insomnia

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For a minute there, I found myself

Wow, I’m really tired.  I had a terrible time falling asleep last night, even though, once again, I was tired and “shagged out” as if after a long squawk, in the words of Michael Palin’s pet shop owner from the dead parrot sketch.  And then, of course, when I finally did get to sleep, I didn’t even come close to sleeping through until my alarm‒though, rather amusingly, I fell back to sleep about half an hour before my alarm was due to go off, so I got to enjoy being awakened by it when I was thoroughly mired in unconsciousness and confusion.  Nevertheless, I did still get up and do three quick sets of (bad) pull-ups before taking my shower, getting dressed, and so on.  And here I am at the train station, waiting for the second train of the day.

I know all this must make for incredibly tedious reading, and for that I am truly sorry.  I’d prefer to write more about potential stories, and which ones, if any, my readers prefer, and about potential “podcasts”*, and all that stuff, with an eye to the future.  But when I revert to insomnia‒after an all-too-brief respite caused by a rather severe illness, the remnants of which are not even gone‒it’s just terribly discouraging.  It’s a special kind of teasing furlough, like getting a weekend off from being in prison, but having to go right back up the road after the weekend, for a sentence the length of which you don’t even know.  And there’s only one reliable way to escape.

It makes it hard to think about any future whatsoever.

Ah, well, it probably really doesn’t matter.  What do I want with a future, anyway?  I don’t have “a life” at all in any appreciable sense.  I can’t even read fiction‒including even comic books and manga for the most part‒anymore, and that’s long been one of the highlights of my life.

I’ve occasionally been able to watch some shows, most recently Wednesday, and I’ve even gotten through five episodes of The Rings of Power, the latter while I was sick.  And, of course, I’ve watched all of the episodes of the modern Doctor Who, most of them more than once, but these are the sorts of things that in the past I had always done with other people, with whom I could share the enjoyment, and even talk about the shows and so on.  It’s just not as much fun to do by myself, even when I watch some of the “reaction” videos of other people watching the shows for the first time, which is almost like watching with a friend, but not quite.

Even the prospects of getting healthier, sleeping better, trying to conquer dysthymia and to integrate into my self-understanding a probable diagnosis of Asperger’s all seem pretty unmotivating.  What’s the point, for instance, of seeking out an official, confirmatory diagnosis of the Syndrome Formerly Known As Asperger’s, at significant personal time and expense?  What, ultimately, would this even do for me?

What’s the point of trying to find a therapist with whom I can work, and that I can work into my schedule‒perhaps through BetterHelp or similar‒to try to mitigate my dysthymia/depression?  It feels better, so to speak, just to feel horrible constantly rather than to have brief respites of feeling a bit better, a bit more “normal”, only to have that feeling slip away again.

It’s even hard to pursue further learning in mathematics and physics, both of which I find deeply interesting.  I have tried to use Brilliant to work on my skills, but though their interactive, stepwise, animated approach is interesting, and I can see why it would appeal to many people, I find it boring after a very short time after I start to use it.  I think I just do better with textbooks, and with problem sets.  I even bought a copy of one of my old college calculus textbooks, the Thomas and Finney one, and started working through it to re-hone and improve my mathematics skills, with an eye toward moving to higher level mathematics after that.  But I haven’t gotten very far.

I also got a copy of Sean Carroll’s Spacetime and Geometry, and the huge tome Gravitation, by Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, et al, which not only is the bible of General Relativity, but is also an excellent demonstration of its own subject.  This is all in an attempt to improve my formal understanding, at the mathematical level, of General Relativity.  Special Relativity is pretty easy, and the mathematics to deal with it formally is/are rather straightforward.  But I don’t have a deep handle on tensors and matrices and higher dimensional geometries‒not at the mathematical level, anyway‒which I’d like to have to be able to approach the subject at a real, quasi-professional level.

I’d also like to be able to do the same thing for quantum mechanics, which is at some levels more straightforward than GR.  I got Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum book on that, but haven’t been able to sustain my attention for it.  That’s my fault, not the writers’.  Anyway, I really want more than the “minimum”; I want to get deeper into the subject, mathematically, because the concepts are all reasonably clear‒although often explained in rather wooly terms by many popularizers‒and I would like to be more formally and mathematically adept at the subject.

And I deeply regret not having done more in pursuit of furthering my pretty good initial exposure to computer science, both at the software and hardware levels.  Related to that, I would like to have done more in circuit theory and more general electrical engineering.

Of course, I did have a lot of my time and energy taken up by biology, chemistry, organic chemistry and the other subjects related to becoming a doctor.  And, of course, “helping” my now-ex-wife study (to the extent she needed help, which was, let’s face it, not very much) when she was in law school was quite fun.  But the time and effort put into both medicine and my marriage have turned out now to be moot and pointless, though they were worth the cost due to the fact that my children are here in the world now.

That fact would be worth almost anything.

Anyway, I don’t have any point** here with all this, and I’ve gone on long enough today.  I’m just tired, and if I can’t find a way to stop being so tired all the time, I really don’t see any good reason to try to keep slogging forward.  All the way up until my next birthday, my age and the two digit number for this year are both prime, and it’s sometimes better to leave while still in one’s prime than afterward, as I mentioned in a previous post.  Meanwhile, though, I’ll see if I can find any other answers.

Oh, P.S.:  Does anyone know off the top of your head how one checks the results (so far) of a poll one has arranged on WordPress?  I’m sure the answer is somewhere in the WordPress “help” functions, but it’s not amenable to a superficial and obvious search, and I’d rather not have to “chat” with one of their “happiness engineers”.  It doesn’t matter much, but if you know,  would you please leave a comment below?  Thanks.

*That’s one of those amazing terms that was a brand new thing based on an entirely new and revolutionary technology, but now that technology itself is already obsolete, but the term lives on.  I think the closest similar thing that readily comes to mind right now is the expression “running out of steam”, which I would guess arose from the era of steam engines, which are quite obsolete, but the expression remains common.

**Now there’s a pithy summary of a life 

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As blog is full of unbefitting strains, all wanton as a child, skipping and vain

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 5th of January, and this is my first official, “original recipe” Thursday morning blog of the new year.  Isn’t it exciting?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.  But people are supposed to pretend to be enthusiastic and celebratory about every little thing it seems, until there are so many celebrations and holidays that it becomes a relief when a rare day arrives in which nothing in particular is being celebrated.  There are so many sweets and treats and rewards and awards, day after day, that soon people feel entitled to receive a medal for not drooling and peeing on themselves, and a piece of cake for dinner because they skipped a cookie at lunch.

