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Step up or STFU

Here I go again, writing another blog post.  It seems like just yesterday that I wrote a previous one‒but of course, it was two days ago, not just one.  Wow, what a spooky difference.

I’m getting ready to be at work, or rather, am in the process of being on my way to work as I begin to write this.  I’m not actually currently moving relative to the surface of the Earth, but that happens a lot during commutes, especially when you don’t have your own vehicle anymore.

I don’t really have “my own” much of anything anymore.  I mean, I have a small amount of stuff, as George Carlin might say, though I’m quite sure I have waaaaaay less stuff than he had when he performed that particular routine.  Not that that’s bad; he certainly earned his stuff.  I mean, he’s still making loads of people laugh and think even after he’s been dead for a while.  I don’t know how long that will go on‒contrary to delusional claims by people who like a cool-sounding expression, online is not forever‒but he will, I suspect, be remembered fondly far longer than most.

The average day, on the other hand, feels like it is forever.  I don’t think I really look forward (in the positive sense) to anything nowadays.  There are two movies in theaters right now that I ought to want to go see, but if you presented me with free tickets, free concessions, and a ride to and from a theater of my choice, I think I’d say, “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”  And that would be true.

Likewise, though I watched the first episode of the latest series of Doctor Who a few weeks ago, two more have come out since then, and I have no desire to watch them, or anything else.  There are no books to which I look forward.  I’ve had to force myself to read at all, and even that’s probably a mistake*.  I occasionally look at my guitars and at the keyboard and they almost feel alien to me.  Like, what is that even used for?  I can’t really even imagine picking one up and playing it (or sitting down and playing, in the case of the keyboard).

I can’t really imagine writing any fiction.  The only thing(s) I anticipate at all anymore is something to eat, and that’s just so, so pathetic.  Thankfully, even my favorite snacks are starting to feel and taste and smell very dull lately.  I don’t know if perhaps I had my sense of smell altered back when I got Covid, or if this is born of the fact that all pleasures have backfired on me at least one time or another, and more so than ever, lately.

I really think I’m just about done.  I should’ve been done already.  I should’ve been done a long time ago.  But we’re always told to hold on, to stay alive, that we’re wanted and needed here on this stupid planet.  It’s a bit of a similar situation to what happens with “pro-life” people:  They don’t want there to be abortions, they want all those potential people born, but they aren’t helping to take care of them, and they don’t even want there to be public services available for them or for education or what have you.

So it is with the people who don’t want other people to commit suicide.  They don’t want you to kill yourself, but they’re not offering to help you be alive, not in any meaningful sense of helping.  And so, of course, when people do reach the end of their rope (sorry, no pun intended, but the expression is doubly appropriate so I’m leaving it) they have to choose the analogue of “back alley abortions”, killing themselves (or trying to do so) in messy, unreliable, disruptive ways that often don’t succeed but can lead to permanent damage and social opprobrium.

In some civilized countries, it’s possible for people to go to places like Dignitas and get physician-supervised ways to end their lives with minimal pain and with some peace.  Of course, even in such places, the service seems to be available mainly for people with terminal cancer and similar incurable illnesses.  But depression is often a terminal illness, and it is certainly incurable as far as I can see.  And, of course, ASD is not a disease, it’s a neurodevelopmental difference, so there’s no curing that, short of a brain transplant (which would really be a body transplant for the donor brain).

But if no one is going to give serious help to a person who has severe difficulty even wanting to live, and who has no capacity to lift himself out of the whirlpool of self-loathing and chronic pain, then why is there all the verbiage about how “depression is a liar” and other bullshit like that.  As if optimism weren’t a liar.  As if all the ideals and isms and dogmae and “good” things weren’t lies or liars or both.

So, fuck that noise.  Don’t tell a woman not to have an abortion if you’re not going to care for her and the child, and don’t cajole and guilt-trip a suicidal person about not killing themselves if you’re not gonna come in and help them in some real, tangible, serious way, God damn it.  A person on the verge of suicide is already admitting that they don’t think they can survive under their own steam.  They can’t swim anywhere, but you want them to keep treading water, or at least floating‒indefinitely‒just so you don’t have to be aware of the fact that they drowned while you were out boating.

