insomnia

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“…and the worms ate into his brain.”

It’s Tuesday morning.

It’s odd how a night can seem to last for a thousand years, and yet, nevertheless, the morning can come far too soon.  That’s the situation in which I find myself, today.  It’s nothing particularly new, but it has been a night that’s tending toward the bad tail of the bell curve, by which I mean, it was worse than most of my nights.

I keep wanting to write some form of the present tense, as in “it is” a worse night than most, because there has been no real boundary between last night and now.  My back and leg pain has been more or less continuous, and though my consciousness has been waxing and waning, there has been no real rest.

There’s a rather famous philosophical notion that, as far as one knows, after one has gone to sleep, when one wakes up, one might have died and been replaced during the night, and one could be a completely new being in the morning, with just some implanted memories from the person who came before.  Of course, this could also be true in any given waking moment, since all we know of our personal past is our memories of it, but there’s a definite feeling of continuity during a given day—sometimes there’s too much continuity—that is interrupted when we have a true night’s sleep.

Well, I definitely feel a rather strong continuity now with yesterday; I have no sense of having been significantly unconscious overnight, though I know I wasn’t fully conscious the whole time.  And now I have to go to work, where my only regular, pseudo-social interaction happens, but which also tends to make me stressed much more than it makes me feel good, mainly because of noise and irregular interruptions.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are many people at the office whom I like, and even one or two with whom I can have enjoyable conversations, at least about some things, though not about very much.  I know, it’s my own fault that I have no friends anymore.  And by “fault” I mean, I know that I am faulty.  I’m a bad product, a lemon.  Any sensible consumer protection agency probably would have demanded I be recalled to the factory if there were such a thing.  I was born with both cardiac and (apparently) neurological defects.  These things should have been covered under the warranty.

I know, I know, melodrama, right?  It’s curious that I express myself so over-much here in this blog.  Apparently, in person, I’m rather wooden, and don’t smile very much—though I get the impression that when I talk about music I like or about math or science or things of that nature, I light up a bit.  Certainly, I get more energetic.  And then people’s faces soon tend to glaze over and look either confused or bored or whatever.

I used to wake up with leg aches a lot when I was little.  I don’t know what the cause was, really; they used to think they were “growing pains” or something along those lines.  I just know they hurt an awful lot, and they often woke me up.  When I started having my “new” onset of pain—it turns out almost certainly to have been related to a back injury—as an adult, I thought that it was some kind of recrudescence of the problem I had as a kid.

I underwent all sorts of tests to see if there was a neurological/myological problem of chronic, perhaps congenital, nature.  I even went through electromyography, which is a lot like getting a protracted series of intramuscular injections in which the needle is just left in the large muscle group and then you’re told to flex the muscle while it’s in there.  I don’t recommend it as something fun to do, even if you think you’re something of a masochist, which I am not.

Anyway, they didn’t find anything like that, at least nothing obvious, and I eventually learned I had a seriously ruptured/torn L5-S1 disc, and ultimately had surgery on it.  To be fair, the surgery reduced my pain, but it clearly has not eliminated it.

Sorry, I know this is all boring and repetitive.  Such is life, though, isn’t it?  It’s boring and repetitive.  At least, it’s repetitive.  I guess when one has family and friends and loved ones, people with whom one can spend time doing nothing in particular in each other’s company, the repetitive doesn’t feel boring.  I’ve been in that situation before, and for long periods of time.  I had a good, close family, with good parents, brother, sister, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on.  I had friends growing up, in school, and in college.  I was married for fifteen years, and that wasn’t boring, certainly.  I had friends in med school and residency, and I had my kids.  That was all truly great and wonderful.

I am now tired and worn down, and quite alone/lonely, but I don’t necessarily want to want to die, though I often do feel that I want to die.  I want to want to live, which is not quite the same things as wanting to live, unfortunately.  I need help.

I feel like the narrator of the song Hey, you, asking if people can feel him, if they can touch him, if they would help him to carry the stone.  But, of course, it was only fantasy, as the song goes on to note.  The wall was too high, and no matter how he tried, he could not break free.  And so on (see above).

Pink Floyd does seem to resonate for me, and it has since I first started listening to them, especially their big four albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and of course, The Wall.  I’m clearly not alone in this, which is actually somewhat ironic. Isn’t it?

Oh, by the way, based on the way I save my blog posts in the computer, I’ve just realized that the day of the week for the current date is one day later than it was last year.  In other words, July 18th (today) is on a Tuesday this year and was on a Monday last year.  This means that every seven years it should come around to the same day, except that leap years make the cycle irregular.

It will be five or six years instead of seven between returns to a given day, depending on whether there is only one leap year embedded in the course or if there are two.  There can’t be more than two, because leap years are every four years, but there are only seven days in a week.  I guess that could mean, though, that it could be more than seven years before a return to the same day, if the year when one would be returning to it is a leap year, and then that day might be skipped over again, leading to a longer course of time between.  I could try to work out the potential maximum length of time between when one date falls on one day of the week next time, but I’m already getting bored of this.  In any case, in the long run, it ought to be on average that the date falls on the same day of the week one out of every seven years.

Except February 29th, of course.  There are more than seven years between any repeated day for February 29th.

Anyway, I’m going to go.  I’m in so much pain, despite what meds I have available, that I think I’ll call a Lyft or something to get to the train station.  I hate doing that, but I’m just worn out.  Also, it’s not as though I’m saving money for some possible, imagined future retirement; I don’t see how it’s possible that I have a future of significance.

I would like to have a future.  I would like someone, somewhere, to find me some kind of answers or help or something.  But that’s pretty unreasonable to ask of other people, all of whom have their own problems and pains and troubles.

I guess the show must go on, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

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Something for the rag and bone man

It’s Friday morning, July 14th.  I strongly considered walking to the train station this morning to try to get back into that habit, since I’ve been sick this week, but then last night I had an especially horrible night’s sleep.  I think I got maybe an hour or an hour and a half total of sleep, not continuously, but spread out over the time between 10 and 3.  Now I feel surreal and slightly hallucinatory.  I really don’t even want to go into the office, but I’ve already missed one day this week (Monday), and I’m off this weekend, so I’ll try to trudge through today.

I don’t know what to do about this.  My sleep and other issues seem to be worsening, and it’s getting to the point where fewer and fewer things keep me wanting to do anything.  Most days, honestly, I half-wish I were dead, but today it’s more than half.  I’m so tired; I don’t know what to do.  But I’m not sleepy.

I think tonight, even though it gave me some trouble last time, I’m going to take one of those melatonin, as well as two Benadryl, just to see if it helps at all.  The research apparently shows that melatonin doesn’t do much other than to reset one’s sleep clock if one is off kilter, but maybe in some people—maybe in people with weird brains to begin with—it might help.  I don’t know.  Anyway, I don’t work tomorrow, so if I have a bad reaction and get a headache and all that, it won’t matter much.

It’s not as if I have any plans for Saturday.  I don’t see anyone or spend time with anyone, though I’m going to call my sister this weekend, and that’s a good thing.  I don’t go out or do anything interesting.  I’ve sort of half-decided I want to try to replace the inner tube in my bike and retry that again, maybe go for a ride.  That might be worth doing.  I have the necessary equipment, at least.  I don’t know if I’ll have the will to do it, but I’ll wait and see.