Eventually, many seem to think that, because they got their various “best attitude” or “cleanest desk” awards throughout their formative years, they’re just as worthy of admiration as someone who received a Nobel Prize in Physics or a Fields Medal or a Hugo and/or Nebula Award for science fiction.  It’s nauseating.  No wonder we consume so many acid blocking medications these days!

As you can probably tell, I’m a bit grumpy today.  This is in large part because I’m very tired again.  My insomnia has been reasserting itself over the last few days, with last night being worse than the night before.  Though exhausted and stressed from matters at work‒another contributing factor to my grumpiness‒I couldn’t get to sleep once I finally got back to the house, and then, despite that, I woke up starting at 3ish this morning, slightly earlier than yesterday.  It’s a weird situation when one finds oneself wistful and nostalgic for the times when one was (more) severely ill, because at least in those situations, one could rest.

In other matters, at the time of my latest look this morning, there have been two total votes on my poll from yesterday.  I would say that’s not a statistically significant sample of any kind, especially since the two didn’t choose the same option.  Perhaps the statistically significant result, which should have been obvious to me from the start, is that nobody gives a flying fuck at a rat’s ass what I do.

Well, why should they?

Apparently, the Tri-rail has given up on even the pretense of trying to run their trains in time in the year 2023.  So far, every train I’ve been on, and the other ones I’ve seen going the other direction, have been five to ten minutes behind schedule.  There are those who believe in some notion of “American Exceptionalism”, but sometimes it seems that we’re most exceptional‒at least among wealthy, “western style” democracies‒at being slipshod and disorganized.

Oh, I know, I know, NASA is pretty darn impressive, and always has been.  But NASA by its nature draws applicants from among the brightest, hardest working people in the country (and the world) and can be selective‒for now, at least‒about whom it hires even from among that group.  Of course it would tend to do exceptional things, even if that were the only factor that made it exceptional.

But to be exceptional is a judgment only properly to be applied after the fact, rather like “luck”.  There is no inherent “exceptionalness” which would mean someone or something is exceptional before it’s done anything at all.  Of course, one could say that everyone is exceptional in some way; certainly each person’s specific genes and environment are unique, and indeed each new moment in the universe in any given place is different in some sense from every other that has come before.  But this sort of “universal, uniform exceptionality” is trivial at best.  Or, as Dash so wisely noted in The Incredibles, to say that everyone is special is just another way of saying that no one is.

“Ignorance is strength.  Freedom is slavery.  Speech is violence.” One of those three statements is not from the original book, 1984, but spiritually it belongs right there among the aphorisms and axioms of Big Brother’s Party.  Of course, nowadays, if you mention Big Brother, most people will probably just be triggered* to think of some idiotic “reality show”.

I don’t know how I got on that track, but that’s one of the things about a free-form blog post: you never know what you’re going to get**.  I honestly didn’t much feel like writing at all, today, but “mood is a thing for cattle and loveplay, not fighting”, and also not for most anything else to which one has committed oneself.  An Impala that doesn’t keep a watch for lions and leopards and hyenas and the like because it’s not in the mood is soon going to be removed from the population and gene pool.  That’s more or less how it has to be, given the laws on nature.

TTFN

day off

*Shouldn’t we be eliminating the use of the word “triggered”, given that it could be, well…triggering in and of itself, since it can invoke thoughts of firing pistols and rifles, which thoughts can cause recurrent trauma in those who are personally devastated by news stories of mass shootings, even if they’ve never experienced a single instance of true violence in their own lives?  It seems rather insensitive.  We really ought to put edge guards and drawer locks and padding on (and apply sanitary wipes frequently to) all surfaces, literal and metaphorical, should we not?  We need to child-proof the world, since it is, after all, populated merely and entirely by children.  Of course, it bears remembering that all the Powers That Be are children, too, so they certainly can’t be trusted with doing the child-proofing.

**This is in contrast to the Gump-ian box of chocolates, since with a box of chocolates, unless it is a prank or joke or a trap, what you’re going to get is a selection of chocolates.  Of course, what you’re going to get in a blog post is some sort of writing on some subject or topic of the writer’s choice, so perhaps it’s unfair of me to criticize the line from Forrest Gump, but rest assured that when I do so criticize, I do it for a very good reason: I am a Hypocrite.

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A story I forgot to mention yesterday…and a poll!

Whew, I’m a bit more tired than I was yesterday morning.  It was a long and somewhat frustrating day at the office yesterday, and then I had trouble getting to sleep and subsequently a bit of that really early awakening with which I sometimes have trouble.  Whatever else you may say about being sick, I have been getting slightly better sleep since my recent illness started, and that is nice.  Hopefully last night was a minor fluke*, and I’ll revert back to my slightly improved sleep pattern at least.  I have reason to suspect it may be so, but it’s not guaranteed.

Oh, by the way, yesterday when I mentioned the possibility of starting writing again, and using solely the cell phone to do so, I neglected to mention the option of starting a new story that would be written entirely on the phone.  If I did start such a novel, it would almost certainly be Changeling in a Shadow World, a story I’ve mentioned here before.  It’s an old story idea; I even wrote the beginning of a prologue to it once, back in the day.  It has ties to other stories of mine, including Outlaw’s Mind itself and The Chasm and the Collision.  It even has bits that hearken back to my lost, first sci-fi/fantasy novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  So I have some affection for it.

So, please throw that into your voting machines.  Come to think of it, maybe I’ll try to insert a readers’ poll here, if I can easily figure out how to do it.  I know it can be done, because I’ve seen other people do it, but I don’t feel like trying too hard about it.  I’d rather just get some feedback in the comments below.  There’s more flexibility that way, and it feels more like an interaction.  I know that, in some situations, a poll is simply efficient, but I think I still have a contained (shall we say “elite”? Yes, I think we shall) enough readership that we don’t have to resort to crude measures.  That doesn’t mean you can’t curse in your comments, by the way, as long as it’s cursing that serves a grammatical and/or rhetorical purpose!

One thing I will say, though, is that if I do this, and start writing fiction again, I want to stick to whichever story I pick until it’s done.  One of the things that kept me from ever having finished and published anything prior to going to prison was that I would have a new idea for a story, or something similar, and let myself divert from one to the other, and so I had a relatively wide selection of beginnings of books, but only two that I’d finished in even first draft form**.  I also had a handful of completed short stories, and the cheapo, low-quality screenplay I wrote in high school, with the notion of trying actually to make it, starring my friends and classmates.