All right, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.  Autism Awareness Month ends this week and Mental Health Awareness Month begins.  Fat lot of good they’ve done or do.

*Interesting aside:  I accidentally typed “provably” when I tried to write “probably” right there.  The words are, so I understand, etymologically** related‒probe, prove, proof, probable, etc.

**Etymology and entomology are however (apart from the “ology” bit) unrelated.

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Monday morning nonsense

     It’s Monday again; aren’t you all just delighted?  I’m writing this on my smartphone, starting at the train station, after having walked here from the house.

     I did a lot of walking this weekend:  about ten and a half miles on Saturday, then a little over six on Sunday, then just about six so far today.  My new shoes seem to be a good choice so far.  Of course, I have some modest blistering on my right foot (I’m not entirely sure why it’s only on the right, though I have a hypothesis or two) but not enough to cause serious trouble.  The goal is to try just to do more and more of my traveling on foot and to get in better condition‒not just because of the sort of things that filled me with rage on Friday morning, but also just to try to get myself healthier, or at least stronger.

     Of course, the popular wisdom is that regular exercise like walking can help with depression, though I’ve never been completely convinced by the data I’ve seen on that.  Also, to be honest, I had some of my worst trouble with depression in college when I was doing pretty serious exercise.  I was running six plus miles and doing ridiculous numbers of push ups and so on at the time.  Perhaps my episodes of depression had (and still have) more to do with burnout, possibly from masking and related ASD based issues than with more garden-variety depression.  Who knows?

     This was a momentous weekend, holiday-wise.  It was the end of Passover and yesterday was also Easter (they tend to fall around the same time of year and that’s no mere coincidence‒remember that Jesus’s “last supper” was a Passover Seder).  And for those for whom marijuana is a bit of a modern sacrament, yesterday was 4/20, which for some reason is the number related to marijuana use.  I’ve heard some rather dubious explanations for that association, but since I don’t have any convincing reasons to believe any given one, I won’t get into it.

     Yesterday was also a day of very important remembrance for me, and for some modicum of hope related to that remembrance.  But that hope was unfulfilled, which unfortunately comes as no surprise.  I really need to stop with any and all “hope” nonsense.  What’s the line from A Christmas Carol about comfort?  It comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers to other kinds of men.  That about sums up the notion of “hope” when it comes to me.

     I really don’t have any hope for anything good at all in the world, and particularly not for me.  Look at the state of things, and the degree to which reason and ethics seem to have deteriorated.  Is human civilization even worth saving?  I suppose there are many innocent people among the throng of humans, and it would be a shame for them to suffer unnecessarily just because a vocal, moronic minority causes so much trouble.  But good grief, it can be frustrating.

     As for me and my life, well…there’s nothing much to say.  I suppose we’ll see if, after enough time doing it, my walking will help my outlook and my mood.  At the very least, it might help my physical condition.  That’s a positive thing, assuming all other things are equal.

     I’m not going to get into political discussion right now, though I will say that I would rather hear the thoughts of the dead worm in RFK, Jr’s head than whatever nonsense he voices with his own minimally functioning brain.  He’s just pathetic.

     Of course, pathetic is the typical order of things, and I certainly match that adjective, myself…but not in the way he does.

     Anyway, I’m a bit sleepy, probably from the long walk, and I’m on the train now.  I’m going to make this blog post short today; maybe tomorrow I’ll write more and something of greater interest or consequence.  Or, maybe I’ll get hit by a truck while crossing a street or something.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, though it would be a shame to screw up an honest truck driver’s workday.

     In any case, I hope you all had a very good weekend and that you also have a very good week.  Actually, even if you didn’t have a good weekend, I hope you have a good week.  You might as well.  You are readers, and readers are the people who embrace the greatest invention of the human race.  Please do your best to encourage and spread that love.  Written language is still the best thing we have.

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The paragraph indentations below are not merely done on a whim

     Wow, okay, yesterday was one heckuva day, and not in a good sense for the most part; it was a real cluster-fudge*, so to speak.  This is not meant to imply that yesterday was all bad or anything; that would be absurd.  I may be a madman (without a box, alas), but I am not so irrational as to think that there were no positive things in any given twenty-four hour period, even if I restrict the universe being evaluated down to only things that happen to me.

