insomnia

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How strange or odd some’er I blog myself

Hello and good morning.

It may not be morning when you’re reading this, but it is morning when I’m writing it, and since the time any given person reads it is variable—it could be anywhen from noon back round to noon, and in any time zone—the only stable point from which to make departure is that time in which I am writing.  Thus, again:  good morning.

I’m using my laptop today, which is easier and faster, though it may lead to the post being more wordy and rambling than the ones I wrote on my phone.  Perhaps not.  Those who’ve said anything at all have said they can’t tell the difference.  It feels different, of course, but then, it would feel different, wouldn’t it?  A laptop and a smartphone are, despite many common attributes, very different devices with which to work.

I’m waiting for the second train this morning, rather than having gotten up for the first as I did the previous two days.  It’s not that I wasn’t up frequently during the night; I was awake well in time to come for the first train, but somewhat ironically, since I’m not feeling quite as physically ill, I was able at least just to lie there “in bed” and wait until five minutes before my alarm went off before getting up.

Of course, given my traditional greeting, in case you don’t know, it’s Thursday, the day I’ve long reserved for writing my blog posts, even when I didn’t write them any other day.  As with the time, you might be reading this on pretty much any day of the week, but I’m writing it on Thursday, and that’s not going to have changed, unless reality is far more fluid than it seems.  I’m pretty sure it’s not.

I’ll briefly relay an issue I had when I arrived at the office yesterday, already sick and uncomfortable, forcing myself to go in when I should have stayed in bed because it was payroll day.  Suffice it to say that I had to rush to the restroom when I arrived, only to discover that the toilet paper had not been maintained as I’ve always asked people to do, even in my absence, and I was caught rather short.

I decided to enact a temporary, prison-style system of people having to be responsible for their own toilet paper, since they couldn’t be responsible for looking out for each other according to very simple procedures of letting someone know when they take the last replacement roll from the cupboard.

I’ll revert to the old system today, for stability’s sake, but it’s frustrating that grown people don’t take simple steps to be considerate.  I wish I could fit everyone at work—including myself—with a shock collar, to activate when someone does something rude or inappropriate.  Of course, the person I have most complaints about is myself; the very fact that I get so angry about everything, and always feel so tense, just makes me hate myself more every day.

I have an electric stunner at the office—I bought it because in Unanimity, some characters use them for specific purposes, and I needed to know how they sound and look when activated, and how easy it was to get one.  I do various things to hurt myself when I’m either too angry at myself to hold back, or so stressed out by various things people do that I want to lash out, but I can’t allow myself to do such things, so I let it out where I can, at myself.

I’ve destroyed my own writing and art work, I’ve banged my head against desks and walls and tables until I bruise myself, I’ve punched walls—the first two knuckles of both of my hands are slightly bulbous from my having done this often over many years—I’ve thrown away precious items and books, and I’ve hurt myself in more extreme ways than these, but I won’t get too much into that*.  I don’t want to have to title another blog post with a trigger warning, especially not on a day when the title is supposed to be a minced Shakespearean quote.

The point is that I’ve never tried using my stunner on myself, mainly because I’m nervous about how it might interact with my chronic pain, which is at least partly neuropathic in character.  I don’t want to trigger muscle spasms or neural feedback loops or the like.  It probably wouldn’t do any bad or good, though; I’ve used TENS units with no particular benefit, even at very high power.

That’s the character of my life.  Each day is a loosely connected string of things I do to try to distract myself from chronic pain, tension/stress, sleep loss, dysthymia/depression, and deep inability to connect with anyone despite being profoundly lonely.  It’s a shitty ride, I’ve gotta say.  I’m not even going to give it one star on TripAdvisor.

People sometimes say** things like, “Hang on, keep going, there are people who care about you, you’re not alone.”  And that’s nice, and I’m sure there are people who care, at least in the abstract sense.  But it’s at least a bit like saying, “Hang on, keep going, there’s a supermassive black hole in the center of most galaxies!”  It’s true, and it’s interesting.  It’s something I care about.  But it has no apparent impact on my daily existence and the fact that I hate myself and hate my life.

I don’t have any answers for myself, in case that’s not obvious.  But I’m getting wearier and wearier of just plodding along, without any goal, and with no one nearby to talk to, with all the people I’ve cared most about not wanting to be around me.  Who can blame them?  You’ve read my writing; how much time would you want to spend with me?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope all of you out there are doing well, and have things for which to live, and people around you who love you and care about you and want to spend time with you.  If you do, please be grateful and treasure them.

TTFN

me distorted

*Although I will give a caution about one long-past event:  don’t hit yourself in the kneecap with a ball-peen hammer, even if you’re doing it to distract yourself from chronic pain.  Just…don’t.

**Or, to pick nits, they write such things.

This is an addendum, to be added to today’s blog post at the end.  The train I’m waiting for is delayed, and they keep running an automated announcement overhead that it’s delayed “10…15 minutes”.  But it’s already 25 minutes late, and according to the app that tracks the trains, it’s going to be at least 10 more minutes before it gets here, so the announcement is just wrong, and that grates on my nerves far more than it ought to do.  Of course, as always with delays, the train will be more crowded, because people who would have missed the usual scheduled time, or who arrive early for the next train, will be aboard.  I feel like I’m going to split in half because I’m so tense about it.  When the whole universe, or at least everything related to humans, feels like the Enemy, it doesn’t take all that long to become shell-shocked.  I feel that I have no escape and no comrades, like I’m the only member of my species in a strange, foreign universe.  I think I’m on the verge of some breakdown.  Hell, maybe I’m already in the midst of it.  I don’t know what to do.  I need help, but my need is no claim on anyone else’s abilities; my need is my own problem.  It’s a need I don’t think I’m going to be able to meet, and when one is unable to meet one’s needs, one deteriorates and/or suffers and/or dies.

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I don’t know…trigger warning, I guess? Whatever.