I had plans to talk about that second topic I raised at the end of yesterday’s lengthy post.  I’m referring here to my thought that, perhaps, having big jackpot lotteries and the like for people to play legally has actually done harm to the overall work ethic and productivity of the nation, because at least some people will console and delude themselves with the dream—and yes, it is a dream, since to a good, five-sigma approximation, no one wins the lottery—that they might get a windfall and never have to work again, and then they could get and have all the joys and comforts they envision.

I imagine—and this is conjectural—that when there is no lottery available, people can’t even dream of getting ahead or getting more comfortable other than through working hard and saving their money.

Like I mentioned yesterday, this is not something I would imagine is to blame for all, or even a lion’s share, of the diminishment of the middle class and the work ethic and whatnot.  There are many factors in the equation or the program or whatever you might call it that determines the economic and sociological structure and function of a society.

But I don’t think the lottery has been a good thing in any sense.  It doesn’t appear to have benefited public education at all, which was one of the things for which lotteries were supposed to raise money.  If anything, it might have given those in government an excuse to be able to cut some of the tax-based funding for education.

Certainly the public schools appear to have gone downhill even since I was in school, and I don’t think I’m just being a typical curmudgeon who thinks the younger generation is stupider than the youth of my generation were.  In fact, I don’t think they are stupider.  Probably they’re overall somewhat smarter—they certainly have less exposure to environmental lead than people did when I was a kid, and the general knowledge base of civilization has definitely increased.  But the education system in general appears to be much worse than it used to be, and what’s more troubling is that people seem not to care as much about education as in the past.  The respect for teachers and for schools and for getting an education in general seem to have declined significantly.

That doesn’t seem like a good way to run a society with an eye toward the future.  In fact, the future seems more and more bleak by the year.  Thankfully, of course, there are smart people out there, and some of them will be able to get educated in spite of the schools they attend, and when push comes to shove, these individuals will do their best to come up with new solutions to new and old problems, and they will carry the rest of the human infestation along with them, for better or for worse.

But if people in general were better educated—if they were taught even basic probability and statistics in high school, or even junior high, for instance—there would be much less of a market for con games such as state lotteries.  One sees people lining up almost every day in the convenience stores, spending absurd amounts of money (which they cannot afford) on slips of paper that they might as well use to blow their noses or wipe their asses.

I always told my patients that they should never make a special trip to buy a lottery ticket, because they were far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident on the way to the store than they were to win the jackpot.  I suspect this might be true even if they walk to the store, though at least then they would be getting exercise.  The odds of them getting injured are even greater than the odds of them getting killed, and in the USA, people with injuries that cause persistent diminishment of ability are going to have extra expenses and decreased productivity and lower quality of life for a long time, and our healthcare system is woefully inadequate.

And make no mistake, injuries that you have do cause chronic diminishment of your capacity—“you are still the victim of the accidents you leave”.

Nietzsche’s famous quote about “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is just a load of bullshit.  Remember, the man died of neurosyphilis, but syphilis doesn’t progress to the nervous system very rapidly.  It didn’t kill him quickly, but it certainly didn’t make him stronger, neither physically nor mentally.  Exercise, practice, education, deliberate self-improvement—these things can make one stronger.  Accident and injury don’t tend to do that.

Not to say that a person can’t find wisdom and lessons even from horrible events, but to do that, one needs to be primed to look for such lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I probably could go on and on and off on tangents of various kinds related to this.  It’s frustrating to see people make excuses for why they don’t think they need to worry about educating their children, and at the same time to see people wasting their money on absurd gambles.  Gambling is only a winning industry for those who own the casinos or the lotteries (if them).  It is true that a very good poker player can make a living at the game, but only if there are worse poker players against whom they can play.  It’s a zero sum game.  There are no lions unless there are hinds; there are no wolves unless there are sheep.

Better to get educated, because knowledge can be shared and gained without real loss to the sharer.  Information can be reproduced now at very low cost—lower than it’s ever been before.  Education can be a positive-sum game, a mutual exchange to mutual benefit, which is the type of interaction at the heart of any functioning, productive economy.  If you get smarter, it doesn’t make me stupider; indeed, it often makes me smarter by feedback, for if you learn or create some truly new knowledge, then I can subsequently learn it.  More knowledge, more information, can benefit everyone.

But I doubt that it will.  I don’t have high hopes for the vast majority of humans.  As David Deutsch has pointed out, it certainly seems possible for the future of humanity to be a cosmically significant one, in the long term.  But there’s nothing that guarantees it.  It can easily go wrong, and most times throughout history, the production of knowledge has gone wrong, and has ground to a halt for centuries at a time and more.

Oh, well.  I’m too tired to do much but feel pessimistic about everything, anyway.  This blog is the closest thing to contribution to society that I do anymore.  I don’t know that it does me any good, though.

Anyway, I’m off to head to the train station now, for another depressing day of pretending that there is any point at all to continuing to strive to make a living.  I hope you all feel better, or at least better rested, than I do.

karloff-monster so tired

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

Well, it’s Wednesday morning now, as one might expect, if one lives life linearly and ordinally, which is how I do it.  I’m writing this on my little laptop computer today, because my thumbs have been getting sore from the use of the smartphone for blogging—more precisely, the base of my thumbs and my first MCP joints on both sides hurt quite a bit.  Also, I just type faster on the laptop, and It’s easier for me to express myself, though why I ever bother doing that is not quite entirely clear to me.

I feel pretty rotten still—physically, I mean.  I still have body aches and soreness and weakness (or at least asthenia) and a general feeling of being slightly breathless.  I still had a very low-grade fever as of last night, but I checked my oxygen, which was 95-96% saturation, occasionally pushing up to 97%, and my pulse rate was in the high-90s to low 100s, a bit variable with respiration.  That’s actually slightly low for me.  All my life I’ve tended to have a rapid pulse, possibly related to the atrial septal defect with which I was born, which can affect the heart’s inherent pacemaker and conduction system because of its location.

Apparently, the average number of heartbeats in a lifetime for a human (or closely related alien) is about 3 billion.  This is more than that of most mammals, which hover a little below two-thirds that many, if memory serves.  That number is roughly consistent from shrews to blue whales.  Geoffrey West discusses some of this in his book Scale, which is really interesting, and I recommend it.  As for me, I haven’t read anything in over a week, really, other than a few blog posts.

I just did a quick calculation regarding my chronic, diagnosed “sinus tachycardia”*.  If my average heart rate were 110—which my pulse can hover near, at least some of the time—I should have lived to about 51.8 years.  I’m already slightly past that, but within the realm of rough experimental error.  If 105 were closer to my average, my expected lifespan would be about 54.3 years, which would mean I have less than a year to go.  I figured the first number by dividing 3 billion by 110, then by 60, then by 24, then by 365.25.  I then did the second one by replacing the 110 with 105 and repeating the whole thing, but it occurs to me that I could just have taken 51.8 x 110/105 and gotten the same answer more easily.

So, basically, if my pulse has been steadily tachycardic—which I can only infer roughly based on the moments in which I’ve actually measured it, since I obviously didn’t measure it in between—then I’ve already lived just about as many heartbeats as I’m expected to live, on average.

Of course, there are some big “ifs” there.  There have certainly been times when I’ve been more fit, and that has tended to slow my resting heart rate somewhat.  Also, let’s not be too quasi-mystical about all this; it’s not as though there is some ethereal hourglass that measures out not seconds but heartbeats in the platonic space of life and death.  It’s just a rough average.

If the world is deterministic, then of course, one does, in a sense, have a pre-programmed number of heartbeats before one dies, but there’s nothing about that number that would determine the length of one’s life; it would, indeed, be a consequence of the various things that determine the length of one’s life, just as would the length of that life in seconds.  It wouldn’t be a dispositive fact, merely an epiphenomenon.  It would be casual rather than causal, one might say.