     I have never been one of those depressed people who interprets himself or his life as “all bad”.  That would make things easier, probably‒I would either have destroyed myself long ago or I would have embraced my identity as a pure villain**.  But I am capable of nuance, an attribute that seems often to be missing in our political discourse.

     Mind you, that latter happens largely because it’s what people seem to want to consume, or at least what enough people want, and to which enough people respond, that it becomes a stable and often successful strategy for politicians to use.  So, at least some of the “blame” for the vacuity of news and politics is that humans tend to run toward misleading simplicities rather than dealing with a complex world in which even people with whom they disagree can have good points and do good things and have their own pain and loss and fear and love and memory and dreams.  And even people with whom they agree on most things can nevertheless sometimes behave like complete assholes.

     The world is complicated.  How could it not be?  Almost everything of which we are aware and of which our reality consists is constructed from incomprehensibly vast numbers of interactions between quantum fields on tiny, tiny scales, with causality propagating at the speed of light, with behaviors and properties requiring complex numbers*** to describe mathematically.  If you’re an electrical engineer, you might use complex numbers in real life, because they are very useful for modeling cyclical processes like alternating current, but most macroscopic, emergent processes don’t require complex numbers to describe.

     Or maybe they would be best described, mathematically at least, using complex numbers, but most macroscopic, emergent phenomena have too many things going on‒too many moving parts, if you will‒to be efficiently described by any remotely practical mathematical formalism.  Even computer algorithms might be inadequate to describe the functioning of large scale matters in sufficient detail.

     It may be that natural language really is the best tool for describing such aspects of reality, since it allows one to vary one’s level of intricacy and complexity to suit the needs of any given situation.  But of course, to do so requires one to be rigorous to the point of being a martinet about one’s language usage.  If a word or term can have more than one meaning, it is crucial to specify which meaning one intends so as to avoid apparent disagreements that actually just come down to semantic confusion.

     I don’t necessarily mind semantic discussions‒I like words and language and logic and poetry and puns and all that stuff‒but if one is trying to share an explanation for something, and really to share understanding, precise word meaning is going to be necessary.  You can’t use html to write a program that runs in Pascal.  Okay that’s not a great analogy.  Let’s say…you can’t win a game of Texas hold ’em poker by following the strategy you would use for euchre.  It’s not just that you won’t win; your moves won’t even make sense.

     Okay, well, that’s probably enough for today.  I’ve been trying not to be as negative as I was yesterday, and I think I’ve succeeded reasonably well.  I do this sort of back and forth thing so often that some people have said they wonder if I am literally bipolar with a rapid cycling rate.  I can only respond by saying that this possibility has been considered by me and by several different mental health professionals, and it is thought not to be the case.  Of course, I’ve never been tried on a course of, say, lithium****, nor really on any of the other, less tricky mood stabilizers (other than as would-be adjuncts for chronic pain treatment).  But if I were occasionally waxing manic, I would imagine that sometimes I would feel really good about myself, and I rarely do.  Also, antidepressants have never triggered a manic or hypomanic event for me, and I’ve taken many different ones at different times.

     All right, well, there was a whole paragraph after I’d already said I’d written enough.  My apologies.  I do go on, don’t I?  Have a good day, if you can.

*If no one has used that euphemism as the name of a brand of candy, I’ll be even more disappointed in humanity than I was already.

**Knowing me, I would probably accidentally do good for the world every time I tried to do evil.  At least it would be funny.

***Complex numbers are numbers with one “real” part, i.e., some number on the usual, continuous number line, and one “imaginary” part, which is a real number multiplied by i, the square root of -1, which is no more truly imaginary than is any other number.

****I like the song a lot, though.

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I don’t know what to title this post

Hi, y’all.

There, that’s me officially and in writing endorsing the contraction “y’all” as a very clear, useful, and effective term of address, a 2nd person plural pronoun, which the English language seems otherwise to lack.  I might have mentioned previously that I like the word, but I nevertheless rarely use it.  I rarely talk even to a single other person, let alone to a group, so it doesn’t come up much.