I even filmed, or attempted to film, one scene, using a home VHS video camera one of them had, but it and the sound were really quite limited, and I had no personal experience with movie-making, and it was high school so we had a lot going on.  Anyway, it didn’t get made, which is not a tragedy.  My friend Joe said that the title*** was too good for the story, anyway, and he was right.

I did write some decent musical themes for it, though, including a bad guy’s theme that drew inspiration from the carousel in Something Wicked This Way Comes, and a main title theme that I can still play pretty much by heart on the piano, and which is probably the prettiest music I’ve written.  That may not be saying much, but it is what it is.

Okay, well, sorry about those various tangents.  I’ll do my best to stick with sines and cosines**** hereinafter.

Anyway, I really would appreciate your input about how I should go about doing a story and the blog posts‒using the phone should make it easier to work writing in, anyway‒and which story to write if I write anything.  Or are things in the world better in general without my writing any more new fiction?  It’s certainly possible that such is the case.  Although, if someone convincingly told me that my continued writing of new fiction would literally and significantly put the whole human race in jeopardy, that might very well give me an added impetus to write.  I am a would-be supervillain at heart, after all.

Well, let me know, please.  Also, have a good day, if you can, and if you are so inclined.

Oh, and I did put a poll in at the bottom, below the footnotes, so if you’re so inclined, would you weigh in with your choice?

*Which sounds like some part of the anatomy of a whale or a seal or some other, similar marine mammal.

**That’s Ends of the Maelstrom that I mentioned earlier, and The Vagabond, which at the time I called simply Vagabond.

***Night Vision.

****This is an example of that truly rarefied entity, trigonometry related humor.  Pythagoras would probably not approve, but he was a putz who repressed knowledge of irrational numbers and the dodecahedron (or his followers did) and who (as I’ve heard it) died when he refused to run away from would be murderers across a field of beans, because he hated beans.  Now that’s what I call a food intolerance!

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I’m under the (warming and improving) weather

I’m really going to try to make this short, if not sweet, today, because I’m laden with a respiratory virus that hit rather suddenly and progressed very quickly yesterday afternoon.  I’m feeling quite under the weather, however much better the weather is than it was only a few days ago.  How under the weather, you ask?  Well, I woke up to my alarm this morning rather than hours before.  I guess my body is awash with enough immune cytokines and interferons and interleukins and related crap that they were able to suppress my insomnia.  I guess that’s a good thing, in its own way.  At least my system is smart enough to force itself to go into rest mode in certain, relatively extreme circumstances.

Of course, I’m going in to the office today, though ideally, I should not.  Indeed, I would not if it were not Wednesday.  But on Wednesdays, the payroll has to be done, so I’ll do it as soon as all the reports arrive.  But after that, I mean to leave the office.  It’s just too ironic that I’m sick enough that I’m able to sleep, but I can’t because of work.  I’m sure there are millions of people who can relate to that.

I’m writing this on my phone, by the way, because I deliberately chose not to bring the laptop with me yesterday when I left the office.  I felt like crap, and I just didn’t want to have anything extra to carry.  I will try to remember to bring it today, though.  The Thursday blog post is easier to write‒and feels more natural‒on the laptop.

I’ve been feeling an added impetus to do a “podcast” if you will, what I call an “audio blog” post, relating to sugar metabolism and its issues, since I uncovered how apparently insulin resistant I have become.  It seems appropriate.  Of course, right now I am just too hoarse and ill to consider doing such a thing.  But I will try to get around to it soon.  Obviously, it’s been something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, both lately, and in the past.  Diabetes and related matters comprise a big chunk of the work of a typical general internist in the modern world.

Then I guess I’ll try perhaps to do an audio blog on Parkinson’s disease and/or on the whole cybernetic future thing.  I’m not, for the moment, planning on doing any specific outline of the subjects before doing the recordings, but obviously, I’ll think them through a bit ahead of time.  I’ll see how they do, audience reception-wise, before deciding whether or not to do more.  But I’m not likely to record anything before the new year.

Wow, “the new year”…just think about it:  within a few days it will be the beginning of 2023.  It seems like barely 12 months ago that it was the end of 2021.  How did 2 years pass in just over 12 months?

Ha ha.

Of course, now that Christmas has passed, the Tri-rail has, as I suspected they would, put on the automated message that, yes, they will be operating on a Sunday schedule on January 1st, New Year’s Day.  Which is a Sunday, so of course they are on a Sunday schedule.  The saddest part of that announcement is that there probably really are a few people out there who need to be told that information.  But I can’t help thinking that a person who requires that announcement to know that the trains will run on a Sunday schedule on a Sunday will probably still not get the idea.

I wonder how long it will be before they start auto playing the announcement about the next holiday that applies.  I’ll probably let you know when it happens.

Anyway, I think that’s about it for now.  It’s been difficult enough getting the post to be this long.  Stay well and healthy.  And wear masks if you have to go out in public when you’re sick.  That’s what I’m doing.  Or, well, I’m wearing a mask; more than one at a time is rather stifling, and probably doesn’t confer significantly greater benefits, though it may perhaps give some improvement.

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The winter’s wind which, when it bites and blogs upon my body, even till I shrink with cold, I smile.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, December 22, 2022, which is another sort of fun day for twos, though it doesn’t fall on a Tuesday, so it’s not as fun as this Tuesday was.

Yesterday was the Solstice‒the winter one in the northern hemisphere and the summer one in the southern hemisphere‒and I completely neglected to mention it.  Instead, I went on an overlong, self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent ramble, and for that I apologize.  I doubt that I’ll be doing something like that again.

Now that the solstice has come, it’s officially winter in the north, so the Game of Thrones people can shut the hell up about it.  And in the south, summer has arrived.  Meanwhile, in the north, the days have begun to grow longer, or at least the daylight time has, relative to the night.  It won’t be noticeable for quite a long time, though; at and around the peaks and troughs of sine curves, the rate of change of the function is at its lowest, and the length of daylight over the course of a year is one of the oodles of sinusoidal processes in the natural world.

I’m really tired, but I am here at the train station, the first to arrive to get on the first train.  I couldn’t sleep, even though I got to sleep late because the Wi-fi had gone out and I was on chat with Xfinity (on my phone) until quite late trying to get it fixed.  My one source of relaxation and release is to be able to watch some YouTube videos when I get back to the house from work, and it certainly costs an absurd amount of money, so I become quite irritable when it doesn’t work.  It seems tentatively to have been sorted, but I have a likewise tentative appointment for a service call…on Sunday morning, the 25th of December, the only day I have off until New Year’s Eve.  It’s a date that may be familiar to many of you as the one on which we celebrate the birth of Isaac Newton*.