Okay, well, I’m writing this post on my phone on Google Docs like yesterday, because I didn’t take my laptop with me when I left the office.  This time it was more or less deliberate, however.  I left work early due to general, global ill-feeling, both physical and psychological, and I just didn’t feel like bothering to pack up the laptop.

I honestly didn’t feel like doing much of anything.  I didn’t really feel like going back to the house‒and there were frustrations awaiting me when I arrived, but that was mainly a problem with my reaction to the unexpected change in my patterns and the like‒but I had nowhere else to go, and I didn’t want to stay at the office.  I didn’t want to be anywhere, but that wasn’t a readily viable option.

There was a moment, while I waited for my train, when a freight train passed, going in the “wrong” direction, using the commuter train tracks as they occasionally do when necessary‒I’ve written about that before.  It was intriguing to think how powerful the passing cars and the whole train were.  They were so close you could reach out and touch them if you wanted, since they were right there passing through the station.  If I had timed a jump to go between the cars as they passed (they were going no more than maybe twenty-five miles per hour), I would have been shredded to pieces in an instant, possibly before feeling anything but the initial concussion.

Of course, as I thought about it, I realized it was something I would have a hard time working up the gumption to do, and‒more importantly‒it would cause a great big mess, shutting down that train, shutting down at least some local traffic (since the station is right by a road crossing) and of course causing delays for the whole commuter system for hours.  That would be terribly rude, and though of course I would have nothing to fear from Hannibal Lecter at that point, I still don’t like to be rude*.

So, I just waited for the next train and went back to the house.  Someone was parked in my usual spot, which stressed me out as it always does when it happens, but I was able cleverly to third-space that stress by cursing out loud to myself repeatedly and hitting things and hurting my hands and hurting myself in other ways in the room when I got there.

It’s an overreaction, of course, but I do ask for very little from other people.  I pay the power and the water and the cable/internet bills, and I don’t bother trying to negotiate splits of those bills, because that process is more stressful to imagine than is just paying.  So it would be nice if my space and my routines and whatnot were left alone.

Oh, well.  Why would I think the world would be comfortable in any way?  It never has been so far.

Never.

Speaking of cable/internet, the WiFi went out again in the evening as I was sharing some “videos” of some cover and original songs of mine as a zillionth attempt to send a message out**.  This was particularly frustrating because I had a lot of trouble with it last weekend already.  I got so frustrated I went out to 7-11 and got 2 slices of pizza, which were not as good as usual, and two iced teas, which were quite nice.  This was not a positive thing to do, but involved another form of self-harm in a way.  At least when I got back my spot was open and the internet was once again stable after my reset.

I tried to relax and go to sleep after eating and watching a few educational videos, but I woke up starting an hour later, then 2 hours after that, then another hour later, at which point I stopped trying to get back to sleep.  When it was finally late enough, I got up and came to get on the earliest train, and here I am on the way to the office.

Lather, rinse, repeat as needed, until finally‒someday soon I hope‒it will all go down the drain.

*I’ve sometimes thought that a good, polite, unobtrusive way to kill oneself would be to go to the nearby Atlantic Ocean and start swimming eastward and just keep going until exhaustion led one to one’s inevitable end beneath the waves…or until one reached Africa, I suppose.  However, the fear of ocean-going predators (though a rarefied possibility) and a less-than-ideal comfort with swimming makes that process difficult to contemplate for me.  A better one might be simply getting up and going for a walk, and just continuing to walk until dehydration and exhaustion and the like finished one off, though there are plenty of possible caveats there.  At least, though, it would give one time to reconsider, which jumping from a great height would not allow (and which “Russian Roulette” only allows if you lose***) and the process itself might bring some sort of rescuing, spiritual insight or enlightenment‒at least if one believes some religious and spiritual stories and legends.  It’s something to consider.

**It never works; I don’t know why I bother.  I guess I must be more optimistic than I think I am.  I’ve said it before, I wish I had a drug and/or alcohol problem, because there are numerous resources out there that are available and eager to provide help and support for those issues, and one is given social and moral support, often almost lionized, for fighting an addiction.  Failing that, one can always just overdose.  I think high dose fentanyl, probably combined with Valium, would likely be a decent way to die.

***Now that is a tense game, I can tell you from personal experience.

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Yet another blog post without a real title. What do you expect?

It’s Monday morning, and I’m at the train station ever-so-slightly later than usual*, because I slept a tiny bit later, having stayed up quite a lot later than usual last night.  That was because The Power of the Doctor was on BBC America starting at 8pm, and I was quite wide awake even after it was over.

It was pretty good, though not as good as The Day of the Doctor, but then again, that was hard to beat.  The ending was a real surprise…but I don’t want to give any spoilers, except to note that I like the fact that the thirteenth doctor stepped outside the Tardis to regenerate so she didn’t trash it.  I’ve already given spoilers for the presumed heat death of the universe, that’s more than enough.  And that’s okay because the chances of anyone alive today in the universe being around to see it and having their surprise ruined are so small as to make winning every lottery in the world seem a near-certainty.  At least, that’s my intuitive estimate.

Also, I could be wrong about the heat death of the universe.  It could end in some far more horrific fashion.

I just noticed something curious, speaking of time travel-related shows:  In the little Microsoft search bar at the left of the toolbar on the screen, just after the Windows symbol, there’s a little stylized jacket and skateboard from Back to the Future II, the least good of the three movies (in my opinion).  I wonder what that’s about.  But I don’t wonder enough to look into it.  If anyone reading this happens to know and cares to leave a comment about it, I’d be grateful, but it’s not important.

Nothing is important, really.  Or everything is.  Either one is the same statement, when you get down to it, or at least they’re equivalent statements.

Of course, importance is a relative measure.  There’s no absolute importance scale like we have for temperature.  Importance is also subjective.  What’s important to one person is different from any (and probably all) others.  Importance is also variable, it being an estimate in the mind of the beholder that varies from day to day, year to year, decade to decade, and so on, for any given person.  If you’re not convinced, try to think of the things that were most important to you when you were five, then when you were fifteen, then twenty-five, and see how your priorities have changed.