This is all a bit silly, but in many ways it’s reassuring to me that, just maybe, I really have come to what will be the natural end of my expected life.  I’ve read that people on the autism spectrum have shorter expected lifespans than people not on the spectrum (the range is wide, apparently anywhere from 36 to 61 years, which seems pretty imprecise) supposedly largely due to the various difficulties with self-care and social support and the like.

One reads plenty of reported evidence that a key determinant of a long and “happy” life is the degree of one’s social support network—not necessarily its size, but certainly its quality.  Well, when one of the fundamental aspects of a dysfunction is difficulty with ordinary social communication and connection, one can expect a group to tend to have a poorer social support network and ability to self-advocate.  And, of course, the three major proximate causes of death are apparently—according to a quick Bing search—epilepsy, heart disease, and suicide.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of epilepsy.  I do have a cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, which was discovered by chance on an MRI done for other reasons.  It’s a benign finding, in and of itself, but it turns out to be slightly more common in people with ASD (the neurologic one, not the cardiac one) as does ASD itself (the cardiac one, this time, which I also had).

So, I do/did have at least one form of heart disease, though I don’t know whether it counts in the measure of what they’re describing as such causes.  I think the third thing in the list is by far the most likely cause of premature death for me, if “premature” is really the right word.  After all, my “social support network” is locally all but nonexistent, and is very limited on a distant scale.

Of course, sleep disorders—also apparently very prevalent in those “on the spectrum”—are significant impediments to a long and happy life for anyone, and my sleep has been disordered for a very long time.  As a case in point, yesterday I was so physically wiped out from work and feeling ill that I just took a ride from the train station to the house and tried just to shut off the light, take half a Benadryl, and go to sleep.  Then—to no one’s surprise, but to my frustration—I could not get to sleep until after midnight, and then I started waking up by no later than two in the morning, awakening on and off every ten to twenty minutes until finally there was no point in delaying anymore.

I don’t know why I’m discussing all this trivia.  Maybe I’m just to try to get the message out that, if I do die “young”** in the near-future, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, you shouldn’t think of it as something sad, as some kind of tragedy.  My life is pathetically empty, and rather unpleasant most of the time.

I would never say there aren’t people who have it much worse than I do.  Of course there are.  That will almost certainly always be true, by any set of criteria one might choose.  It’s also irrelevant.  There are people who die young who, based on the quality of their lives, would have been better off having died even younger.  And there are those who live very long lives who still could have lived even longer with great happiness and well-being, and so even after a century, such a death could be considered premature by some criteria.  Futility is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I’m dragging this out, as I tend to do.  I just feel very tired, and very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any particular joy, or prospect of future joy, that makes me want to keep going and live longer.  I’m lonely and sad and uncomfortable and awkward and weird, living in a world in which I feel like an alien or a changeling or a mutant, or whatever.

Well, lets call that good for now, so to speak.  I’m going to get a Lyft to the train again today, because I’ve taken longer than I’d like to catch the bus, and anyway, I’m still just wiped out.  I’m going to try to time the train I take so that I get to my destination after the nearest CVS is open, so I can pick up some cold medicine***.  Maybe a decongestant will help me feel like I can breathe a little better.  Who knows?  But I need to do the payroll today, so at least it might help me stay awake for the time being, even if the decongestant effect doesn’t make much difference.  After that, I don’t think it really matters much.

*Nothing to do with the sinuses in one’s head, but with the sino-atrial node in the heart, the intrinsic pacemaker.  It means that one has a fast heart rate—tachycardia—but that its origin is at the usual source of the heartbeat.  It’s not an aberrant source or a reentrant tachycardia such as might occur when the conduction system of the heart develops a loop that keeps feeding rapidly back into itself and generating a truly and significantly over-fast heartbeat.  That can degenerate into more dangerous arrhythmias, whereas sinus tachycardia does not tend to do so.

**Scare quotes added because I do not feel young in almost any way, other than, perhaps, my ability to remain curious about various things in a way that seems unusual in other people somehow.  Many days I feel as if I’ve lived for centuries, but not in a cool, Anne Rice vampire kind of way.  Rather, I feel more like a mortal who has kept one of the Great Rings.  I’ve discussed that metaphor before and won’t bother going into it now.

***I did time it correctly, and the CVS was open…but the pharmacy was not, and will not be until 9 am.  Unfortunately, one cannot get real Sudafed—the decongestant that actually works without causing dangerous elevations in blood pressure—except at the pharmacy counter, and only in limited amounts, because some people have used it to make amphetamines.

This is a truly absurd and sub-moronic standard.  It’s harder for a law-abiding citizen in Florida to get a product containing pseudoephedrine than it is to get a gun, and all so the state can prevent a small minority of people from willingly taking a substance into their own bodies that no one is forcing them to use, just as some other people use beer or potato chips or Big Macs or ice cream…or tobacco.

And, of course, they aren’t actually preventing anything.  If they wanted to prevent drug use, they’d have to try to find out why life is bleak and empty enough for some people that they seek artificial sources of transient mood elevation (even though those sources are dangerous) and perhaps try to remedy or at least remediate the causes.  But, no, the same sort of people who would decry government overreach if corporate or upper-echelon income taxes were raised slightly, or if the government tried to ensure that people are vaccinated to curtail the spread of actual contagion to millions, and who would take up arms in open rebellion against any attempt to restrict gun ownership at any level, are willing to have the state keep people from using a comparatively safe medication for congestion and force them to use more dangerous ones—like oxymetazoline, which I am going to have to use, today.

The law truly is “a ass” and “a idiot”, and it’s written by people who are—and who are voted into power by—cretins and troglodytes who cannot even comprehend the nature of and the science behind the comforts and technologies which keep them alive and relatively safe.  If any readers here have any influence in this particular issue, please try to do something about it.  If necessary, just burn it all—the whole stupid planet—and let nature start over in some new state.  There are still a billion or so habitable years on Earth in which hopefully to bring an actually intelligent species into existence for the first time.

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Phoning in yet another blog post

Well, here it is, Friday, and I’m writing another blog post.  I’m doing this one on my phone, because I didn’t feel like bringing the laptop with me when I left the office yesterday.  I had to leave late, because all of a sudden, at the end of the day, three different people got deals, and of course they all had to be processed and recorded‒and fixed, when the first 3 credit cards didn’t go through.  Of course, the people who got those deals were long gone well before things were finished; Cat forbid that they should have to leave late just because they waited until the end of the day to actually put in serious effort.  Cat forbid they should worry about inconveniencing other people.

I had hoped to get the 6:15 pm train and then walk back to the house from the train station while talking to my sister on the phone, but that didn’t work out.  By the time I even left the office it was already well past that train’s time, and the next one is 45 minutes later.  I was too tired and stressed out to talk then, and it was too late to start walking.  I didn’t really do any walking yesterday.

This morning, though, I awoke too early, and after putting it off for a while I finally got up and showered and walked the 5 miles to the station.  And now, I’m on the train.  It would be nice to get to the point where I get an endorphin surge from the walk, but evidently I’m not at that stage yet.

I wish I had something more interesting to write about, so you kind readers could have something interesting to read.  Alas, my creativity seems to be at a local nadir.  As mentioned, I haven’t really read anything this week so far, whether fiction or nonfiction, except a few short blog posts and news stories, though I didn’t get to the end even of most of those.  Likewise, I don’t think I’ve listened to a complete podcast nor finished a full YouTube video, though I’ve started quite a few.  Maybe I finished some on Tuesday in the evening, when I got off work early, but I’m not certain.