Well, it’s not as if I’m doing anything but laundry that day, anyway.

Wow, I feel like I’ve written a lot today already, but it’s only about 450 words so far, counting the footnotes.  I really am tired.  Stupid nervous system.  Why don’t you sleep??!?  Yesterday, of course, I wrote and wrote until it was way too long, and I excised whole paragraphs from the final post when I edited it.  I was almost hypomanic, just for a little while there‒or at least, that’s what it felt like compared to my usual subjectivity.  Maybe it’s just the way healthy, normal people tend to feel, and it’s so unusual that it feels bizarre to me.

I don’t really think I felt “normal” in that sense, though, or at least I didn’t feel it about myself.  I felt weird and loopy and still different and distant from all the other people in the world‒the humans‒but at least I had energy and a bit of enthusiasm.  The only times I remember having really felt “normal” were the two occasions when I was given Valium for medical procedures‒wisdom teeth extraction and heart catheterization, when I was about 17 and 18 respectively.

I recall both of those experiences with great fondness.  I even remember when my heart did a big whopping double-beat that I could feel all the way up my neck during the catheterization, as the cardiologist bumped the SA node or the AV node or something along those lines.  My reaction was to say, “That was cooool.”  And it was.

I don’t know what my point is.  There probably is no point to me.  Even my head is quite rounded.  I guess I could try to find a pointed stick to carry, since defending oneself with fresh fruit is more difficult than defending oneself against an attacker armed with fresh fruit.

There, that’s my most niche, nerdy reference of the day.  Or is it?

With that, I think I’ll draw to a close.  I don’t have a clue what sort of Shakespeare quote I’ll alter for my title today, nor what picture I’ll put in the post, but it’s Thursday, so there will be such things.  Of course, you who are reading this do know both of those facts, which is curious to think about…my readers right now know things about my blog post that I, as I write it, do not know.  Time travel‒you can’t keep it straight in your head; it’s too wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

I think I need a Doctor.

TTFN

winter scene

*Though, in all honesty, he was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar, so the equivalent Gregorian date is 10 or 11 days off (I don’t recall which, and I can’t be arsed to look it up).  Then again, most biblical scholars apparently agree that Jesus was born in the summertime, based on the descriptions of his birth in two of the gospels**, so Newton’s birthday is much closer to the Gregorian December 25th.

**The other two gospels, Mark and John, I think***, don’t even mention his birth.

***I remembered correctly‒I just checked.  It’s weird the things one remembers about matters such as this.

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Bad memories, Good memories

It’s Wednesday morning, and not even really close to five o’clock yet.  I’m early enough to be the only person yet waiting for the trains.  I woke up this morning quite early‒obviously‒and though I briefly watched part of a lecture on exploring prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence, I couldn’t really rest, and I’ve felt angry since pretty much when I woke up.  I’m not angry at being awake, though that is irritating.  I’m not even particularly angry at me, though I’m almost always at least a little pissed at myself.  I was angry and thinking about a stupid exchange from my first medical practice after residency, with one of the partners in the practice.

The substance of it isn’t important, it’s just odd that it came into my mind.  I mean, yes, it pissed me off at the time and I think I was not irrational to be pissed off (though I held my tongue), but it was more than twenty years ago.  Why is that making me angry first thing in the morning?  It is fun to imagine things I might have said then, had I been the person I am now.  I take far less shit than I used to take, largely because I have very little left to lose, and much of what I have‒indeed, sometimes all of it‒I frankly want to lose.  At least, I don’t feel that what I have is much worth fighting to keep.

It is quite amazing to think that it’s been more than twenty years since I finished residency and moved to Florida and started in private medical practice.  It’s been about thirty-one and a half years since I got married…and slightly more than half that long since my wife divorced me.  And it’s been about ten years since I’ve seen either of my kids in person or since my son has spoken to me in any way but via a semi-formal E-mail.  A lot has happened in the last 20 years, I guess; I’ve barely hit the highlights here.  But it still has passed rather quickly on the subjective level.

I’m saddled with a good memory, so I recall a lot of the things that have happened in my life, even going back to quite a young age.  I remember the very bad leg aches I used to get as a child, which make my current chronic pain almost feel nostalgic.  I remember really hating the noise of the cannons (and presumably, though to a lesser extent, the muskets) at the musket festival at Greenfield Village, but my memories of that place are otherwise extremely positive.  There were great molasses cookies from the old-fashioned bakery and candy sticks from the general store, and beeswax candles that my sister loved, and of course all the old rebuilt buildings and roads and horse-drawn carriages…it really was (and presumably still is) an excellent place.

gfield village

An evening at Greenfield Village

 

That’s better stuff on which to dwell than on the sometimes irritating personality of a former senior doctor.  I’ll say this, though:  he took good care of his patients, and he also made them feel well cared for, at an above-average level.  Respect is due.  Those things are not as common as they ought to be.  He was (and presumably still is) a good doctor.

I had a positive moment yesterday, which came at the end of a long, fairly frustrating process.  The details aren’t important, but basically I was trying to do something that in the past has always ended up requiring a few hours on the phone with tech support and with them remotely controlling our computers to do what needed doing.  I was trying to do it on my own without contacting them, and I followed the basic steps‒the good thing about computers and related systems is that they have internal logic that is consistent and explicable.  Still, I hit an impasse, and knew I was missing something that the tech support people had always needed to pull off in the past, sometimes with difficulty, but I hadn’t been able to see it, and it wasn’t part of the standard steps of the whole process.

I tried watching some videos but they were superficial, and I was steeling myself to get in touch with “the IT crowd”, when something clicked, and I thought I realized what to do.  It took about twenty minutes of watching to see if I had succeeded, but turned out that I had.

Such moments are remarkably euphorigenic.  I mean, I know I’m reasonably “smart” about some things.  Certain types of endeavors have always been easier for me than they are for most people, though there are other things that other people do readily that I find all but incomprehensible.

But every now and then one does something that was difficult, and it brings a joy along the lines of having solved a difficult puzzle, but with the added benefit of being useful, and of being something many other people wouldn’t have seen, or not as readily, anyway.  It’s particularly zingy when it happens in a field in which one is not actually an expert, but it can even happen in cases where someone is.