Hell, when you’re old enough, just being able to sleep through the night without having to get up to go to the bathroom several times can be amazingly important.  I have a head start on that, in that I wake up anyway, so I sometimes get up to go to the bathroom preemptively.  I’m clever that way.

Oh, speaking of being old enough, I want to send out a (belated) Happy Birthday to my cousin, Lance, who apparently reads this blog with some regularity.  I didn’t write any posts over the weekend because I didn’t go to work, but I hope he had a good birthday and enjoyed himself.

My own weekend was basically rather frustrating and annoying, but a lot of that was just because I was there.  Of course, that’s rather trivial when you think about it.  Any given person cannot be frustrated or annoyed unless that person exists and is “present”, whatever that might mean in any given circumstance.

I did do something rather funny, yesterday.  I made a note using my phone’s video feature about something that I have realized before but had never recorded:  microwave popcorn tastes quite nice, and is a pleasantly easy snack to eat while watching (for instance) the sixtieth anniversary Doctor Who special, but it leaves a smell that lingers in the air for hours, and that smell is rather reminiscent of nether bodily effluvia.

I think it’s funny that I used the video function to record me commenting about that.  I would normally** have used a voice recorder app rather than wasting video, which has the unfortunate effect of recording pictures of my face, but my new phone doesn’t have an easily used voice recorder app.  It has a recording app.  There’s an app simply called “recorder” and it has a waveform of sorts as its icon.

I don’t think it has anything to do with those wooden (or plastic) flutes they have you try to play in grade-school level music classes before you’re ready to use real instruments, but when I tried to use it, once, to record a quick note to myself, it asked me for all sorts of permissions and things, and I decided, “You know what?  If it needs to get clearance for all sorts of things that I have to give it clearance to do, then I don’t want to record my notes on this app.”  Honestly, why can’t it just be like the previous app, which recorded what you said, just like an old-fashioned Dictaphone, and stored it as a file named based on the date and time of the recording?

Apparently, the camera function doesn’t require any permissions of that sort, though it’s recording presumably just as much audio information, and a ridiculously unnecessary (in this case) amount of video information.

Oh, well, what are you going to do?  The world is stupid.  But, well, it would be, wouldn’t it?  It’s just a planet, after all, how smart could it be?  And so is human civilization stupid, or at least human society on the local, daily level.  I suppose that, taken as a whole, human civilization is the smartest thing that we know of in the universe, but that’s not saying very much.  Most of the universe is vacuum, filled (slightly) with whatever “dark energy” is, and that’s getting bigger all the time.

Dark energy really is bringing down the average cosmic intelligence, but it’s not as if it was high to begin with.  Or even to middle with.  As far as we can tell, right now, it’s as smart as it’s ever been, and that’s just because of human civilization*** is smarter than, say, the moon, or a star or a black hole or a nebula or “dark matter****”, or anything else.

Anyway, before I bring down your overall intelligence too much, or at least your mood, I’ll call it done for today.  I’m not that happy even still to be around for another week, if I’m honest with you (which, in that, I am*****).  Hopefully that won’t happen too many more times.  Some promising signs have occurred recently, but I’ve been disappointed before, as I was particularly for the last five days.

I hope you all feel more upbeat than I do.  It’s not a high bar to clear.

*By which I mean, I got here at my self-scheduled time, in time for the usual, second train.

**So to speak, anyway.  I don’t know what I’ve ever done “normally” in my life.

***You can watch my video about there being no life in the universe, effectively, if you want to explore these thoughts further.

****As far as we know.  We know so little about the substance of dark matter than I guess it could be amazingly intelligent.  But there are good reasons not to think that’s the case, so far.

*****Though I can make no promises about honesty at any other time.  How could I?  If I’m honest, the promise would be true by default, and if I’m dishonest, then the promise might be dishonest.  It’s a pointless promise to make, as are all too many promises.

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There was a star blogged, and under that was I born.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—October 20, 2022—and thus it’s time for my weekly blog post, though I’ve been writing my near-daily blog post all along this week and for many preceding weeks.

I posted yesterday about the two videos I’d uploaded to YouTube with my readings of two of my favorite poems, and I hope those of you who are interested in such things enjoyed them.  The only comments I’ve received were on Facebook, and those were actually on the sharings of the videos themselves, not on my blog post, or on YouTube proper.  I guess it’s something.

I did a first draft, so to speak, of a recitation of The Raven yesterday, and I started to work on editing the audio for it.  I realized that I cannot use that video, since I made a few errors—a wrong word in at least two places that doesn’t even make sense.  I honestly cannot understand how that happened, since it’s an error I’ve never made before, as far as I can recall, when reciting the poem.  Anyway, I’ll have to re-record the video.

At least working on the audio led me to decide what I was going to do for the background music for this, and I’ve prepared that (it’s remarkable what I can get done since I no longer write fiction or play guitar in the morning).  It didn’t involve me actually playing and recording any new versions of music, but I did work with my own recorded music to produce it, and it’s suitably eerie, I think.  I’ll let you all be the judges of such things.

On a less cheery note, I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, waking up at around one thirty, struggling to try to get back to sleep, but only succeeding for a total of about fifteen minutes by my clock.  I did at least have a dream during that fifteen minutes, but it was one of those typical, semi-mundane but still bizarre dreams, and it involved some annoying scheme that took over computers and cell phones, but in a fashion such that I can’t see what the point would have been, other than pranking.

I don’t understand computer pranking and hacking, or why someone would think it was funny.  I guess there’s no accounting for one’s sense of humor.  I, for instance, think it would be funny to castrate all saboteur-type hackers* without anesthesia or antibiotics and to use fire to stop the bleeding.  I think it would be hilarious.  But that’s just me.  I’ve always had an odd sense of humor.