Anyway, I’m sorry to be such a drag.  I’m not a good or pleasant person, and I doubt that I ever have been.  Certainly most people who know me have voted with their feet in one way or another.  I ought to follow suit, and just walk away from everything, forever, and for good.

I didn’t even listen to any music or podcasts this morning, other than songs that were running through my head‒mainly The Man Who Sold the World and Ashes to Ashes today, though some others probably peeped in here and there.  Nevertheless, I kept my earphones in.  They’re good to have in place so that other people will understand if you don’t speak or listen to them.  You can even bob and sway a bit, if such is your habit, and people might just assume that you’re listening to music.  I don’t know for sure.  It’s hard to say what, if anything, goes through other people’s minds much of the time.

Oh, by the way, I apologize for not putting in hyperlinks to the sites or locations of the books I mentioned yesterday, which I usually do.  I didn’t really do any of my final usual edit on the site, because I just didn’t care.  I apologize, but I probably will behave similarly today.

Also, by the way, there seems to be some issue with the embedded Twitter sidebar on my site.  It claims I haven’t tweeted anything, which is a damned lie.  Evidently, the twit who now owns Twitter, and the twits he has running it, have fucked it up and made it difficult to connect to it.  If it gets annoying enough for me, I might explore how to fix the embedding, but I’m irritated enough at WordPress themselves for changing their input system for the worse.  This is the problem with constantly trying to update and change everything out of a sense of worry over competition:  while all improvement is change, most change is not an improvement.

Oh, well.  People are stupid.  They probably always will be stupid.  Even the very wealthy and successful are generally idiots, as we see demonstrated all too often.  Even bloggers (such as I) are often idiots, if you can believe such a thing!  No matter how smart someone may be, relative to, say, insects or baboons, or their fellow naked house apes, ignorance is always infinite.

And, on that uplifting note, I’ll stop for today.  It’s at least a shortish post, right?  I hope you all have a nice Friday, and a good weekend.  I expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since I work tomorrow.  I will try not to die before then, since my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday party is tomorrow, and I wouldn’t like to inconvenience him.

Still, there’s only so long I can keep staying alive so as not to cause problems for others.  Goodness knows, most other people don’t seem to have many qualms about inconveniencing me, or anyone else.

Is it any wonder I’m tired of the world?

Anyway, please try to have a nice day.

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Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps, and they that blog see time how slow it creeps

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the long-standing day of what was my weekly blog, back when I was writing fiction that almost no one but my family members would ever read on the other days of the week.

I’m writing this at the house, because I decided to take the bus in to the train this morning, because I already feel over-hot and sweaty and, most importantly, quite mentally fatigued.  I thought I’d give myself a short break and do my walking in the evening today.  That way, at least, I don’t have to carry a change of clothes with me to the office and have it drying out in front of my little desktop fan most of the day.  Not that anyone complained—they didn’t.  But it’s mildly irritating.

I’m getting tired of doing this blog, especially the Thursday one, in which I use a Shakespearean quote that I’ve altered to squeeze in some form of the word “blog”.  Then again, I’m getting tired of doing pretty much everything.

I haven’t read anything at all this week, apart from the occasional snippet of a news article.  I have listened to some podcasts—mainly Sean Carroll’s Mindscape—so far this week.  His solo “AMA” podcasts are often better than the ones in which he interviews someone, though I’ve encountered some interesting people through the latter podcasts, and have bought books by them.  Still, I did that far more often for people on the Sam Harris podcast.  I’m not sure why that is.  Maybe I just have more in common thought-wise with Harris, or I tend to find his guests more interesting.

Still, I like the AMA’s for both of them, the ones for Carroll because he is a physicist, and so people ask him many physics-related questions.  He has more than enough expertise to address them, and he’s a good explainer and thinker.  I think in some ways that Sam Harris is a more careful thinker, a more methodical and cautious one; his long-standing meditation practice seems to serve him well in this.  He strikes me as almost Vulcan in character, though not in any straightforward, simplistic, “emotionless” sense.  In any case, I admire both men and like to listen to their thoughts and listen to their interactions with other intelligent people about interesting topics.

I have Sean Carroll’s textbook on General Relativity, Spacetime and Geometry, but I haven’t read very far in it.  It’s not that it’s too difficult; it’s well written, and everything so far makes good sense and seems clear.  But I just have a hard time forcing myself to go through it, or anything else, really.  I have the book at the office, like I have Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, but I have to sit and actually read them, and there is no good time period during which to sit uninterrupted, even during my supposed lunch time.  And by the time I get back to the house—or early in the morning—I’m all but completely out of mental energy.

I also have Stephen Hawking’s book Euclidean Quantum Gravity (co-written with G.W. Gibbons) that supposedly goes into more detail on some ideas he mentioned in A Brief History of Time, and I’ve also hardly read any of that.  But, again, this week I really haven’t read anything, fiction or nonfiction.  I’m really running out of steam.  Nothing is very interesting.  Nothing is very fun.  I feel mentally exhausted, even though I’m getting more physically fit.  It’s just all very boring.

Maybe it would be better if I weren’t in pain every day, or if I had someone with whom I could really talk about things like physics and whatnot, on a regular basis.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  Well, I’m going nowhere, of course, but that’s more long term.

Maybe I should just Uber to the office, so I don’t even need to walk to the bus stop.  Why not?  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to save money.  I have no future for which to plan or prepare.

I feel a bit like Colonel Slade (I think that was his name) in Scent of a Woman, in that I might as well just spend whatever I have on minor diversions.  I have no interest in most of things in which he was interested, of course—no interest in Ferraris or escorts or fancy restaurants in Manhattan, or the Waldorf-Astoria.  I also have no interest in or expectation to find some high school student to walk me around—thankfully, I am not blind—nor to save my life in dramatic and touching movie-style fashion.

Also, of course, though I do appreciate and enjoy Jack Daniels whiskey from time to time—it’s probably my favorite hard liquor—I do not have a drinking problem, unlike the good Colonel, and I rather quickly get tired of alcohol on the occasions when I do drink it.  I could see myself getting habituated to Valium, in principle—the two times I actually took it, for medical reasons, are the only times in my life when I recall feeling “normal” and at ease in my skin—but I understand the nature of that process, and that such habituation would lead to feeling even worse in between doses.

In any case, I have no access to Valium (or any of its relatives), and have no intention to seek it out.  I wouldn’t trust “black market” Valium even if I knew where to look for it.

Of course, one might well ask, if I don’t really care if I live or die, what does it matter if I take something that isn’t actually Valium?  Well, if I were to be seeking Valium, it would be to try to experience that sense of feeling normal, perhaps for a third and final time in my life, and it would be terribly disappointing to get the wrong thing.  This is a situation in which it is better never to have loved at all than to have loved and lost, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m tired, and this blog post is already longer than I meant it to be.  This week has felt like a million years already.  So much for Pink Floyd’s line “every year is getting shorter”.  Of course, I understand that phenomenon, and I have experienced what is being described in the song.  But lately, time is moving more and more slowly, from a subjective point of view.  I’m dragging my feet, but the sun still just doesn’t keep up, and it certainly doesn’t feel as if it’s racing around to come up behind me again.

Of course, unless I’m secretly immortal, which seems ridiculously unlikely, it is certainly true that I am “one day closer to death” every day, as are we all.  But it still could be a comparatively long way off, at least if I leave it to its own devices.  If I do that, and experience life as I have been for so long, and if I live even only twenty more years (which would still have me die younger than either my mother or father, neither of whom had exercise habits or practices such as I do), it would seem a horrible semi-eternity.

