and the hubris of self-important creatures would be laughable if it were not so nauseating.

I don’t think I can do all this much longer.  My stop is coming up soon.  Have a good day.

*You can look it up.

**There is a maximum amount of entropy that can be fit into any given region of spacetime, and that is the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the area of an event horizon of a black hole that would enclose that region, expressed in square Planck lengths.  Actually, if memory serves, it’s the logarithm of that surface area (probably the natural logarithm).  If you tried to “add more entropy” to such a region, the black hole would grow, and the horizon would just get larger…you wouldn’t get more entropy “within” the given region.

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2 kinds of ASDs and an NTD called SBO all considered by a pitiful SOB

It’s Friday, and this weekend I am not working, which right now seems like a highly positive thing, because starting yesterday in the middle of the day, I suddenly had a huge flare-up of my back/hip/leg pain.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  I’m always trying to see if I can tease out (and test) the causality of such occurrences, but of course, it’s a tricky business, with so many possible variables.  I wondered if it was something I ate‒I had a specific type of food in mind, that I had not eaten for a while‒or was it partly because of my severely poor sleep the night before?  What was it?

It was frustrating in more than the usual sense because, after having walked to the train that morning and not having any problems from it or the previous few days’ longish walks, I was planning to walk in the evening again.  Unfortunately, I did not feel up to such a thing when the time came, so I took an Uber to the house‒after getting some comfort-oriented ice cream at the Cold Stone Creamery*, a place I’ve not visited in over a decade‒and then another one to the train this morning, since I still feel rotten.

It’s noteworthy that, when I am in more severe pain than usual, my willpower to resist indulgences that I want to resist gets quite a lot weaker.  I suppose that trying to compensate for and deal with the pain diverts mental resources that would otherwise be pointed toward self-discipline.  I had a big hot pastrami sandwich for lunch yesterday and then that ice cream, but they were both far less satisfying and pleasant than I would have expected.  I don’t think I’ll ever get either one again.

I’m always trying to think about my back pain and the things that trigger and assuage it and so on, and occasionally‒though for the most part it’s all well-trodden ground‒I come upon some possible connection that I hadn’t seen before.  Yesterday, while thinking about my then-present back pain, I thought back to my childhood leg pains, which I think I’ve mentioned here before.  When I began having my current problems (about 20+ years ago), they first presented as a recurrence of the kinds of pains that I had as a child, quite similar in character.  This led to various investigations to look for neuromuscular or myopathic processes, but I had no myopathy**.

Having more recently researched connections between autism spectrum disorders (which I might have) and congenital heart disease (which I certainly did have‒Atrial Septal Defect, secundum type‒because I had open heart surgery for it when I was 18), it yesterday occurred to me that there might be other associated anomalies.

I think it was while I was browsing biomedical news related to neurodevelopmental stuff on a site that’s linked with phys.org (which is a science news site that I enjoy and recommend) that I saw something about neural tube defects related to autism spectrum disorders.

Neural tube defects (NTDs) occur when the neural tube‒the embryonic infolding that creates the cavity that becomes the sort of scaffold and center of the spinal cord and central nervous system and its supporting structures‒fails to close completely on one or both ends.  It’s mainly to prevent these that potentially pregnant women in the modern world are encouraged to take daily folate supplements.  NTDs can be utterly catastrophic, producing forms of anencephaly and various types of severe and lifelong neurological impairment, or they can be comparatively mild, all the way down to spina bifida occulta.

neural tubeadjusted

That latter term describes the situation when, at the very lower end, the spinal bones and what not are not completely closed at the rear.  The “occulta” part refers to the fact that there are no noticeable external findings that show the presence of the incomplete closure.  The most commonly affected portion of the spine is in the L5 and S1 vertebral bodies (lumbar and sacral, that is) with somewhat incomplete rear closure.  These findings are, according to what I have read, not always noted on MRI unless it is looking for them specifically.

diagrams of sacral spina bifidaadjusted

It is noteworthy (to me) that when my back was investigated, including “provocative discography”, I had not just a bulging disc but a full thickness tear in the L5-S1 intervertebral disc, going all the way from the outer edge to the nucleus pulposus.  Imagine one of the pieces of Freshen Up gum, with the goo in the middle of each stick up gum, but torn inward from the edge so that the central liquid leaks out.  That’s the sort of thing I had.

annular-tearadjusted

And it was in the rear of the intervertebral disc, just where any SBO might have left poor structural support.  No one noticed SBO in my back when they were working me up, but they weren’t looking for it, nor even looking at the bones in particular.  No one (including me) suspected any skeletal issue.  And SBO can be very occult, and may present, conceivably, with only very minor, hard to notice changes.