That’s pretty much all I have for you today.  I’ll work on redoing the video for The Raven, possibly even this morning.  If I get a take that I like, I could be finished and post the video by this evening, but the takes are about ten and a half minutes in length—that’s the time it takes me to recite the poem with a bit of voice-acting thrown in—so if I screw it up, I probably won’t do another take.

Still, if I do post it to YouTube today or tonight, I’ll probably share about it here on my blog tomorrow, assuming I’m still alive and sharing, which is not necessarily my preference.  Honestly, I don’t know what most people see in staying alive; I imagine most of it truly has to do with innate biological drives, a fundamental, “terminal” goal, in AI-speak (though it’s ironic to use it here), and people just make excuses for it, confabulating justifications and motivations for staying alive when it’s really just animal programming due to natural selection that impels them to continue.

Oh, well.  That’s life.  I hope yours is enjoyable, at least for today, and hopefully from now on, for as long as it can be for you.

TTFN

Raven

*Other than, perhaps, those who are legitimately and honestly taking part in some form of political protest, but that should be a very strict set of criteria and very limited in application.  Hackers can potentially cost a society millions and even billions of dollars with minimal effort or risk on their parts, and when society loses such amounts of money, there are people, somewhere, who because of that, go without enough good food, without medicine or mental health care; there are people who suffer in general and who die prematurely.  It’s not obvious to see, not as straightforward in proximate cause as most homicides, but its effectively a mathematical certainty.  These are petty and cowardly murders committed anonymously and at a distance, for no good reason but to assuage weak egos.  If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, you should go into politics; at least then you might accidentally do some good.

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“What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? No! Poems, no less. Poems, everybody!”

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m at the train station, but it’s more than half an hour before five o’clock.  Officially, the train station isn’t even open yet—in the sense that the payment kiosks and the bridge and elevator access portals are all closed off.  I suspect there’s at least a bit of dereliction involved on the part of the person tasked with opening them, since the first train arrives in roughly fifteen minutes, and it seems reasonable for the station to be open at least fifteen minutes before the first train.

I couldn’t stay asleep this morning, as is probably obvious, having awakened at around two.  After rolling around a bit and ruing the fact that I never can seem to get any real rest, I gave up, got up, took a shower, got dressed, and headed for the trains.  I’m certainly busted flat in a figurative sense, and I would say that I was feeling nearly faded as my jeans, but I don’t wear jeans, anymore.  The sentiment still applies, nevertheless.  I feel not only faded but frayed and, in places, rather tattered and torn.  I wonder if there’s anything that can be done about it, apart from the obvious.

I did recite the two poems I mentioned yesterday on video, and I uploaded them to YouTube.  I’ll also embed them here.  I decided to make two videos instead of just one with two poems, because the two poems have quite different general ambience.  I also decided to do a little reverb and stuff to my voice in addition to eliminating background noise, and while I was editing the sound for the first, it occurred to me that it might be nice to add a little music.

I didn’t want a copyright strike from YouTube, though for a non-monetized channel like mine these are mostly harmless.  Still it’s a minor irritation, and I happen to have music of my own to use, so for The Second Coming, I took the opening and closing music from my song Come Back Again, which I’ve never “released” but for which I have a “video”, which I had made private.  I guess I’ll make it public again, and will have added a link for it just above.

Anyway, I slowed the combined music down just enough to make it last until it faded out at the end of the poem, then lowered its pitch by three semitones to make it more ominous, and put it through a couple of reverb filters in a row to make it sound distant and hollow, then adjusted the balance and added it to my video before doing just the barest bit of trimming on the ends.  I think it came out nicely.  Here it is:

For the second poem, Alone, I used the opening, the bridge, and some of the final fadeout from my song “Like and Share”, which I slowed, again, reduced in pitch, and put through three different reverb processes, so it’s quite echoey and distant.  I wanted to do that because it’s slightly less somber to start with than the other song, and I needed it to be a little more hollow to make it match the poem.  This is one of my very favorite poems, and since the first time I read it* I felt not just that it had been written for me, but almost as if it had been written by me.  Of course, I cleaned up the audio for my voice as well, taking out background noise and so on.  Thankfully, I’ve done that sort of thing so often now that it’s speedy work.  And here is that video:

I hope, if you enjoy them, that you’ll give them a “thumbs up” and maybe subscribe and possibly even share them.  If you feel like it, please comment on them, either here or on YouTube.  Of course, I’ll always give you the out that the man selling a broken barometer gave to potential buyers:  No pressure.

I’m thinking of doing a video of The Raven, as I think I mentioned yesterday.  For this, I may dispense with the mask, and possibly even with the sunglasses.  Though I strongly dislike seeing my unimpeded face, for that poem such a horrific sight may even be beneficial, and in any case, I want to have full expressivity, not just of voice, but of face, to recite it.

I want to use some background music for it as well, I think, but I don’t know whether I’ll use just one song or multiple ones for different sections.  The latter notion sounds like an awful lot of work.  I do have an old piano piece I wrote as the theme for a really crappy horror screenplay I wrote in high school, and for which I dreamed of making the movie; the music is way better than the script was, as even my most generous friends agreed.  Maybe I’ll do some of that, and also the bad guy’s theme that I wrote for it, on my keyboard at home (maybe using a pipe organ setting, that might be good), and of course, do various things with the audio to make it more suitably ominous for the background of The Raven.

We’ll see.  It’s a lot of work, all that, but it might be engaging enough to keep me at it for a few hours, which is probably all it would take overall.  It’s not like I have anything better to do with my time.  So, if I do anything at all, I’ll probably do that, but I can make no guarantees.  It’s entirely possible that I’ll crash and burn before then, possibly even before tomorrow; but I’m rarely that lucky.