I know, “semi-eternity” doesn’t actually make sense.  It’s akin to multiplying infinity times zero—it’s not a well-defined operation, mathematically.

I did invent a “number” in the past, which I called a “gleeb” for no particular reason, that when multiplied by zero would produce 1, making it, in a sense, “bigger” than infinity, or at least different.  I even worked out a little of the implicit algebra of the gleeb, during some down-time in the education department at FSP West.  It was silly, and it certainly wasn’t useful for any mathematical purposes, but when you realize that it implies that 1/0=gleeb, or 1/gleeb=0, and then start putting those identities into equations and the like, you can get some surprising and amusing results, such as that a gleeb raised to any positive power is just still a gleeb, and that the gleeb is, in a sense, the reciprocal of zero—though again, there’s no use or rigor to it.

Anyway, that’s that.  I want to go back to bed and try to go to sleep, but I’m not going to do that.  I work today, tomorrow, and Saturday, and it’s my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday tomorrow, so I wouldn’t want to interfere with his family’s enjoyment of that.  So, there it is.  I will need to survive until next week at least.  I don’t know if I’ll make it until next Thursday, but I expect I’ll at least write a post a day for the next two days, because that’s just me doing what I do every day.  I hope you have a good remainder of your week, whoever you are that is reading this.

TTFN

tardis-doctor-who

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I’m not tiptoeing but I’m walking a fair amount

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station, having timed my walk nicely to make me just miss the 6:10 train, so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to try to rush to catch it.  When I saw it arrive at the station, which I did, I was a bit too far away to have been able to catch it even had I sprinted.  So, my timing was good.

I’ve been walking to the station every morning this week, including yesterday*, which means that, as of now, I’ve walked roughly thirty miles since Saturday.  That’s no world record or anything, of course—a person in excellent condition could probably walk about thirty miles a day, if that were all they were doing, leaving plenty of time for rest breaks and sleep.  But it’s an improvement for me, at least.  Though I’ve had to adjust my wardrobe, bringing a full change of clothes with me, because by the time I get to the office, I look as though I’ve been swimming, I’ve sweated** so much.  As I think I mentioned before, I carry those little “scent bomb” sprays so I don’t offend anyone around me with my smell, and I’m reliably told that, at least in the short term, my sweat doesn’t actually smell too bad, which is not exactly high praise.

I changed the high E-string on my black Strat on Monday afternoon***, and I even played a little after that.  Nothing serious, it was just nice to hear the sound of the new string, and it was good to feel the stupid sense of pride in accomplishment in having changed it.  That’s rather pathetic, but I guess that should surprise no one, least of all me.

I’ve been wearing bilateral spandex supports both on my knees and my ankles, as I think I mentioned earlier this week.  This seems to be helping to minimize the degree to which the walking exacerbates my back pain, which is a hugely important consideration.  The fact that it helps also raises questions about the specific things that have caused the triggering of worsening back pain at other times when I did not use bilateral supports.

I’m not using back supports, of course—when I was first dealing with my back problems, I rapidly concluded that back braces are worse than useless, at least for me.  But certainly, having a side-to-side differential in the way one walks can produce an irregular torque on one’s lower back that could easily stimulate worsening pain, especially when repeated over a five to six mile walk, which is, after all, about 13,000 steps.

Anyway, that’s about all that’s going on with me.  I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday yesterday, other than to write my related post and to get off work early.  I didn’t sleep particularly well, even for me, because I kept waking up throughout the night thinking that someone was knocking at my door, only to realize quickly that it was just the sound of moderately distant fireworks going off.  There were even people still setting off fireworks when I got up this morning and when I was walking to the train station.

I remember when I was very young that fireworks and related loud noises terrified me horribly, or maybe not so much terrified as just elicited a profound displeasure.  Some of my earliest memories are of being overwhelmed by the noise of fireworks, and of having to be carried (screaming) out of the showing of The Three Caballeros cartoon at Disney World once they started shooting their guns.  I’m still not a big fan of noise, especially chaotic noise (though I like fireworks now for their appearance), and if it were not for the fact that I love music, I think I would happily try to make myself deaf.

Of course, I am enjoying listening to podcasts and audio books while walking, so I would lose that if I were deaf, but it’s not as though such things are crucial.  On Saturday, during my 6.7 mile walk back from the movie theater, I didn’t listen to anything, and that wasn’t a problem.  In fact, thinking back to my above comment about someone walking thirty miles a day, I don’t see how one could listen to something for such a long time without their battery running out quite early in the process.  Walking thirty miles has to take on the order of ten hours (or more), and I’m not sure that anyone’s cell phone could play e-books or podcasts or music for that long, or even close.

Maybe silence is just better.

Anyway, it’s never truly silent, because I’m always listening to tinnitus in my right ear.  But that’s just one of those things.  Even if I were to develop full hearing loss I might still have that tinnitus, like an amputee with phantom limb pain.  If that were the only sound, and I didn’t hear all the stupid noise of people talking at the office and so on, I think it might be worth it.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I don’t think I’ve said or written anything of any use to anyone, but that’s pretty much par for the course for me.  I’m not looking forward to work today, nor am I looking forward to leaving work at the end of the day, nor to much of anything else.

I hope you feel otherwise than I do, though.  I wouldn’t want to try to convince anyone else to feel dysthymic or depressed or to be in despair.  I don’t admire foolish or delusional optimism, of course, but reasonable positivity is hard to denigrate if one is being honest.  I wish I were built to be that way, but it just doesn’t seem to be the case, though it can be quite irritating when one feels rotten.

Oh, well.  There’s no place to ask for a refund or replacement for the suboptimal product that I am.  All I can do is lodge my complaint, as I’m doing here, in case someone out there might be able to fix me, or at least so that no one out there is too surprised if I finally succumb to my mental issues, which could happen pretty much any day, honestly.  I’m more or less always seriously mentally uncomfortable, and it wears me out, and there’s really nothing happening in my life that compensates for it.

I want rest, or at least I want oblivion.  I guess we all have that waiting at some point.

*We worked yesterday for half a day, in case I didn’t mention that during my post.

**That doesn’t feel like a proper word.  The past tense of “sweat” feels like it should be just “sweat”.  However, Word’s spell-checking function is not highlighting “sweated”, so that probably means it’s the standard past tense of that verb.  Weird.

***That was the string I broke when I kicked the guitar in intense frustration (not related to the guitar) a few weeks or so earlier.  I tend to take my frustration out on things that I’ve created or that are important to me, largely because I feel that I have a right to do so, but also because I tend to direct my anger inwardly.  Whenever I get angry, I tend to divert much of it to myself in response to the simple fact that I’ve allowed myself to be angry.  It makes me feel pathetic and weak and that I’m a horrible person.  So I’ll tear up music that I’ve written, or drawings, or other similar personal expressions of creativity, and if I can’t do that, I’ll break things that have some importance to me, and if that doesn’t work, I may just directly hurt myself.  Of course, in kicking the Strat, I covered both of the latter—my right big toe was almost certainly fractured, because it’s still sore even weeks later.  That’s okay.  Fractured toes are just things that need time to heal (not heel).

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Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my blog alone.

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m still writing this blog post.