For instance, there was a case in residency in which a code was called for a man in respiratory distress, who was having “Cheyne-Stokes” respirations.  Without intervention he probably would have died, but such situations are run-of-the-mill in a hospital, and he was being intubated before immediate danger of death threatened.  He wasn’t my patient, but it occurred to me that he was a relatively young man to be in that situation, and from group rounds I thought I remembered that he had a drug problem.  So I asked if anyone had tried Narcan*, and they hadn’t.

They got the Narcan out of the crash cart, gave him a shot of it in his IV, and Wow!  He practically exploded to life.  I’m sure it was unpleasant for him, especially since he was already intubated, and abrupt opiate withdrawal is not pleasant for anyone.  But he was alive, and now it was clear that some “friend” had brought this patient‒who had been put in a corner, single room somehow‒a dose of heroin or something similar, and he had overdosed while in the hospital.

I had a slightly different type of feel-good moment as the Senior Medical Resident on a nighttime consultation in the Rehab wing of Jacobi Hospital for a patient who was having palpitations and a very fast heart beat.  A quick EKG revealed a benign kind of supraventricular tachycardia (SVT).  I tried a quick vagal maneuver that didn’t work, and then gave a push of adenosine to the patient and the rhythm broke.  The patient was very happy**, as was the rehab resident, who began almost deferentially calling me “Dr. Elessar” after that, though she was just as much a doctor as I was, and certainly just as expert in her own field.

SVT

SVT – Supraventricular tachycardia

And once, during an ICU/CCU rotation***, I helped nudge an obviously dead-on-his-feet Cardiology fellow (they have a very rough schedule) by asking if maybe we shouldn’t quickly cardiovert a patient who was intubated but conscious and was now going into ventricular tachycardia****.  He sort of blinked as if he didn’t even know what language I was speaking, then shook his head and said, right, yeah, that’s what we should do.  We did, and it worked.

Monomorphic-ventricular-tachycardia-VT

V-tach – Ventricular tachycardia

I can tell you, there’s nothing quite like the facial expression of someone who’s being externally cardioverted at bedside‒this is basically the same as the defibrillation scenes you see in TV and movies, and it uses the same equipment‒while conscious.  It’s not a pleasant thing for a patient to experience.  However, she converted immediately to sinus rhythm, and afterward grabbed my hand and squeezed it before I stepped back, showing her appreciation, so I guess it was worth the moment of extreme discomfort for her.

It’s one thing to know intellectually that one is reasonably intelligent, but these little events that demonstrate competence and success, however inconsequential (or sometimes quite consequential), really do give a person a boost.  The opportunities don’t come as often now as they used to come, so I have to relish them when they do.  I was rather giddy for a few hours at work after my minor success yesterday, and jokingly said to my coworker, paraphrasing Apollo 13, “I…am a steely-eyed missile man.”

It’s silly and unimportant, of course, but I rarely feel good about myself, so I’ll cut myself a bit of slack.  it didn’t help me sleep any better last night, though.  And then I woke up in an angry mood, but I guess it was ego-syntonic anger, in that I wasn’t angry at myself but at the memory of a twenty-year-old, unimportant interaction.  Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say.

*For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is a drug that blocks the action of opiates and related compounds, and it does so quickly and strongly.  It’s not fun for the patient, but it can be life-saving and more.

**I don’t recall if we transferred the patient directly to a medical floor or merely continued to consult and ask Cardiology to take a look‒in a public hospital, we didn’t necessarily get to follow up on particular patients long-term.

***I think this was the rotation in which once while on call I literally did not sit down for thirty hours straight, and in which, due to the call schedule, I worked 21-days in a row, had a day off, and then worked another 10 in a row.  It was a busy month, but a hell of a learning experience in many ways.

****Much more acutely dangerous than SVT, especially in a critically ill patient.  It can easily progress to ventricular fibrillation and even of itself can cause cardiac arrest.

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Great Hypnos, child of Nyx and Erebus and twin brother of Thanatos, why keeps’t thou thyself thus so strange from me?

Well, I have my laptop with me today, and I’m at the train station even earlier than I was yesterday.  This is related to the fact that I woke up even earlier today than yesterday, though I didn’t go to bed or to sleep any earlier.

It is 12-20-2022 on a Tuesday, which is kind of fun—because there are a lot of 2s in today’s date.  I don’t mind the zeroes, but I wish we didn’t have that numeral one in today’s date.  I do remember that the Tuesday on which fell, using the European date writing system, the twenty-second of February of this year was 22-02-2022, which is about as palindromic as such dates can get*, and the ultimate twos-day.  Matt Parker did a video a few years ago about February 2, 2020 for Stand-up Maths, claiming it was the most palindromic, because it worked in European or American dating order.  He had a point; I’ll put a link here if I remember.  But that date did not fall on a Tuesday.

I had to check online to confirm the days on which the dates above fell.  I could probably have worked it out for myself with a bit of figuring.  If I had plenty of energy, it’s the sort of thing I might do—but not right now.  Right now I have almost no energy.  I’m frankly exhausted at nearly every level, though perhaps not according to the literal definition of the word, since it implies something that is fully empty (is that an oxymoron?) in the literal sense.

I feel like I am very close to that point, though.  I’m so tired of doing what I do every day, just to maintain the various functions of life that continue to require maintenance, from eating, to brushing teeth, to working, to buying food, to getting to and from work, to doing laundry, to all those other things that are just repetitive maintenance for a life that I don’t even want to keep doing.

There’s a famous fact of physics that, if there were an airless hole straight through the middle of the Earth**, and if one jumped into the hole, it would take—if memory serves—forty-two minutes to get to the other side of the planet.  I believe Newton figured this out, himself.  Of course, this is highly counterfactual, since there would be air resistance and worse in such a hole, and a large portion of the Earth isn’t even really solid, so you couldn’t maintain a hole, and the Earth’s interior is far too hot to survive passing through even at high speeds.  But still, it seems like it would be nice just to jump into such a hole and fall, going back and forth through the planet without stopping, forever, or at least for the rest of one’s life.

Actually, come to think of it, that’s an experience that’s the same as any form of free-fall.  Anytime one is moving unimpeded along a geodesic in spacetime, one is in the same circumstance.  That was Einstein’s great insight that I believe he described as the happiest thought of his life:  when he realized that a man falling from a high roof would effectively experience no forces whatsoever while falling, and it led him to the principle of equivalence—that acceleration and gravitation are locally indistinguishable—which then led him down the path to General Relativity.  So, just being an astronaut on the ISS would be the same experience, internally, as falling through such a hole in the Earth, though I doubt they’d send me up there just so I could get a break.