Oh, as an aside, by the time the first train arrived, this morning, they had not yet opened the train station at Hollywood.  If anyone involved with the Tri-rail system reads this, please note that fact, if you haven’t been made aware of it already.  It’s not cool, to make people with chronic pain and other, similar disabilities have to walk all the way down to the nearest crossing and back to get onto the other side of the tracks.  I don’t much mind the exercise myself—I’m self-hateful to an astonishing degree—but there are people I see regularly at the station for whom this seems an onerous and unkind imposition.

That’s about that for today.  I hope you enjoy the poetry recitations a bit, including my original background music.  Have a good day if you can.

*In an Edgar Allan Poe collection I got as a holiday gift when I was about twelve or thirteen, I think, but I may be one year early or late on that.

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Here is my throne, bid kings come blog to it.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, unless I’m losing track of things, and thus it’s time for my formerly weekly blog post, on its usual day.  It’s also the thirteenth of October, which is always at least a bit of a fun date, as far as it goes, and it has significance to my extended family.

The trains are back on the usual side of the tracks now.  This actually was inconvenient for me, because I missed the earlier train which arrived just as I got here, since it was on the opposite side from the entrance.  I don’t know if I would have been able to make it even if I’d run up the stairs, across the bridge, and down the other side.  But I wasn’t up to that, anyway.  My chronic pain has been even more severe than usual lately, with my back, hips, and ankles giving me tremendous trouble, even compared to their usual sorry state.

The train adjustment isn’t that big a deal, though.  The one I just missed was the earlier train, not the one I “usually” take.  I woke up way early but decided not to get up too much earlier than my alarm, because I figured that getting up to stand would exacerbate my pain a bit.  I was correct in that assessment, of course—I know the subject pretty well, after all—so at least I was not surprised.  That’s good.  I’m not a huge fan of surprises.

Now I’m sitting back in my usual seat on the usual side of the track, and I’ve got a bit of time to write this before the usual train comes.  Of course, I still don’t really have much about which to write.

I guess I could let you know that, although my video was done, I forgot to upload it to YouTube yesterday.  I’ll do that: “My video was done as of yesterday morning, but I forgot to upload it to YouTube.”  I would apologize to those who were waiting for it, but I doubt that there is even one such person, let alone more than one.

Of course, I haven’t written any new fiction, though I talk about my fiction in the video, encouraging people to consider buying a copy of some of it if they’re interested, or if they want to “support” me.

Actually, if someone really wanted to support me, they could get me admitted to some neuropsychiatric hospital somewhere.  Or they could procure for me lethal doses of fentanyl and valium in combination.  That seems like it would be a good way to go; at least they would leave me relaxed and not in pain.  I would really like to be relaxed and not in pain.  I don’t even remember what either of those states is like, let alone a combination of the two.  Then I might be able legitimately to quote Kurt Vonnegut and say, “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”  As it is, I usually say the opposite*.

I’m honestly more tired than ever of everything.  It doesn’t help that some idiot is having a heated phone conversation on the other side of the track, presumably to someone in her headphones, at whom she is spewing unimaginative expletives.  Yet the other person is remaining on the phone with her, at five in the morning.

Or, perhaps, she’s having an argument with a hallucination; that would be harder to recognize in the modern era, given the prevalence of smartphones and Bluetooth headsets.  But she seems to be having a believably real conversation.  If she’s not schizophrenic, then she has no excuse for being so rude as to inflict her profanity-laden conflict on everyone waiting for the trains in the early morning.  Where is Hannibal Lecter to deal with such rude people in his typical fashion?

He’s a fictional character, of course, so he is nowhere.

I haven’t made any new fictional characters recently, as I noted above.  I did pick up and strum around on the guitar I have in the office the last few mornings, but it was highly unsatisfying.  My playing just sounds like crap to me, and it’s all just the same old thing over and over again; and it’s not as though there’s anyone who listens or cares about it.

Someone on one of the other WordPress blogs I followed shared a meme from the video game God of War III that I liked enough to copy and save, though it doesn’t apply to me, since it’s about “hope”.  Obviously, it wasn’t something that Kratos, the main character, said.  He’s not big on hope, but he is stubborn and angry enough that hope is mostly not necessary for him.  This resonates with me far more than hope does.

Anyway, my son has always loved those games, and I thought I would share it with him, but I had to do so indirectly, through his sister, because I don’t want to irritate him by sending him yet another email, when he already said he didn’t want to have a personal relationship with me.  It’s weird:  His sister, my daughter, is spending a semester or year in South Korea for college, which is mightily cool, but in the modern world, it’s swifter to send something to her, on the other side of the world, and have her send it back around the world to her brother, less than a hundred miles away from me, than just mailing something would be, let alone bringing it to him.

It’s beautiful, but at the same time heartbreaking.  I haven’t actually seen either of them in ten years—by their choice—though I do interact with my daughter at least.

I’m seriously thinking of just selling Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses** on my birthday, which is rapidly approaching.  It seems like the sort of thing that would be fitting.

Anyway, the train just arrived, and it stopped at a different location than usual, so I had to trudge along to get on it, and my ankles and hips hurt so much that I had to fight back real tears in the face of the random, unnecessary additional walking, and then climbing into the train and up the few stairs.

That’s it for me, at least for today.  I hope you’re all feeling a lot better than I am.

TTFN

painful sorrow

*Nothing was beautiful, and everything hurt.

**This is a metaphor, by the way.  I neither own a place called Bag End, nor do I know any Sackville-Bagginses.

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Get up get over and turn the tape off

Well, it’s a shitty, shitty day today already.  I realize that’s redundant, of course.  I could simply say that it’s a day today.  They’re all pretty shitty a lot of the time, which is a phrase, at least, that sort of rhymes.  Pretty shitty is kind of pretty; one could use it in a ditty.

That’s enough of that nonsense.