I’m also still alive, which I guess more or less goes without saying, since I am using* the present progressive form of the combined verb “am still writing”, albeit with part of the “am” contracted with “I”, and I mean it literally, and as far as I know, one has to be alive to be writing, at least if one is a biological organism.  I also certainly don’t see how one could in any sense be the gerund, “writing”.  That’s just a weird notion.  Imagine Groot saying it that way:  “I…am…writing.”  Strange.

I had a pretty stressful day at work, yesterday, but perhaps not as bad as it might have been.  If you expect the worst, you’ll only be pleasantly surprised‒though “worst” is difficult even honestly to consider, since there are so many ways and by so many measures that something can be bad.

Anyway, I actually decided to leave the office early after finally getting the very involved payroll work (and other office work) done.  I took an Uber back to the house, which was not as expensive as I thought it would be, though it is not something I could do very often.  It brought me along a route that I had never taken before, and that’s always nice.  Well, it’s not “always” nice, I guess, but in this case it was.  I learned firsthand a bit of new geography about the roads near where I live, and that’s rather fascinating, albeit not terribly exciting.

I also forgot, or neglected, to bring the laptop back with me, so I’m writing this on my smartphone.  That will hopefully keep it shorter for you than yesterday’s post, which is probably good.

I don’t feel much better than I did yesterday, though.  In fact, shortly after posting my post yesterday, I felt a brief, light, almost giddy feeling, as if I got some benefit from just sharing some of those bitter truths, and declaring some of my possible intentions.  It didn’t last long, but it was there.

Anyway, though this is a day of bad remembrance for me, I don’t want to do anything drastic today or tomorrow, nor at least early next week, because it’s my coworker’s birthday next Monday, and it’s his daughter’s first birthday a day or two after that.  So, here I go again, not doing something** to get me out of here because I don’t want to spoil someone else’s day or week or whatever.

To think, I used to fear that I might be some kind of psychopath because of my difficulty connecting with the way other people thought, or to care too much what most of them thought of me, and my fascination with villains of some stories and comic books and so on.  Now, I suspect that was always some manifestation of (possible albeit not diagnosed) Asperger’s or whatever you want to call it.  Anyway, I think I’ve talked about some of why I envied and admired villains before:  they are weird, they are outsiders, they think differently than the people around them, they are pretty sure they can run things better than the more ordinary characters, and though they are weird and are outsiders, people don’t mess with them, generally, certainly not in any casual sense, because they are dangerous, and they really are exceptionally competent.  This doesn’t apply to all villains, but generally to the ones I like most.  Doctor Doom, in particular, I suspect to be on the autism spectrum, so to speak.  He has many attributes of the syndrome, especially when he’s written by someone who gets the character well.  On the other side of things, Batman is also an interesting possible dweller on the spectrum, though of course, both he and Doom have other psychological issues due to their traumatic histories.

Anyway, that’s all not truly  important.  Maybe I’ll explore it more, sometime‒though I doubt it.  I’m just trying to say that I may well try to survive at least to and possibly through next week, and then probably to the weekend, since I am scheduled to work next weekend and don’t want to leave my coworker and others hanging on the week of birthdays (and after a national holiday, though that has less impact on the office).

It’s kind of pathetic when one’s only reason for continued existence is that one doesn’t want too abruptly to inconvenience one’s coworkers.  That’s somehow more pathetic and sad even than just being alone and depressed and suicidal in the first place.  It certainly can’t keep working forever.  It’s hardly the sort of thing Frankl was talking about in Man’s Search for Meaning.

It’s certainly not going to give me the strength to keep going indefinitely.

In all honesty, I can’t even guarantee that I will avoid leaving my coworker in the lurch in the week of‒or even on the day of‒his birthday or that of his daughter.  All other things being equal, I prefer not to do so, but I’m in tremendous physical pain right now, for instance, to say nothing of dealing with the daily cacophony, and my strength and my reserves are quite low.  I’m not sure quite how low, nor am I clearly able to gauge them except by seeing when they finally run out.

Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got in me to write, today.  I make no promises about tomorrow or whatever, but I do pretty much know that I will not be writing a blog post this Saturday, since I am off this Saturday.  Well, I’m always off, ha ha, when you get down to it, but you know what I mean, I think.

And now, please fill in the end-of-post goodbye sentiment of your preference, and know that, if it’s a well-wishing thought towards you, my readers, it’s almost certainly something I would honestly endorse.

TTFN

weariness

*That’s a present progressive form as well.  It would be even weirder to say “I am using” and mean it as a gerund than it would be to use “writing” that way.

**I sometimes think of silly things such as imagining that “something” is the present participle of the verb “to someth”.

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“Don’t think I need anything at all.”

“No, don’t think I need anything at all.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and this morning I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer, which at the moment of writing this sentence is, in fact, resting atop some form of my actual lap.  Actually, it’s more on my right thigh and lower left leg, the latter of which is crossed over the former in what’s sometimes called a “figure four” posture, rather than being a true, traditional “lap”, like you might find in Lapland (presumably at discount prices).  Unfortunately, though useful, that figure four posture puts strain on my left knee—at least if it’s in any kind of sore state, which it is at the moment—so I’m probably going to have to switch that out.

I’m really tired, even for me.

I’m tired of trying.  I feel that I’ve been trying hard all my life, and in many objective senses, I honestly have.

I was never a slacker in school.  I graduated with all “As”, I was class valedictorian, I was a National Merit Scholar, all that bullshit.  I got a full ride scholarship to Cornell, without having anyone with any kind of real background knowledge or connections about how to apply to a high-level university or anything.  We certainly had no “connections”.

Anyway, you all know all that stuff:  blue collar town, scholarship to college, heart defect discovered and heart surgery done during my first summer of college, significant mood and (temporary) cognitive side-effects from open-heart surgery, leading to switched major.

Graduated with honors*, had a temporary (but severe) estrangement from my parents** due to issues involving my now-ex-wife.  Was administratively discharged from the Navy for health reasons related to the heart defect and also to my mood disorder.  Was not able, at that age, to finish my novel-in-progress, and so decided to go to medical school.  Got the distribution requirements easily enough, went to medical school on a partial scholarship, had some pretty bad trouble with mood disorder during third year or so.  Did residency, had kids, moved to Florida to start practice.

Had a back injury, with consequent chronic pain, worsening mood disorder, divorce, “temporary disability”.  Tried to do at least part-time medical work to help other people with chronic pain, but was not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to certain things that are beyond the straightforward (i.e., trying to help people with chronic pain but not realizing that some people—some patients and people with whom I worked, as well as the State itself—had ulterior motives of one kind or another) and thus not even recognizing that there was a chance that I could be arrested or charged with anything, since I wasn’t trying to do anything wrong…I was just doing what I saw as the essence of my job (trying to relieve suffering), and had no desire even for personal enrichment.  Seriously.  I gave away most of what I made to other people.  I’ve done that a lot, and consistently, throughout much of my life.

I’m stupid that way.

Then, of course, I went to jail and prison, and I haven’t seen my kids in over ten years.  I haven’t spoken (in any sense) with my son in that time***.  I’m still in chronic pain, my mood disorder is as bad as ever or worse, and I’ve recently discovered that I’m possibly/probably on the autism spectrum, which would explain a lot of my not understanding or expecting the issues that led me to be arrested, among other things.

It probably also explains part of why I had so much trouble with (for instance) dictating charts after I went into private practice.  I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that last bit here, but that was a nightmare for me.  I had the most horrible time trying to dictate chart notes, and always ended up getting backed up—a lot—no matter where I was in practice.  It seems all the other doctors and everybody just loved dictating charts; they thought it was so much easier than writing.  For me it was like trying to build a sand castle using knitting needles.  But I didn’t understand why I had so much trouble with it, I thought I was just being lazy or weak or something, and I just had to force myself to learn to do better, so I kept on trying, and I kept on getting backed up (severely) over and over again.