I haven’t yet mentioned that one of the findings that can be associated with SBO is bed-wetting.  I had trouble with that, in addition to my frequent and rather severe childhood leg aches, far later than my siblings…in fact, I never heard of either of them having that trouble at all.

It turns out that the correlation between congenital heart disease and SBO is quite high as such things go, more so than either condition’s correlation with autism spectrum disorders.  Of course, most people with congenital heart problems do not have neural tube defects, and vice versa, but the existence of one involves a prevalence of the other that is quite a lot higher than in the general population.

So, though I cannot arrive at any firm conclusions, I know that I had congenital heart disease, I have lifelong neurological and psychological attributes that seem (to me) to be consistent with what would have been called Asperger’s Syndrome before about 2013, and I had symptoms (and signs) that could very well correlate with the presence of a minor form of Spina Bifida Occulta***.

Also, of course, my physical findings when my back was investigated for a resurgence of leg pain in mid-adulthood are consistent with a structural weakness in the posterior region of L5-S1, such that my disc damage or injury was markedly worse than most I’ve seen in patients with whom I’ve been associated, or in descriptions of disc disease.

Alas, I no longer have, nor have access to, my former radiographs of any kind, nor medical notes or surgical notes.  I could be incorrect in this assessment of possibility, and I certainly don’t put my credence very close to 100%.  But I think I’ve nudged myself at least past the 50% point.

Whatever the case, I have chronic pain now, and I’ve had surgery in my back and implanted matrix with bone growth factor there and a titanium cage, so it’s probably all too messy ever to discern if there used to be a very minor case of SBO in the past.  Until and unless someone develops a means of scanning the past such as the Father invented in my book Son of Man, which uses complex time (and a phenomenon I made up) to be able to scan the past of quantum fields without running afoul of the uncertainty principle, I’m unlikely ever to know with anything close to certainty.

I’m convinced that our firm credences of any of the facts of reality can never actually be 100%‒I personally don’t even consider “I think therefore I am” to be completely valid, since even my consciousness might be part of some much greater mind’s imagination…though I suppose in that case, it would still be valid to say that “I am”, just that what I am would be different than what I seem to myself to be.

But for all practical purposes, it’s reasonable to go with Descartes, though.  Most other aspects of reality are, as he pointed out, less certain than we often suspect them to be‒except when they are more certain than we expect them to be.  

I hope I haven’t bored you too much with these thoughts.  They seem interesting to me, of course, but I recognize that’s no guarantee that anyone else will find them anything but mind-numbing.

It would be nice if I could find a way to get better answers than I have on questions of personal neural tube defects or neurodevelopmental disorders, but even textbook findings of such disorders are somewhat misleading, because we don’t have MRIs (or similar) of everyone in a population and symptoms or signs to correlate with findings.  Indeed, almost by definition, the MRIs and CTs and X-rays of people with such issues are going to be those with the most obvious and glaring findings.

Oh, well.  Reality is often disappointing.  But at least thinking about these things is momentarily engaging.

I won’t be writing a blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, so I hope you all have as good a weekend as you can have‒which you will, since whatever happens will be what has happened, and will not be subject to change once it has (It’s always the best, and the worst, of all possible worlds, in a sense).  So, I guess it might be worth it not to worry about it too much.  But, of course, you also don’t have any choice about whether you worry about it or not, once you’re worrying about it****.

Even if there are “many words” a la Hugh Everett, you still only will experience one version of your life.  The fact that another of you might have it better (or worse) has no bearing on your experience in any given Everettian branch, unless it’s possible for the wave function branches to interfere again after decoherence, which is, in principle, possible, but so vanishingly unlikely that it seems not worth considering.

Enough!  Please have a good weekend.