I awoke very early, even for me, with worsening pain than usual in my right lower back and hip, radiating down into my foot and calf, with spasm and tenderness in most of the muscles.  I’d had a decent pain day the day before—which I guess would be yesterday, duh—partly because I took larger than normal doses of naproxen, in addition to aspirin and acetaminophen, and as always I was trying some behavioral interventions such as those with which I constantly experiment.

But I think I was lured into a false sense of security; probably the relative decrease in pain was as much a random fluctuation as anything else.  Also, I realized by the end of the day that I had started to develop edema—accumulation of fluid, that is—in my legs, especially the right one.  I suspect that’s partly due to the effects of the high-dose NSAIDs and other meds on my kidneys’ clearance functions.  So, last night I held off on the naproxen.

While trying to massage out some of my pain, I noted that my son, to whom I had sent an email a few weeks ago, had replied at last to that apologetic note.  But though his email was polite and kind, he basically said that he didn’t want to pursue any relationship with me, at least for the time being, and that he hoped I would respect that.  I can do so, of course; if I didn’t have to have a relationship with me, I wouldn’t do it, either.  He even said he didn’t hold what had happened, what with my arrest and time in prison, against me, which is nice, and that he had fond memories of me and of his childhood with me.  He’s a good person, he works hard and is smart, and all that, like his sister.  I want him to be happy, and I would never try to force my presence on him.  I’m just not built that way.  So, that’s that.  Not a great thing for me, but probably the wise choice for him.

I did record the video I mentioned yesterday, and I already started editing it, which is basically just removing long pauses and umms and coughs and the like.  If I finish and upload it today, I’ll share it as part of the post for tomorrow—I’m scheduled to work—and you’ll be able to see and watch it if you wish.  In case you do, I’ll add now the request that most YouTubers give (which I neglected to do during the recording) which is please, if you’re so inclined, like the video, share it if you’re willing, subscribe if you’re interested, and do please feel free to comment.  All those requests apply here as well, though I guess most of my readers are already subscribed, now that I think about it.

And here I am, at the office already and writing this, quite a bit earlier than I usually arrive, because there was no point just lying around in my room and watching random YouTube videos, some about science, some of British comedy panel shows, and occasionally some about autism/Asperger’s.

It’s the last day of September in 2022, and tomorrow begins the month of October—the month of my birthday, and of Halloween (my favorite holiday), though honestly, right now, I couldn’t give a shit about either one.  Next week is both Yom Kippur and my father’s birthday (I think they’re both on the same day this year, though I may be off on that).

I wish I could see my father, and my mother, but of course, they have both “passed on” as the euphemism goes.  I’m afraid I was probably a very disappointing son for them, not least because I had seemed so promising.  I’ve basically let down all the people who are most important to me in life, regularly and consistently.  Consistency is good, I guess, as far as it goes.  I just wish I had a drug or alcohol problem to hang it all on, so that I could have hope of conquering the problem and receiving minor accolades for the success, a la the famous Christian parable of the prodigal son*, or just succumb to an overdose or something if not.

Unfortunately, my problems are basically internal and inherent.  I’m just not very good at humaning, it turns out, if you’ll pardon me for using the au courant contrivance of turning a noun into a seeming gerund of a verb, as in the expression “adulting”.  Adulting, by the way, does not get a red squiggly underline in MS Word, but humaning does.  I guess that means I really did just make it up.

I’ve been trying to do it all my life, of course, and I have put a lot of effort into it.  But my return on investment has gone deeply in the negative, I’m afraid, though that’s only if you discount the fact of my two children.  Anything I went through up until they were born was repaid at an unimaginable rate, so I can’t complain about that.  But that’s all past, now, and they are alive and well, and they’re doing their thing and living their lives and that’s good, that’s outstanding.

I wish I could have been there to witness more of it.  But if wishes were horses, we’d all be waist-deep in horseshit.  Which we may be in a metaphorical sense—more than waist-deep, I would say—but obviously that’s not literal.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today, and it’s nearly all I’ve got, period, full stop.  I don’t see how I can possibly go on much longer.  I hate the world, I hate my life, but most of all, I hate myself.  I’ve got to find a way to escape.

Which word makes me think of the Radiohead song, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.  Here, I’ll embed some version of it in “video” form below, so those of you who are interested can listen.  It’s a beautiful song.

*Which I’ve always hated as a clear case of injustice and even cruelty.

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Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee, And hush’d with blogging night-flies to thy slumber

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and so it’s time for what was once only my weekly blog post, and which remains the most “formal” of my posts.

I’m waiting on the earliest train this morning, because I fully woke up a bit after 2 in the morning, and was not readily able to go back to sleep.  When it was finally late enough (so to speak) to come to the train station and not feel just silly about it, I decided to get up and do so.

I thought of something interesting during that early morning time.  Well, it’s not truly a new thought for me, but it’s something that crystallized a bit.  I’m going to try to start making short videos for my YouTube channel, discussing some specific topic in each one, though I may go off on a tangent or two, it being me.

But I’m going to set my timer when I start making the video, so that I have a maximum length to record, before editing, that hopefully will keep me from meandering too much.  My “Superman Neutrino Hypothesis” video was fun—for me, anyway—but I think it probably went on for too long for other people to stay interested in it.  So, if I set myself a limit, such that an edited video is between ten and twenty minutes long (at most), that might be good.

Of course, there are arguments that can be made that a purely unedited video would be better to share—more honest, more straight up.  For highly personal videos, that’s probably true.  It’s not as though I’m going to be adding any significant special effects or anything—that’s not what it’s about.  I don’t intend to create some homemade wannabe TV news program or special.  I just want to convey my thoughts about some subjects in ways that are likely to reach more people.

I know, obviously, that those of you who are reading this are the sorts of people who read the written word, and that’s great.  I think there are more people out there who might be interested in what I write, but there’s no good way to make people who might be interested aware of it, other than asking people to share the posts on your social media (please do, if you would), and for me to share them, and so on.