It’s a stupid idea, anyway.  Writing and speaking are two different kinds of processes, and organization and recording of medical notes is better done in writing.  Also, that way there’s also not delay in getting the notes into the chart.  I couldn’t speak and say the things I’m writing here with anything approaching the speed and clarity with which I am typing them.

Nowadays, I think most medical charting is done using portable computers, which—if the system is good—is probably an excellent option.

Anyway, all that leads up to now, when I’m living alone in a single room (with attached shower/bathroom), in a house that is not my home, working at a job that I’ve worked at basically just to keep myself alive and fed while writing fiction…but now I’m no longer writing fiction, I’m no longer doing music, I’m no longer doing anything apart from this blog.

Tomorrow would have been my 32nd wedding anniversary.  Though I’ve been divorced longer than I was married, it’s still an important, or at least consequential, day to me, though I’m guessing it isn’t as important to my ex-wife.  I don’t know, I think I’m a member of a species that mates for life to a single mate (though clearly that was not the case for her).  I certainly have no desire to get romantically involved with anyone else ever again—it’s not worth the risk.  I also can’t imagine anyone wanting to get involved with me.  The few minor attempts I made after my divorce were laughably bad.

There’s nothing good coming down the pike.

And no one is going to help me, I’m pretty sure of that.  I’ve sent out coded and not-so-coded distress signals, here and elsewhere, over and over again, in various ways, some of which are perhaps opaque, but others of which I think are rather obvious.  Maybe it’s just a case of some form of “the bystander effect”, I don’t know.

I’ve tried to do therapy again**** (online this time), with limited and very temporary effects, and I’ve called 988 and spoken to the very lovely person who was there—they deserve all the plaudits and support they can be given.  (I’ve tried to call it more than once, the first occasion of which involved a misadventure due to T-Mobile’s bad service at the time).

It’s all ultimately not getting me anywhere.  I’m not accomplishing anything or contributing anymore to the net worth of civilization.  I’m certainly not contributing to my own well-being, because I don’t think that even exists.  I’m just adding my little, inconsequential bit of entropy to the eventual (probable) heat death of the universe.

I need to die.  I’m just having a hard time working up the nerve to do it.  I wish I had a drug or alcohol problem, because the use of those is associated with higher rates of suicide, and even “accidental” overdose death, but I don’t seem prone to such things.  I have large bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen and naproxen that I could take, but such means are unreliable, and the process tends to be quite drawn out.  I don’t own any guns anymore.  I did buy two helium tanks and a non-rebreather mask and tubing, but setting that up and applying it turned out to be difficult, and I didn’t have a good place to do it.  I hate the idea of leaving a mess for innocent people, though that may be unavoidable.  That’s also the main reason for not just cutting various arteries open after ensuring that I’m adequately anticoagulated—I’m not afraid of blood (and I’m demonstrably not afraid of cutting myself), but I know other people are, and I don’t really want to traumatize others more than I already have in my life, if I can help it.

I had a rather strong bourbon and diet-Pepsi last night; alcohol is supposed to help one harm oneself, but it’s just made me feel more tired today than usual because of worse-than-usual sleep.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I don’t know if or what I’ll write after this.  I hope the rest of you are feeling better than I am.

*After initially missing the deadline for my honors thesis, thinking it was due a month later than it was, and having to write the whole thing—52 pages!—in one weekend.  I might have gotten more than a basic cum laude if I’d been better able to manage deadlines and all that, but it was never my own idea to try for honors, anyway.  Not that I regret it, but it was not my ambition.

**And more indirectly, in consequence, with the rest of my family, since they were caught between.  I feel very bad about that, and about the time I missed with them and my parents, all over someone who left me in the end.

***His choice, not mine.  We have exchanged one email in that time, and he sends along his thanks via his sister for birthday presents and the like.  He’s a good person, and I love him and am proud of him and do not blame him.  He’s not much better at dealing with things like this and with other people and with radical changes of circumstance than I am, and I think he was badly hurt by everything that happened.

****I’ve gone to at least four or five therapists, and I’ve even been (very briefly) hospitalized once for depression while I was out on bail.  I’ve tried at least seven different anti-depressants with mixed results, at best.  And here I am.

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In Diana, we are simply passing through history.

It’s Tuesday morning, now, as I’m writing this, which makes sense, since yesterday was Monday.

In case anyone was wondering about the title to yesterday’s blog post:  After deciding not to try to work any reference to any song titles or lyrics relating to Monday into the title‒though I did link to that Carpenters’ song‒I thought I would reference the moon, nevertheless, perhaps as some metaphor for madness.  That seemed appropriate for my blog, since I’m rather steadily mentally deteriorating.  So I figured, who better to give a quote about the moon and madness than Shakespeare?

My first thought, though, led me just to the classic Heinlein novel, which I had thought had been a direct quote, albeit not from any play I had read.  But it wasn’t, apparently.  So I dug around a bit and found a quote from Henry IV part 1‒which I have read, but quite a long time ago‒and took the appropriate lunar reference.

However, I didn’t want simply my usual, slightly altered Shakespearean quote, though that might make up for last Thursday.  The fact that the original line references Diana* made me think of turning it into a Japanese “quote” and replacing Diana with Tsukuyomi, the traditional Japanese moon god or goddess (more often the latter in manga and anime depictions) sibling of Amaterasu, the Japanese god (or goddess) of the Sun/Dawn (obviously a very important deity in the land of the rising sun).

I can’t claim the Japanese expertise necessary to have translated by myself the quote into yesterday’s title, at least not without a lot of work and probably making a mess of things, so I used Google Translate.  I do know enough Japanese to have been able to tell, basically, that it was a decent translation.  I originally planned to leave it in the Japanese characters‒I had gone as far as to remove Google’s transliteration of “Tsukuyomi” or “Tsukiyomi” into katakana** and put in the actual kanji/hiragana characters‒but then I decided that would too pretentious, even for me***, and so I left it in the transliteration into romaji.

For the picture, I used a version of Tsukuyomi found in the brilliant and beautiful manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by the unparalleled manga team CLAMP, creators of such works as Cardcaptor Sakura among many other (in my opinion) even better and more beautiful works.  I altered the picture, though, to make it darker and more eerie and sinister-seeming, since that seemed appropriate for a moon goddess as a representative of madness, as the Shakespearean reference seems to imply, and which certainly seems most pertinent when it comes to me.

Anyway, I’m sure that’s all quite boring, but I thought the title might seem strange and obscure enough to merit an explanation, and while I was at it I ran off at the keyboard.  That, at least, is not too unusual.

I’m writing this on my phone again, by the way.  Yesterday I decided not to carry my laptop back to the house, because I knew I planned to walk from the train to the house (which I did) while talking on the phone to my sister (which I also did), and I figured I’d keep my load light-ish, just to make the process as pleasant as could be.  It wasn’t raining, which was good, but it was rather hot and, of course, humid.  Fortunately, having someone to whom to talk makes the trip pass rather quickly, subjectively speaking.  In objective time, it took slightly longer than usual for 5 miles for me, which makes perfect sense.  I was talking while walking, after all.

I’m afraid I have to report that I am still pretty stressed out at work, and when I am not at work, and just in general, other than when I was talking to my sister.  I had a third quasi-chamber locked and loaded already yesterday, if you’ll remember my reference and metaphor/analogy from the other day.  At one point, I decided just to take it, which I did, and that little bitty minor risk did calm me down a bit.