That’s it.  That’s about as positive a thought as I have right now, and I doubt it’s going to get that positive again.  I feel truly burnt out.  I mean, I’m still writing my stupid fucking blog, because I am more or less internally compelled to do so.  And I’m going to work, because it’s not as if I can rest when I’m back at the shit-hole of a house, and I can’t sleep without sedating myself‒not for long, anyway.  I don’t really know what to do.

The world is going to shit, but it doesn’t really matter to me‒or it shouldn’t‒because my life went to shit a long time ago, and since then I’ve just been trying to swim through an ocean of raw sewage, trying to keep my head above “water”, but there’s no shore or pool edge or whatever in sight, and frankly, I’m tired.  I’m very stubborn about not giving up in general, but look where that has gotten me.  To paraphrase Fiona Apple, I am steadily going nowhere.

So, fuck the world.  All you humans had such opportunities to build something better, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  That was an amazing series of events that I could barely believe, having grown up expecting global thermonuclear war to happen sometime.  Things seemed honestly on the verge of real progress.

But no, always after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes a new shape and grows again.  And people allow it to grow, people encourage it, people water and fertilize it, and indeed, people are that shadow.  There’s no Sauron or Morgoth or Satan or Ahriman or whatever other incarnation of evil you might conjure.  It’s all just the weakness and mental softness of the human race*, and alas, despite those seeming signs of improvement (which happened in the very year that I got married, coincidentally‒and that ended up falling apart as well), it seems that humans overall have little capacity for growth.

The true improvements made in the world, in life, are the products of a tiny, tiny fraction of people, while the others just take and use the products of that progress without any real understanding.  Perhaps they see them as miracles provided by their fictional (and not very clever) deities.

Meanwhile, if it were up to most people, humans would still be figuratively living in caves.

I hate the world, as well as almost all of its people (as a general feeling, anyway).  I honestly would like to burn it all, to erase it, to delete it.  There are ways that could be accomplished, if one were to put one’s whole effort into it.  If I had Elon Musk’s resources, I could initiate several such processes at once (for all I know, he might be doing so).  I’ve spent a very disturbing fraction of my time of life thinking of ways civilization can be destroyed, but then again, I am a Destroyer by nature.  I think I always have been.

But I don’t really feel I have the right‒though “rights” are one of those things made up by the smartish humans, and which are underappreciated by the rest‒to wipe everyone else out, and also, there are a few people here and there whom I actually like.  And I don’t think there is zero chance that humans will save themselves and the world, I just think the chances are tiny.

Maybe the world looks disgusting to me because I can only see it through my own eyes, and I myself am disgusting.

But there is a way for me to make the rest of the universe go away from my point of view, and for myself to go away as well, and it’s much more efficient than the many schemes I have dreamt up for obliterating the world.

It’s a very alluring thought, to escape from internal and external sources of pain and horror.  Oblivion, obliterate‒related words, from the Latin for forgetting.  I want to rest, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for me, so I probably will just have to settle for erasure.

*I do not refer here to kindness or generosity or compassion as softness‒those traits are strong, and only those with real strength have the capacity to show them.  I mean softheadedness, that pathetic need to imagine oneself to be, for instance, the favorite species (or people) of some imaginary almighty deity, or to believe one is somehow superior simply because of one’s ethnicity or sex or skin color.  But of course, that “belief” is itself evidence of the most profound weakness, insecurity, and inferiority.  Such people are nevertheless worthy of compassion‒as is everyone really, given that no one made themselves or the world‒but they are frustratingly capable of doing tremendous harm.

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I am a detriment…goo goo ga choob

I’m feeling very grumpy this morning, which isn’t anything new; grumpiness is a common part of chronic depression (AKA dysthymia).

I have known some people who find anger/grumpiness preferable to being simply down and discouraged, but I really don’t like being angry.  I feel wrong and evil and ashamed when I get angry.