I’m sorry to have to accept that videos just reach more people than written posts and articles do, though in a far less efficient way (data-wise).  It’s tragic, but life is tragic, so what are you going to do.  Plus, I do sometimes like to talk, and though I have no one to talk to in person about the things that interest me, maybe if I start a one-sided verbal conversation, someone out there will engage with it.

I was thinking of starting to do some other new videos anyway, though the specific reasons for that are something I’ll try to keep close to my vest for the moment.  We’ll see what happens.

Of course, I’ll share/embed any such videos that I make here on this blog.  I may even also share them on Iterations of Zero, which I’ve been leaving fallow for a long time now, at least since I started just sharing my brain drippings here on this blog.  Maybe it was a mistake, or at least not terribly useful, for me to have made two blogs, but I had my reasons at the time.  I still like the name of it, and the symbol I made to represent it, which I use as the “cover” of many of my video versions of audio blogs, and of some of my songs, including the official cover of my song Like and Share.

Anyway, I expect to try to record this first foray this morning, since I’m up early anyway—you’ve got to seize the bull by the horns of the dilemma while the iron is hot or get off the pot, after all.  So, hopefully, you’ll get to see that soon.

To begin to bring things to a close, it’s worth noting that this is the last Thursday in September of 2022, already a week after Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  I really didn’t hope to be doing any of this still at this point, but there have been reasons why I didn’t want to inconvenience other people around me too much, and that would have happened, otherwise.

Also, I’ve been trying to adjust some lifestyle matters related to my chronic pain—that’s a long story and quite boring, frankly.  It’s one of those things that sounds interesting, perhaps, if you leave it vague, but then if you knew what I meant, it would be dreary and even distasteful.  I’m just struggling, always, to find ways to mitigate my pain that don’t cause more problems than they solve.

For the most part, medicines have engendered vastly more issues than they have corrected.  Though I am okay with using borderline (and not-so-borderline) toxic doses of aspirin and acetaminophen and naproxen, all in various combinations throughout the day as needed, to mitigate things a bit.  It’s not as though I particularly want to avoid liver and kidney and GI failure, anyway.  It would frankly be okay if my whole system would just have a catastrophic meltdown sometime reasonably soon; it would save me a lot of bother.

Oh, and the hurricane clouds were heading north-northeast this morning, consistent with the hurricane now being northwest of my location now, or at least the center of its rotation (cloud-wise) being there.  That seems roughly to match the predicted track of the thing.  Locally the rain has mostly stopped, though it’s still windy.  But the trains (and apparently the buses) are all running in Broward County, and good on them!  I’m reasonably impressed, as I have been many time before.  It’s a pretty well-run organization, or pair of organizations.

It’s nice to see something being done rather well, especially when so many things in the world are done only as well as they absolutely must be to survive—and that merely because those that aren’t done well enough to survive do NOT survive, and the ones that remain include, seemingly in the majority, those just barely good enough to survive, since there are likely to be more of those than there are of really successful and exception things—that last one by the very meaning of the word.

I’ll stop myself here, now.  Maybe I should set my timer to constrain myself writing the first draft of these blog posts!  Do you think that might make them better?  Do please let me know, if you have any interest.

Right.  That seems unlikely.

TTFN

cane

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Nothing to say but “What a day, how’s your boy been?”

Okay…I’m going to hopefully keep it relatively short today.  That should, in principle, be easier than writing a long post, but in practice, for me, it can be a challenge.  We shall see, I suppose.

When I first woke up today, I thought it was September 20th though I’m not at all sure why.  It’s not, though; it’s the 16th.  That’s just in case you weren’t sure, also.

I’m very tired and feeling pretty poorly this morning, but I have to go to work, and I’m going to have to go to work tomorrow, too, unless I’m very mistaken.  I don’t quite understand how it is that people at the office don’t realize how worn down I am.  I feel as if I’m dropping bits of flesh as I walk, like a cheesy, movie zombie, but apparently I don’t look much different than usual, based on the way everyone acts.

It’s probably my fault.  I tend just to keep going, day after day, without much personal complaint.  I mean, I complain about the way people in office do things, when they cut corners, or don’t follow the general, promulgated guidelines and whatnot, but I don’t often complain about myself.  I do complain a bit, like about the fact that I feel tired, that I don’t want to have to stay late and everything, because I’m always the last one out no matter what, but maybe people just see that as the way I am.

Again, as I’m sure I’ve run the topic into the ground already, I apparently have the trait of alexithymia, a difficulty recognizing, or being able to characterize, one’s own emotions.  I’m not sure how I feel about that*.  Anyway, I guess I have a pretty deadpan face no matter what, and even when I say that I don’t feel very well, or don’t feel great, people just sort of “Oh, that’s too bad” kind of thing, and then everyone just goes about their business.  I think I need to work on being more melodramatic.

Maybe it’s just that I’m always negative.  Anything’s possible in this world.  I don’t tend to be the world’s biggest optimist.  I know, that’s unbelievable, right?  I’m also never sarcastic.

Anyway, there’s just not much more to say about it.  I’m much more tired than usual, but I’m going to have to work tomorrow anyway, unless I’m very surprised, and then after having Sunday off to do my laundry, I’ll have to work Monday.  Hopefully whatever I have right now will turn into pneumonia and kill me soon, or something like that.  It would not be a tragedy.  It’s not like I’m likely to do anything more that’s useful with my life.

I wish I could just make myself lie down on the floor in the office at every full stop, but my tendency toward insomnia makes it difficult for me even to rest during the day when I’m worn out.  Or maybe that’s unrelated to my nocturnal insomnia.  I don’t know.  It’s difficult to tease these things out, and it’s not like I have anyone else helping me with it.  You people (the ones reading) are the main ones I share things with, but it’s not quite the same as having someone around who sees me from moment to moment or even from day to day.

Last night I had a hard time falling asleep, but I did sleep through to my alarm this morning after I finally dropped off.  I haven’t heard my alarm in weeks, so that was kind of surprising**.  I took half a Benadryl last night when I went to bed, because I really wanted to be able to sleep.  It seems to have worked as far as that goes, but I feel a bit groggy now, and still just physically wiped out.