I’m still just quite, quite depressed, and I guess I’m also what would be called terribly anxious.  Though it doesn’t feel like “fear” of any kind exactly to me as much as it does a kind of mental itchiness and swelling tension, as though most things in the world give me a central nervous system neurologic allergic reaction that makes me want to peel myself out of my own metaphorical skin.  I’m not afraid of anything per se; it’s more as though I’m being squeezed and stretched at all times in numerous directions in some mental vector space, and it’s both crushing me and tearing me apart, slowly and sadistically.  I find nearly every interaction‒especially ones involving interruptions to something I’m already doing‒to be incredibly irritating and stressful.

I feel a bit like an injured and sick feral cat that’s being approached and molested by various different gawking people (no good Samaritans) and other animals when my instinct is to want to be left alone and unmolested, so I can succumb to the elements and just die.

It’s all really very uncomfortable‒though there are pleasant interludes, at least, as noted above about talking to my sister‒and I really don’t think I can last much longer.  I need to escape, but there’s nowhere in this world, in this life, to which I can safely flee.  Not as far as I know, anyway.  There’s no rescue shelter out there that’s going to take in and try to help and heal and find a home for as diseased and damaged a stray as I am; certainly I see no sign of one, and I can’t just keep waiting and hoping.

Well…I can, or I could, in principle, but there is no percentage in doing so as far as I can see.  I’ve been waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping for quite a long time, meanwhile subsisting on the delusion that some nominal, abstract “fact that people somewhere in some abstract kind of sense kind of care about whether I live or die” can actually make any literal, physical difference.  But, like “thoughts and prayers”, it seems not to matter in actual fact (though it is appreciated, and I don’t mean to denigrate such thoughts).  Or, if it matters, it doesn’t matter enough to keep me going indefinitely.  I’m a miserable person to be around, and I’m a miserable person to be.  I just need to screw my courage to the sticking place and finally take more decisive action than exposing myself to a slight risk of a GI bleed.

Real daggers still work against daggers of the mind, but a bare bodkin is an intimidating thing to turn upon oneself, as Hamlet knew.  But I need to do something.  I can’t just keep waiting and deluding myself that something in me will get better.

Oh, well.  Time to head to the bus stop.  Maybe the walking will help my morning back and leg pain.

Have a good day.

*Not Wonder Woman, but, unless I’m mistaken, the counterpart to the Greek god (or goddess) Artemis, sibling of Apollo.

**Which seemed a dreadful bit of disrespect toward such an important deity, treating it as if it were a foreign-introduced word.

***If you can imagine.

by

Tsukiyomi no mori no ban’nin, hikage no shinshi, tsuki no tesaki ni narimashou.

It’s Monday morning again.  I can only think of two songs off the top of my head that provide fun references to the day, and I think I’ve used them both more than once, so I’m not going to do that here.  I suppose I could refer to the Carpenters’ song about Rainy Days and Mondays, but that’s a slightly gloomy and glum song, though pretty (and, to be fair, with some upbeat aspects), and I can do gloomy and glum just fine by myself, thanks*.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful, which is not a bad attribute for a day off.  I did my laundry, which was good, and I also got some rest‒I took several naps throughout the day, which, again, is good.  In all fairness, that’s pretty much what I do throughout most nights:  taking lots of short naps and waking up in between.  I even did that on Saturday night after taking two Benadryl before going to sleep.  In fact, I started having a hard time even dozing back off at about 4 am on Sunday.  But that’s just too early to be getting up and starting laundry, even for me.  So I toughed it out until about 6:30.

You’ve got to be hard on yourself sometimes.

Oh, I’m writing this post on my phone this morning, because I just felt too lazy to bring the laptop with me on Saturday.  There was no particular reason to avoid it.  I just didn’t want to bother.  I’m not sure what I’ll do today; I don’t want to force myself to decide in advance.

I’m somewhat disappointed to report that I don’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects, at least so far, of the little experiments that I began the other day.  It’s not impossible that some could accrue yet, but I think I shouldn’t get my hopes up.  It would be such a weight off if I could just start having a GI bleed or something.  Maybe I’m too half-assed about it.

Rat poison used to be primarily comprised of “super-coumadins” in diatomaceous earth**.  That might have been a useful option.  Nowadays, though, most rat poisons (I have checked) seem to be the new neurologically targeted stuff that’s highly specific toward rat nervous systems, and much less dangerous for humans and dogs and cats if they accidentally ingest it.  I know, that’s a good thing (unless you’re a rat or love rats).  But it’s disappointing if you want to have readily available options for encouraging your own self to bleed without a prescription.

Thank goodness aspirin was discovered millennia before the FDA or DEA and has never been used to “get high” by anyone***.  If it were discovered in the modern world, it would never be available without a prescription‒not in the US, anyway.  You even have to go to the effing pharmacy counter to get pseudoephedrine for your cold and allergy symptoms, because some people turned a certain amount of it into amphetamines of one kind or another.

Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  Let’s keep a useful and comparatively harmless medicine**** restricted in availability for people who want to use it for legitimate reasons, in order to prevent rare people from turning it into a product other rare people use because they like it.  Remember, illicit drugs aren’t forced on their users.  People buy them because they want them, just like people do with fast food and candy and beer and tobacco and fast cars and the like, none of which are without drawbacks.

Ah, to hell with it.  It would be nice to improve human civilization using reasoned action with actual measurement of end-points and serious attempts to obtain good data, with a goal of improving things overall, in general, for everyone.  But that’s not how humans are built, is it?

I really want to check out of this madhouse hotel.  It’s noisy and garish and smelly and loud, and it’s almost impossible for me to get a good night’s sleep in it.  And I can’t seem to find anything to do here that’s any fun.

Oh, well.  Maybe things will get better this week.  Try not to laugh; that’s me attempting my closest approach to cautious optimism.  I’m not very good at it.

Princess_Tomoyo

*The “pretty” part might be a personal deficiency in my work, I’ll admit, but sometimes you’ve got to let gloomy and glum just be full-on ugly, and not try to sweeten the hit.  I can do that.

**Coumadin is a brand name of warfarin, an anticoagulant that interferes with vitamin K dependent aspects of the coagulation cascade (is that factors 1, 2, 7, and 9, or am I misremembering?) and of course, diatomaceous earth is basically composed of bajillions of microscopic silica-based skeletons of ancient marine organisms (diatoms), which have tiny little spiky projections everywhere.  I believe that the idea was that the diatoms would make lots of little perforations in rat GI tracts, but I don’t know that it ever did much.  Super-coumadins are more than able to induce various kinds of massive hemorrhaging on their own.

***That factor seems to be the main issue with a great many of the drugs that are illegal, if not all of them.  If people can, at will, do something that will make themselves feel good, even if only temporarily, then what carrots and sticks can keep them being fully productive cogs in the spontaneously self-assembled machine?  Caffeine, on the other hand, is by far the most widely used and abused drug in the world but is quite legal‒and Starbucks is the world’s largest drug pusher, followed closely by Dunkin Donuts and then McDonald’s, or those were the rankings the last time I checked.

****The over-the-counter decongestants available are not as effective, are not as long-acting even in slow-release forms, and are associated with significant and sometimes acutely dangerous elevations of blood pressure, even at their usual dosages.  Blood pressure elevation is, generally, only a theoretic concern with pseudoephedrine; I never saw it actually cause secondary hypertension in anyone.