*It was disappointing.  My tastes seem to have changed over time, perhaps due to Covid or perhaps to other matters, but some things I used to like don’t seem to please me anymore.  In this case, that’s probably just as well.

**Myo- for muscle and -pathy for “something wrong with”.  It’s a fairly basic term that reveals almost nothing beyond its prima facie meaning, but it sounds impressive because of the Latin.

***I should note that leg pain is not part of the traditional symptom list of SBO, but intermittent leg weakness is definitely a part of it‒and my leg aches were associated with some radicular type symptoms, such as apparently being associated with notable temperature change in the affected extremities.  At least, it was notable by our family dog, Ernie, who would often unerringly come and lie on my affected leg when I was in pain, just in the right place, as if to provide warmth and comfort.  He was a good dog!  Anyway, disorders rarely exactly follow the textbook descriptions.  As I’ve often said, diseases don’t read the literature.

****Rush were simply wrong; you cannot choose free will.  It either is or it isn’t, but that’s not up to you.

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I’ll give my jewels for a set of blogs, my gorgeous palace for a hermitage

Hello and good morning.  What follows is a very brief experimental attempt to see how well I can do voice to text while walking on my way toward the train station.  I don’t expect it to be a major way for me to produce this blog post, but maybe it’ll be entertaining, and if it turns out to be pretty good then I may actually go along with it further at some point.

I’m not sure how well to do things like line breaks and paragraph starts and so forth.  I may have to add all those after the fact by hand.  I don’t even know how it’s coming out right now so far, because I can’t really watch it while I’m walking as I speak/write.  I’ll have to learn at the end how well the voice to text process has worked.

In any case it is what it is, and I guess I’ll just have to see how it turns out.  It’s not that difficult in principle to add paragraph breaks after the fact.  I usually break up my paragraphs after my initial draft anyway.  But I’m not going to be doing this portion of this blog post much longer than to the end of the block.  It’s an interesting experiment and question, but until I find out how well it’s gone, and how well the computer has actually understood my spoken words to turn them into typewritten words, I don’t want to put too many eggs in that basket.

If that cliché is not your liking, please feel free to insert another.

It’s also a little bit awkward to speak too much when one is walking at a decent pace.  Okay, now I’m getting close to the end of the block and so I think I will draw this experimental portion of the blog post this close, and I will then finish it up by hand starting after I get to the train station.  Thank you for indulging me in this experiment.

***

Okay, that was the experimental section, which the smartphone says consists of 342 words.  That’s a fair few words to have spoken (to text) by the time I reached the end of my block, but then again, I live quite near one end of a long block, more akin to the space between avenues in Manhattan* than the space between “streets” in Manhattan.

I also tend to be rather garrulous when I get to talking, and I probably say less than the number of words used would imply.  In between such floods of verbiage, I am often at least somewhat taciturn, especially in the morning, and especially relating to “small talk”.  I really don’t like idle conversation at any time, but especially in the morning.  In fact, people who ask me “how I’m doing” or “how I’m feeling” in the morning can only be thankful‒though they know it not‒that I am not strong with the Force, because otherwise I would litter the morning floor with so many choked out bodies that Darth Vader would probably be moved to say, “Hey…dude…come on, man, you need to try to lighten up.  They didn’t do anything to deserve getting killed.”

Touché, Lord Vader.  Touché.  Actually, come to think of it, if you’re fencing with lightsabers, a touché is a pretty serious situation.

I’m sorry if I’m a bit bizarre today; I hardly slept at all last night, well under two hours.  I suspected this might happen.  As I stopped the melatonin, my daytime energy went up because I’m no longer groggy from the persistent hangover effect.  Then, yesterday, I walked 5 miles in the evening and got back to the house around 9, then showered and ate something and so on.  I was perhaps too physically wound up to easily get to sleep, and then staying asleep has never really been my strong point.  So…that happened, as they say, and it will probably affect my mood (affect my affect, if you will) today.

This is a deliberate and calculated thing I’m doing.  Quite apart from the fact that it didn’t seem to help my sleep much‒perhaps a slight amount‒the melatonin left me with less mental energy during the day.  Anyway, I’m trying to divest myself of most of the things I have and do that might make me meta-stable, that might hold back my depression, but not enough actually to treat it, only enough to keep it from completely destroying me.