Mentally, it’s hard to tell.  I feel like I’m not very alert or clear-headed, but I seem able to do my normal things in the morning so far.  Meaning, for instance, when I check my keys and wallet and all the stuff that I have in my pockets, and which I check again every time I move from one spot to another to make sure I still have everything, they’re all there, and—obviously—I’m remembering to check them.  Which is better than forgetting, certainly, though it would be nice, upon occasion, to be able to feel confident that, yes, I did remember them, and to remember that I remembered them, so I don’t have to keep checking over and over and over throughout the day until the moment I go to bed at night, or at least until I get dressed for bed.  But I always have to keep checking myself; I don’t seem to have that sense of personal certainty that so many people give the impression that they have.

Then again, most people seem to feel sure about a great many things that they cannot actually be sure about, and if I had to choose between the two states, I’d rather be the way I am, with no tendency toward easy certainty about epistemologically uncertain things.  I don’t admire overconfidence or dogmatism.  I think they are responsible for a great many of the ills of civilization—people who think they know how things ought to be and how other people ought to behave and what’s really behind everything.  This is my repeated point in reframing the X-files poster statement into, “I don’t want to believe.  I want to be convinced by evidence and reason.”

Ah, well.  Reason is something I have in abundance about some things, but in which I am very poor regarding how best to manage myself, emotionally and in general.  I’m too tired to bother trying to manage myself, anyway.  I’m not worth very much effort, even from myself.  I need just to let it go.

And, as you can see, I didn’t end up writing a very short blog post after all.  I feel as though a therapist is now telling me “That’s all the time we have today,” as has happened to me before in therapy.  I have the unfortunate tendency to drone on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on…

You get the idea, right?  Anyway, I expect, assuming I’m right that I’m going to have to work tomorrow, that I’ll be writing a post then.  If I don’t, either it means that work was cancelled, at least for me—maybe my coworker will return from his back surgery with miraculous rapidity—or that I’ve succumbed to severe enough illness that I won’t be able to make it in or to write, or that I’ve died.  That sounds kind of nice.

*Ha ha.

**It’s the Beatles song Good Morning, Good Morning, which is a perfect morning alarm.  It even begins with a rooster crowing!

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We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob

Guten Morgen, bonjour, buenos días, ohaiyou gozaimasu, and good morning.  It’s Wednesday, at 10 to five, and I’m already on the train, because despite being sick, I still couldn’t sleep, and if anything, I awakened sooner than usual.

Yes, I am still sick—it’s rare that anyone really, actually, gets over a respiratory infection in 24 hours, after all—but I also still have to go to work.  That’s particularly true on Wednesdays, when I have to do the office payroll in addition to my other, regular duties.  It’s not a dirty job, but nevertheless, someone has to do it.

I feel even less that I have a topic to write about today than I did yesterday, but as regular readers will know, that never stops me from writing.  It’s a bit analogous, I suppose, to the jocular saying that one should never let facts get in the way of a good story.  So:  never let lack of a subject stop you from writing a blog post.  Goodness knows most pundits and politicians and even most journalists nowadays don’t let lack of subject matter stop them from writing or speaking at length.

Still, my energy feels unusually low today, even for me.  Maybe I should write about how unreasonable it is in our culture that we demand of ourselves that we go to work even when we’re ill, thus increasing the chance that other people will become ill, and probably reducing overall productivity of the workforce and decreasing the overall quality of life for everyone.  As if we needed to push that down lower than it already is.

But I suppose that subject has been addressed innumerable times in many ways by many other people.  If you need it discussed beyond a few words to trigger the thought, I’m not sure what world you’re occupying.  Perhaps your life is so satisfying that you don’t even comprehend how anyone could be less than happy.  More likely, you’re so worn down and resigned—dare I say, fatalistic—that you don’t even recognize, let alone consider, the possibility that things could improve.

I feel you.

So, what should I write about?  Or should I try to write about anything at all?  Should I just start spewing random sentences in question form, as though initiating a Socratic dialogue?  Would there be any benefit to that?  If so, what would it be?

I’m not good at small talk in general, and I’ve gotten worse at it over time, as my socialization has diminished.

I did very briefly pick my guitar up yesterday, because I had watched a video of someone reacting to the Radiohead song Knives Out, for which I had learned the lead guitar part some time ago, and I wanted to see if I could still do it.  I couldn’t do it from memory—I needed to get out the tabs—but it wasn’t too bad.  And while I had that out, I quickly fiddled (so to speak) through part of the lead from Big Log, by Robert Plant, and a bit of Wish You Were Here, and then the chords from One Headlight and A Space Oddity.  I made a video of me playing and singing the latter a while back, which I guess I’ll embed below as a space filler.

Then someone noticed that I was playing—I usually only play when no one else is around—and so I put the guitar away.  Anyway, I wanted to watch a reaction to the Radiohead song Lift that I noticed on the YouTube list, and the chords for that involve a B add…ninth, I think*, that gives me a terrible hand cramp to try to reach, so I wasn’t going to try to play along.  And listening to that song, and the reaction, made me want to cry, so I had to stop all that.

So that’s it.  I actually did get out the black Strat at the office, or picked it up and turned on the amp, since it’s always sort of “out”.  But who knows if I’ll ever play it again?  I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t.  It’s like picking up your kids—there will be a moment when you pick up your child in your arms for the final time, and you will never pick them up again after that, and odds are, you won’t even realize that it is the final time when it happens.  You’ll just never happen to pick them up again.  Likewise, there will be a last time that you hug or even see each of the people you love, and then one of you will be lost to the other, or both will be, for the rest of time.  So don’t take those things for granted, okay?

That’s about all I’ve got for the time being.  Hope you have a good day.

*Yes, that’s what it was.