Maybe someday there will be free-fall vacations, where a person can book a flight to be put in orbit for a bit, with no engineered gravity, and just allowed to go to sleep.  Maybe one could even climb into a sensory deprivation tank during that time, and the lack of gravitational acceleration would truly allow them not even to experience proprioception related to gravity.  It seems like it would beat just floating in a bath of Epsom salts.

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to get away from it all, and I do mean from it all.  I can’t relax my mind, I can’t relax my body, but both of them are just achy and tired all the time.  And everything I do is utterly without a point.  I mean, from a certain point of view, everything anyone ever does is without a point, but people can at least have their own, internal purpose, the things that give their lives and deeds meaning to them.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s even rather admirable and heroic and beautiful in its way.

But I don’t have any purpose.  I don’t even have a dugong***.  I’m not going anywhere, I’m not achieving anything, and I don’t get any satisfaction out of anything that I do.  I really am like someone who has kept a Great Ring.

I need just to give up.  I don’t know what I’m achieving by any of this, but I’m pretty sure it’s nothing.  Not that I’m achieving “nothingness”, mind you.  That would, in a sense, be an achievement (ironically).  I’m just achieving nothing, by which I mean not achieving anything.  I guess that’s probably obvious.  Sorry.

I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor makes house calls, if he even is allowed to practice medicine after finishing his remarkably short (shorter than mine) prison term..

I’ll bet he’s not commuting on a train to and from work, living in a single bedroom in the back of an old, cinderblock house, not doing anything for fun, not spending time with his kids or any friends or anything.  And, above all, if he has trouble sleeping, we know he has some tricks to take care of that problem.

Oh, well.

insomnia

*Speaking of palindromes, yesterday we missed the last possible palindromic recording number for the year in doing our verification recordings at work, which was what I had set as a deciding factor regarding my future plans.  So, the universe has sent me no positive message.  Not that I was expecting it to do so.  The universe could hardly care whether I live or die.

**Actually, straight through any two places on the surface of the Earth would give the same basic result, but I’m going to keep things simple.

***Get it?

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On the first day of Hanukkah, my candle…gave to…me…no, that’s not right

Well, “happy Monday”* everyone.  It’s the start of another glorious work week, for those who are on a typical schedule, anyway.  It’s also the first full day of Hanukkah, so for those who celebrate it, Happy Hanukkah.  I didn’t light any candles or anything.  I don’t even have a menorah, though I got one for the office‒I’m not sure why or what the point was.

I don’t feel festive or celebratory, though it is a nice time of year to be able to send people “presents”.  That’s in quotes because I don’t really send much that’s personalized‒just gift cards and such. Personal gifts require one to be close to someone else and to know‒or at least to have a reasonable guess about‒what might please them.  I am not in such a situation anymore, really, with anyone.  Maybe I never was, I don’t know.

I’m writing this post on my phone, again, because I deliberately did not bring my laptop with me for the weekend.  I brought some music notes (meaning written notes, not, for instance, bringing a “b flat” or something of the sort), and a few related things, as well as some heatable soups I had at the office.  I didn’t really do much with the music, though I did get out my acoustic guitar for a short bit…long enough to realize that I was quite out of practice, because my left forearm really got tired and sore very quickly.

I don’t have a strap for the acoustic, so part of the fatigue was just from helping to steady the guitar.  Anyway, that wasn’t much fun, and singing along is embarrassing because other people in the house can hear me.  I turned on my keyboard and diddled around on it briefly, but I screwed up even songs that I know from memory for decades, and even forgot some of the left hand part for a piece I wrote in high school, and which I don’t usually screw up.  I think my head just wasn’t in it.  I’m bringing at least some of the other music I had at the house back to the office today, just so it’s not sitting there reproaching me in my room.

I’m getting to where I can’t even wait for my alarm to go off if I want to do so.  I am now waiting for the first train, and have been for a while.  When I woke up early again, I thought about just trying to lie back until my alarm went off anyway, but the thought of not getting up and getting on the first train, since I was awake anyway, made me feel very stressed out.

It’s not healthy, but I’m not sure what to do about it.  I’m also not terribly motivated to try to do much.  What would be the point?  For whom would I be trying to improve or preserve my health?  Only for me, and I’m not too bothered, frankly.  I do get tired of feeling tired, though.

Oh, my apologies, but I haven’t done any audio recordings yet, whether about sugar, or about Parkinson’s disease, or about cybernetic futures, or anything else.  I could just try to do a quick one sometime, maybe today if I have a bit of extra time.  I could just start off talking free-form, as a way to get going, to make an audio thingy.  I don’t know.

I could do an audio recording about what I think are the pros and cons of audio recordings and podcasts, sort of the counterpart to the blog post I wrote the other day that discussed podcasts versus writing and things of that sort.  I don’t know what all of you think about it.  I don’t really know what any of you think about it, actually.  It would be absurd to imagine that I could know what all of you think about anything, now that I think about it.

I am very tired though.  I wish I could rest.  I keep hoping that I’ll get really sick or something, so I’ll be forced to take time off and also to sleep‒even I tend to sleep when I’m fighting an illness. It’s a weirdly nice thought.

I’m also a little tense about this week, coming up to Christmas.  There’s an office get-together in a restaurant on Friday night, I think, and I often don’t go to these when they are in restaurants and similar.  It’s a bit uncomfortable for me, just in general, but also, getting back to the house afterward is an issue.  I live farther from the office than anyone else at work, and also more toward the south. But (as usual) they picked a restaurant another 15 or so miles farther north.  Also, the trains stop running at 9:11 pm at the latest, and then I wouldn’t get to the house until maybe 10: 30…and I’m working on Saturday.

But the biggest problem is being out and about among humans.  I mean, I know the people at the office of course, but I don’t have all that much in common with any of them, though most of them are nice enough.  A few are very irritating, but that’s as much my fault as theirs‒things irritate me that often don’t seem to bother other people.

I guess it’s all pretty much on me, as they say.  I just don’t find such social situations pleasant; in fact I find them stressful, so unless someone slipped me a Valium I probably would not enjoy it.  I should insist that they all do something I like to do for fun, like play role playing games**, or read books together (we could read them out loud, or something along those lines, I suppose), or watch videos or shows or read books about science or philosophy or mathematics or related subjects.  They would have to leave their phones elsewhere, and sit in one spot, with no wandering around, no having side conversations, none of that.