I want to say to it, “Come on then, depression.  Here I am.  Do your worst.  No one’s coming to help, and I’m tired of trying to help myself.  If you’re capable of destroying me, then come on and do it, you piece of shit.”

It’s sort of a King Lear, “Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks…” moment:  An old man stands in the storm and invites it, or dares it, to destroy him.

I think I’ve already used part of that moment as a title of a previous Thursday blog, which is a shame.  It’s a lovely metaphor for many aspects of my life, perhaps much more than, say, Hamlet, which I quote more often.

Even Shakespeare, though, doesn’t have an infinite supply of potential quotes.  An infinite room full of monkeys and typewriters would, in principle, have a bigger body of work, but finding the good stuff would be a hell of a chore.  That’s probably a bit like reading my blog.  To those of you who do, thank you.  I appreciate your patience and kindness.

TTFN

palace in saint petersburgdarker

*I’m referring here to Manhattan Island in New York City.  There is also a Manhattan in Kansas, and there may be many more places named after the heart of New York City.  I don’t know much (if anything) about the street layout in such far flung places, but I would guess that their subway systems are less elaborate than that of the original.

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Minor meandering, major depression, and a locrian outlook

It’s Tuesday morning now, and if the Beatles are to be believed, we will never see Wednesday morning, because “Tuesday afternoon is never ending.”  We’ll know by tomorrow if they are correct, but experience suggests they are not.

I walked to the train station this morning, and I must say, though the temperature and humidity are no better than before, at least now there is some wind.  It makes a world of difference, at least in the amount of sweat one accumulates.  I’m wearing one of those tee shirts that’s made of material that supposedly “wicks away” perspiration‒presumably while still allowing it to achieve its primary function of carrying away heat‒but when there’s no wind, the things just get saturated.

As I’ve said before (I have been told it; I did not arrive at the conclusion on my own), my sweat apparently doesn’t have much of an odor, at least in the short term.  I also spritzed myself with a bit of “scent bomb” before starting this post and prior to getting on the train.  It’s a mango scented one that everyone I’ve known to have smelled it finds pleasant.  Hopefully that all helps me avoid being too disgusting.  There’s not too much I can do about my face; I guess I could just wear a mask.  It works for Batman and Doctor Doom and Erik, the Phantom of the Opera.  We’ll have to see.

I decided to stop taking melatonin, so I didn’t take any last night.  I’ve been using it for roughly a month, but it doesn’t seem to be helping my sleep, and it’s certainly not improving my mood or my mental acuity, so f*ck it.  If I never have another full night’s restful sleep for the rest of my life, well…what else is new?  I’ll just stick with my multivitamin and stuff like that (and OTC pain medicine) and try just to get more into walking now that I’ve got the shoe situation more or less sorted.

I remain very sad about the fact that the hiking boots seem to cause me more pain when I wear them for long.  Still, heartbreak is the normal, usual state of my life, on scales from the trivial to the profound, so I guess I should just shrug it off as best I can.  The boot debacle is very, very far from my worst disappointment.  It is recent, though, so it still stings a bit; I guess I haven’t cauterized my metaphorical nerve endings well enough.

I listened to a few decent podcasts while walking, and that was beneficial, because they are the sorts of podcasts that deal with ideas in non-simplistic ways, and that approach such ideas as matters for discussion and thought, not for debate and spectacle.  A debate is just a kind of sporting match‒it can be entertaining, and the displays of skill can be exciting.  But the way to come ever closer to ever greater amounts of truth about reality is not via rhetoric and engaging personality (which are mere superficialities that titillate social monkeys such as humans) but by using actual ideas, exchanging information, testing it, and trying to minimize noise and entropy and error.

Truth is not an “Us versus Them”, zero sum game of scoring points and humiliating an opponent.  That which is actually true, in reality, is true for everyone, whether they perceive it or not, whether they know it or not, and whether they believe it or not.

Anyway, that’s a bit of minor meandering.  Today again appears to be one of those days in which I spin from idea to tangent idea here in my blog, for no specific discernable reasons.  At least I don’t discern them.  Maybe some astute and skilled reader can do better.