Why do I have to submit myself to discomfort to do things other people claim to like to do, but no one does the things I like to do?  Answer:  There seems to be no valid reason.  At best there may be excuses and sophistry.  There’s no good reason for me to go significantly out of my way, more so than anyone else in the office, to do something that’s not really fun for me without pharmacological help.  I told them before, if they would at least have something down by me, I would readily go, since it would demonstrate occasional willingness to compromise.  But, of course, that didn’t happen.  Quite the opposite.

Oh, well.  “Stranger in a strange land” and all that.  I’m not sure what, if anything, I’m getting at.  Probably there is no point to my meandering today, if there ever is.  I’m too tired to think too hard or too deeply about it.  I’ll just end by repeating a Happy Hanukkah for those who celebrate it, and a general Happy Holidays for those celebrating other ones.  The Solstice is in a few days, so the nights are long, right now.  But I can’t sleep through them.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*I put it in scare quotes because I’m being sarcastic.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many people who feel happy about Mondays.

**That’s not really serious.  I don’t like playing role playing games with strangers, so MMORPGs have never appealed to me.  Neither does trying to explain the rules of Gamma World or Dungeons and Dragons to the people in the office.  I couldn’t get my ex-wife even really to try doing any role-playing games, so I don’t know what hope I’d have with anyone at the office.

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Lyin’ there and staring at the ceiling

Well, I’m sitting here at the train station almost half an hour early for the first train of the day, after already having lain awake in bed for over two hours before finally giving up and getting up.

I feel that I’m waking up earlier and earlier over time, but it’s not as though I go to sleep any earlier.  I’ve been trying to be careful about when and how much I take in of caffeine, and allergy medication, and all that stuff, but adjusting it—or even leaving it out—seems to have minimal effect on my sleep patterns, though it does have its effects on my nasal passages.

I wish I could imagine that something were soon to come for me such as happened in the Stephen King novel, Insomnia.  That would at least be interesting.  But this has been going on for far too long to expect it to be part of some overarching, meta-cosmic chess game against the forces of the Random.  For one thing, though those ideas make for a good story, they don’t hold up to logic in any kind of realistic sense, considering legitimate mathematics and physics and biology and chemistry and all that jazz.  No, I’m just an insomniac because of chronic depression and other neuropsychiatric issues for which we have no cure and about which we only have limited understanding.

What a funny universe.

Oh, speaking of neuropsychiatric issues, I’m not going to be posting the transcript of my interaction with Amazon yesterday, after all.  For one thing, they did at least end up delivering what they were supposed to deliver, albeit far later than it was supposed to be delivered, and it did what it was supposed to do.  Anyway, it wasn’t the only thing that set me to feeling like I was hanging on by my fingernails yesterday, so I think a lot of the issue was with me.

I’m sure if you could read my interaction, you’d probably agree.  I know, I know, you read enough of my lunacy here, how much worse could it be?  Well, it’s hard for me to be objective—being the subject and object of the question—but I think that interaction will stay in draft form on WordPress, one of several things I’ve not ended up posting because they are just, well…too much.  If the public were made aware of them, it might lead to me being involuntarily hospitalized, or euthanized, or something along those lines.

This is not to say I wouldn’t benefit from hospitalization—or even from being euthanized, frankly.  I almost certainly would benefit from being hospitalized in a decent, well-run facility with supportive and qualified staff and whatnot.  But who’s going to pay for something like that?  I’d be more likely to end up in someplace run by some local county and/or the State of Florida, and the State of Florida does not do a very impressive job with such public services.

I attribute part of this fact to Florida’s past primary status as a retirement state, where people came who had already worked for decades, and had pensions and whatnot, as well as medical insurance and Medicare (once it existed), and tended, all else being equal, to be conservative just based on the fact of being older.

It does seem remarkable to me that Florida doesn’t have better healthcare than it does, given that it was formerly oriented toward retirement, and older people tend to require more healthcare than younger people.  Not that there isn’t good medical care to be found; there is.  But it’s not that impressive compared to, say, New York City and surrounding areas.  Though maybe that’s an unfair comparison, since NYC is a fairly unique environment, even on a global scale.

I don’t know what point I’m making here, today, if any.  My mind is not clear…not even close to it, because I’ve been chronically sleep deprived for I don’t know how long.  God knows what I might be able to think and to accomplish if I were consistently well-rested and felt good about myself and the world.  For all that I tend to hate myself, I do know that I am smart and fairly creative and have many abilities that are above average.  I could do a lot of good in the world—or a lot of evil, too, I suppose, if that were my preference—if I were just able to come together.

Maybe not.  Maybe I would do less good than I already do.  Sometimes feeling bad about oneself can be more motivating than feeling at ease with oneself, or so I suspect.  Sometimes having regrets and things for which one wishes one could make amends might motivate one to do more good than would a simple desire to do and to be good.

I’m not speaking too personally, here.  While I certainly have never been a saintly figure, I’ve also not done much in the world to cause harm to other people—partly because I have so frequently felt the anger and rage and frustration rise up in me and cause me to wish harm on other people*, so I’ve developed quite good impulse control.

Anyway, that’s more than I have to say this morning.  I’m not feeling well, I’m feeling very tired, I’m really not wanting to go to work, nor to stay at the house, nor to do anything else, frankly.

Maybe today I’ll try to work out a tune and even chords to that song the lyrics of which I came up with and mentioned sometime last week (or maybe two weeks ago).  I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.  In the meantime, well, if you’re near me, stay dry; it’s a slightly drizzly day, though it’s a bit warmer than earlier this week.  Anyway, it’s south Florida, so it’s always pretty warm.

In winter time, I don’t know why all the homeless people in the eastern part of the country don’t just come down to south Florida.  At least they wouldn’t freeze to death outdoors.  But I guess if they were in a position to make sound plans and carry them out, then homeless people probably wouldn’t be homeless.  I can sympathize.

I wish I could offer them better advice than “try to go someplace warm”, but it’s not as though I’m somebody who has it all figured out.  I don’t think there is any such person, and I don’t think there ever has been.  I’m deeply skeptical about even the possibility that there ever will be such a being, though I think it is possible to improve understanding and knowledge in an exponential fashion, at least until the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes everything else moot.

And given how long it is until that happens—on a human scale at least—it wouldn’t be such a surprise if future intelligent beings found ways around even such seemingly inevitable laws of physics.  To paraphrase Carl Sagan, intelligent life can do an awful lot of good—by whatever measure you want to call it good—in a trillion years or more.