Oh, if I haven’t already said, I’ve been writing this on my smartphone.  Actually, even if I have already said, I’ve nevertheless been writing this on my smartphone.  That’s one of those truths about reality I mentioned, though it’s not a very big one.

Yesterday at the end of the work day, I just didn’t want to carry the extra weight of the laptop with me.  I was in a horrible, horrible, angrily depressed mood, and was barely able to contain myself, though I think very few people in the office‒perhaps none‒noticed it.  I tend to turn my fury inward, since I know I have the right to harm myself, whereas it’s a much dicier moral proposition to hurt someone else.  So, I quietly burned myself twice yesterday (not severely), and I have a small new blister on my left forearm and a linear welt from a heated paperclip on my right anterior upper arm.

I told you, I’m not doing well.  I don’t just hate my life and myself; I don’t think I can stand it much longer, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

It’s a month from today until Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, which is also a day before the start of autumn, at the autumnal equinox.  It’s a very good day, I think, for someone to begin an epic journey.  The biggest question, for me, is whether I can wait that long.  I’m not sure that I can.

I guess, yet again, we’ll have to wait and see.  Obviously I’ve been able to endure long enough to write this morning’s blog post, and on my phone, what’s more.  I make no promises about tomorrow.  I don’t even know how good the odds are, honestly.  I’m not doing well, I’m not getting better, and I hate my life a little bit more with every passing day.  I’m also growing less and less fond of the world and of all the people and creatures in it with each passing hour, it seems.

Oh, well.  The world will little note, nor long remember…well, honestly, anything at all.  Everything is effaced by time and entropy, and nothing really has any point outside and beyond itself.  That latter conclusion actually presents a kind of brilliant freedom, really; meaning is not imposed, it is created.  But that can be a heavy burden, and our culture is poorly organized to bring such facts to the clear attention of those within it.

Still, culture has no more extrinsic meaning than does an individual life, nor is it any more planned and finely tuned.  As with all else, it just happens‒or happened I guess, and now merely continues.

Jeez Louise, it’s all both nauseating and boring, and that’s a truly repellent combination.  I have a harder and harder time every day just metaphorically holding my nose and continuing to walk through the sewer of the world.

Ah, well, I’m not getting anywhere with this.  Let’s stop for now.  Please try to have a good day.

by

No bootlaces to be tied by this Monday’s child

Well, it’s Monday again—the 21st of August—and today I am writing this on my mini-laptop computer, as I said in my Saturday post that I would try to do.  So, at least some of my intentions do end up happening in the world, if they are minor and mainly inconsequential.

Of course, most of what anyone ever intends, or does, or does not do, is from any kind of serious perspective inconsequential.  One can also make the argument that, since pretty much everything is inconsequential, then everything is consequential, from the corollary or converse or obverse or whatever the term is of Dash’s point in The Incredibles*.  And, to stick with Sci-Fi/Fantasy worlds, the 11th Doctor more than once made the point that, in all his travels through time and space, he’d never met anyone unimportant.

So, congratulations, your decision about what to have for breakfast—and whether or not to have anything at all—is just as important to the cosmos at large as any decision that might be made today by any head of state in the world.

Does that make you feel important?  In what way?  Or if not, why do you think it doesn’t?

[Sorry, somehow that felt like the proper moment to pretend to be a cartoon-style psychotherapist.]

Speaking of psychotherapy and its targeted problems, I missed yet another potential stop-code among the recording numbers in the verification system on Saturday.  As the day started, with the first deal, we were coming close to a potential palindromic sequence, and we had two deals in quick succession, so it seemed we might just land on it this time (although there was never very much of a chance).

Anyway, there was then a long gap between deals, and we blew right past the next potential one by well over a hundred by the time we made our next deal for the day.  There won’t be many more opportunities between now and my semi-planned final takeoff date.

Even if a palindromic number sequence were to come up, I’m not sure what I would do about it.  I don’t truly believe in any kind of mystic notion relating to numbers, I just find them mildly amusing to play with, and so gave myself this notion of an “abort code”**.  But if such a number came up now, I don’t know that its occurrence would sway me one way or another.