Of course, it could also crash and burn on every start, without exception.  That would be a shame, but it wouldn’t leave the universe any worse off than it would have been otherwise, as far as I can see.

*For instance, I’ve thought more than once that it would be “nice” if we had the technology to instantiate a three-strikes failure-to-use-one’s-turn-signal system.  In this system, any time you failed to signal before changing lanes or before turning, in anything but a true emergency, you would acquire (and be notified of) a strike, which would last for 1 week, to the hour, from when it occurred.  When it expired you might be notified of that as well, or maybe not.  Such details could be hashed out in planning and reevaluated over time.  Anyway, with your second strike you would be given a stern warning and reminder of your status, and upon your third failure to signal within any given 7-day span, you would be disintegrated.

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Semi-literal “trigger warning” – this post will likely be a downer

Well, it’s Friday again, the second Friday in December I guess, and I’m writing my daily blog post.  I’ll be writing one tomorrow as well, since I’m working tomorrow (barring unforeseen circumstances).  So, if you like to read my blog, keep your eyes open; it should be appearing tomorrow morning, not much later than the usual time.

I’m not sure what to write about this morning.  I suppose I should probably get into more of the informational posting(s) about sugar, but I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind for that.  I’m grumpy—as usual—this morning, and I was even imagining things about which to be angry everywhere on the way to the train station, which is where I am right now, waiting for the very first train of the day.

I woke up particularly early today—I know, what else is new, right?—and so I’m here well in advance of that first train.  There was a casually discarded Burger King beverage cup lying on the bench on which I usually sit when I got here.  I threw it away.  That was irritating, but it wasn’t the first thing to annoy me today.  Still, it’s difficult to understand why people leave such things lying about, when there are public garbage receptacles every twenty feet or so throughout the train station.

Now they’ve announced that the train I’m taking is boarding on the opposite side than usual, which is also irritating, though at least they’ve announced it well in advance.  I had to get up, after already having started writing, pack the computer away, get in the elevator, go up, cross the bridge, and then—and this is the funny-ish part—summon and wait for the elevator on the parking lot side to the second floor.

The funny part of that is that if I were as selfish or thoughtless or whatever you want to call it as everyone else seems to be, then the elevator would have been at the top already, since I was the last one to use it.  But when I ride the elevator up, I always press the ground floor button as I get off, because people are mainly going to be coming from the parking lot side, so they’ll be needing to get on the elevator at the ground floor, and I might as well save them a bit of the wait, in case they’re running behind schedule or whatever.  It’s convenient for maybe one other passenger a day, at most, but it seems like the right thing to do.

Today, however, it inconvenienced me.  It’s a bit ironic, and it is mildly annoying, in my current frame of mind, but I can’t consider it any kind of injustice.  I’m the one who chooses to do the elevator send-back-down thing, and I don’t regret it, and I’ll continue to do it.

But it is yet another annoying little fact about the world.  I’m sure that everyone has plenty of these petty complaints, of course.  The world doesn’t exist for our convenience, after all.  I could almost say that I should feel lucky enough to be alive, except that most days it doesn’t feel like luck.  At least, at this stage of my life, I don’t feel lucky to be still alive.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it as needed, but I was unreasonably lucky to have the family and the schools that I had and went to, lucky to be able to use my creative and intellectual faculties well and with greater ease than many people, and to able to be good at a lot of things to do with art and science, and thus to be able to decide to become a doctor “at the last minute”, as it were.  I was lucky to meet my ex-wife*, and absurdly lucky to have my children, and to have been part of their lives as long as I was.

I was lucky to have very good friends whose company I enjoyed and with whom I shared many common interests.  So, even though I did have a congenital heart defect and apparently neurological defects, and certainly have had trouble with dysthymia and depression (and insomnia) starting at a pretty young age, I had many things to compensate, and overall, most of the time, I was pretty happy.

But most of that is not the case anymore.  I don’t have friends, my mother and father are dead, my siblings and other family members are far away, I can’t practice medicine, I’m not married anymore, and my kids don’t see me (and one of them doesn’t talk to me).  And I still have whatever neurological and mood disorders I’ve always had, which is not surprising, since there is no known cure for such things, though goodness knows I have tried.  And I have my chronic pain, and tinnitus, and all that jazz.

All this doesn’t really have any point.  I know I just sound like I’m moaning, and I would understand if you just found it irritating, much in the way that I find so many other things irritating.  You certainly have that right.  I’m just saying that, if one had good things in the past that countered the bad things, and then those good things go away, it’s hard to deal with the bad things afterwards, and they seem to have their volume and brightness and contrast all maxed out.

It’s a quibble I’ve always had with the line by Tennyson, that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  I’ve never thought this was absolutely, cut and dried correct, never considered it a slam dunk argument or postulate or declaration or whatever class of cliché into which it can be slotted.

To have loved—and to have been loved—and to have lost not merely because of the vicissitudes of fate, but because you yourself are just not tolerable to other people after a while, because you’re fucked in the head in ways you can’t really change…that’s a bit of a downer.

It’s always hard to lose people one loves.  It’s more than enough to engender sympathy and compassion.  We will all, ultimately, lose everyone and/or be lost by them, and that’s sad and hard, but it’s not personal (in the sense of being about you as an individual), though that’s small comfort.  But when so many people you love choose to be lost by you, despite what are honestly your best efforts, when you tried with great force and determination and thought to be the best son, the best husband, the best father, the best friend, the best doctor, and so on, that you were able to figure out how to be—well, that’s a special kind of hard.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself—at least, not exactly.  I’m not prone to cut myself much slack.  I disgust myself.  For the most part, I think I deserve every bad thing that could ever happen to me, but then, I’m my own arch enemy.  I’m the Victor von Doom to my own Reed Richards.  I’m almost an anti-narcissist, at least in some of the aspects of my personality.

I’m the person I hate most in the world.

I’ve said it before and would repeat it ad infinitum:  I would never change anything up to and including the moment my children were born, lest it change the fact that they exist.  But there are things that I would change since then.

There was a time, ten or eleven years ago, right at this time of year, when, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall of my poorly kept one-bedroom apartment, I played “Russian Roulette” using the lovely Ruger pigeon-beak grip single action .32 magnum revolver I used to own, just like this one:

Mvc-004f

I wish sometimes that I had put five more bullets in the cylinder before my spin.

*To be clear, she wasn’t my ex-wife when I met her.