In any case, I’m the only one who would know, since no one at work seems to have even the slightest clue that I feel self-destructive in the first place, let alone that I set myself little escape hatches or potential self-messages to give up on ending things.  It’s not for want of wanting to get the idea across to people—without being unnecessarily melodramatic or intrusive, anyway—but I don’t seem to be very good at crying for help.  I guess that’s a pretty big weakness.

Still, if a palindromic number sequence were to come up sometime between now and, say, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, I think I would just find it a curiosity.

I think I’m going to start to phase out even the few little things I’ve been doing to try to improve my mental health to whatever limited degree I am able to do it.  As regular readers will know, I stopped taking any form of anti-depressant, since it wasn’t working for me at all, and the side-effects were annoying.  I think I’m going to stop even trying to improve my sleep anymore.  Talk about tilting at windmills; I haven’t been sleeping any better than I used to, and I certainly don’t think my mood has improved.

But if it has, it’s done so in a tiny, miserable little way, which in some ways could be a curse.  It’s a bit like taking a disease someone has that’s killing them and pulling back its intensity just enough so that they can stay alive indefinitely, but not enough to make them feel any better or be any healthier.

Come to think of it, it’s not a bit like that at all; it’s exactly and literally that.

[Brief side note:  I’ve noticing that my laptop is very laggy—at least, my laptop computer is—as I’ve been using it today, especially once I activated the auto-save.  I don’t know why it’s especially slow at this point.  I haven’t upgraded it to Windows 11, since I worry that it wouldn’t handle the change that well, and I don’t like unneeded change myself if I can help it.  Also, I don’t really think that’s the problem.  It was never meant to be a speedy and powerful computer, since I got it just to write stories and blog posts.  Oh, well, maybe it’s just that I haven’t used it in a while.]

So far I’ve resisted the urge to get an Uber to the train station; my plan is to try to force myself to take the bus to the train, and then on the way back this evening I intend to try to walk back to the house from the station.  The only real impediment to the walking is the heat; the exertion itself doesn’t intimidate me.  The potential for added pain is sometimes a concern, but I think I’ve adjusted myself, shoe and knee-brace wise, in ways that keep that stable, so the walking doesn’t make things worse.  Knock on wood, if you do that sort of thing.

Soon it will be time to close out the first draft of this post and head for the bus stop.  I guess I’ll try to listen to some podcast or other on the way.  I don’t have any real interest in listening to any of the audio books I have.  I don’t have much, if any, interest in reading any book books, frankly, digital or paper.  Even non-fiction is getting unworkable, and I’ve long since lost my ability to engage in fiction almost entirely.

I’m also getting bored with the Euchre app game that I play, and with the Sudoku app that I play, and frankly, with everything else.  YouTube is getting boring, the various news sites and blogs I try to read can’t seem to catch my attention or lift my spirits.  Nothing seems to be working, and the days are getting shorter now, so to speak, so the seasonality to my mood is heading into worse territory.  This whole game is getting more uninteresting by the moment.  In the words of the WOPR from the movie War Games, it seems that the only winning move is not to play.

But of course, once you can choose your move, you’ve already been forced to start playing.  It’s all rather unfair and unkind, but that’s reality for you.  You get squeezed into the game without being consulted (since you cannot be consulted until you’re already in the game) by people who were themselves squeezed into the game without being consulted, all the way back to the beginning of the whole thing.  So, I guess none of us should feel too bad if we fail to live up to some expectations or ideals or something along those lines.

That’s enough half-assed philosophy for today.  I hope you all are starting what is going to be a good week, and that you have reasonably good weeks from now until the end of your days.  Why not?  I might as well hope for that for you.  You deserve it as much as anyone does, and probably more than most (from my point of view) since you are people who read.

*When his mother told him, “Everyone’s special, Dash,” he replied with, “Which is another way of saying no one is.”

**Though, in sense, it should be considered an anti-abort code, like the process needed to turn off an auto-destruct sequence for a spaceship.  Why would so many imagined futuristic civilizations make spaceships with self-destruct systems, anyway?  Are they all carrying state secrets of some kind?  We don’t put autodestruct systems into cars or trucks or trains or planes or even warships, tanks, and fighter jets.  It’s a weird thing to do.  I suspect it’s usually just a rather ham handed plot device, and once it happened prominently in one story, other stories mimicked it.