My inherent instinct when angry is to want to act on my anger physically; I’m not a big verbal arguer.  At least, if I am arguing verbally, it’s generally not in anger, but entails me trying to explore the truth (or otherwise) of a particular topic and to spread or gain better understanding of it.  But when actually feeling anger, what I want to do is to destroy the object of my anger, literally, so that I don’t ever have to worry about it again, whatever it might be.

I guess I’ll just have to deal.  Or maybe I’ll finally just lose my temper and get into serious and severe trouble.  More likely, I’ll just take my anger out physically on myself, as I usually do.

I have excellent “self-denial subroutines” to keep me from hurting other people (though not so much to keep me from hurting myself).  As I’ve said before, I have an instinctive sense that I do not have any right to comfort or satisfaction with pretty much anything.  So, I don’t usually even try, because as often as not, at least when I notice, trying makes things blow up in my face.

This relates, at least tangentially, to an interaction I had yesterday on Threads.  Someone there had posted something along the lines of “my therapist told me she was proud of me today”.  I thought that seemed quite nice, and I answered, honestly but with a bit of self-deprecation, that I didn’t think I had ever had a therapist say they were proud of me.  I added a little ^_^ emoticon to make it clear that I wasn’t moaning about it, just trying to take a light-hearted approach and reinforce the fact that this person’s therapist’s words were positive and nice and unfortunately rare.

Then, a little while later, the original poster replied to my comment, saying she was proud of me that at least I was going.

That’s a little saddening and embarrassing, because I am not currently going to therapy.  I’ve gone to therapy quite a lot in the past; my comment was not a fictional one.  But I haven’t gone in a long while.  The last time I felt desperate enough and tried to do therapy through BetterHelp—which I chose because I could not find a way to go to a therapist’s office and work it into my schedule—I had just gotten started working with a therapist there and feeling relatively comfortable when she had to go on extended maternity leave.

I don’t hold that against her, obviously, but it was frustrating, verging on heartbreaking, if you don’t mind me seeming a bit melodramatic.  I had really needed to force myself to try to go through with that and to start with a therapist*; to have it suddenly vanish was both frustrating and deflating.

It’s a bit similar to my catastrophic interaction with the suicide hotline years ago, when morons from the PBSO came and got me and handcuffed me and took me to a shithole mental health place, where I was for all of twenty-four hours.  At least I got a brief referral through that place, but I didn’t really stick with it, and of course, I ended up going to FSP before too long, anyway.

Since then, I have been particularly nervous about using the hotline, though there have been many times when I’ve looked at it online, and even more times when my search engines have recommended it to me based on some web search I’ve been doing.  I did give up and use it once, a year or two ago, refusing to divulge my location to them.  But even with that, it’s very nerve-racking to seek help in a time of crisis and to have to worry about some Barney Fife type coming and taking you away.

If I wanted to be hospitalized for my mental illness**, I would go to a hospital.  I know how to do that.  I’m not afraid of hospitals.  I just don’t think they would actually do me any good.  I’m not convinced that anything will do me any good.

This is not mere pessimism (though that surely enters into my figuring).  It’s just that the human race has not understood the mind and brain well enough to have reliable treatments for certain things.  It’s a bit analogous to the plague, which is caused by infection with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, if memory serves, and which is easily treatable (nowadays) with simple, common antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin.  But if you got the plague before antibiotics were invented, going to a hospital for treatment would be pointless, useless, and probably counter-productive.

Anyway, I’m going on and on about nothing, and using more words than necessary to do so.  In case you couldn’t tell, I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, so the words flow more easily.  But it’s all just me flailing about like a paranoid, feral cat.  When you can’t know what you can trust or upon what or whom you can rely, the natural reaction can be just to keep your distance from everyone and everything, because some things that seem like they might be helpful will end up hurting you more—and yes, it seems always possible for one to suffer more than one already is.

So, though I’m chagrined to have been told by someone that they were proud of me for doing something I’m no longer doing, I don’t necessarily think I’m wrong not to do it—though I recognize that I may be fooling myself or even that my thinking may be frankly distorted.  Maybe I would do better with therapy now that I know I have ASD (the brain kind, not the heart kind).  I don’t know.

Sorry for this post going nowhere.  I apologize for wasting your time, and for wasting the time of everyone else who’s ever had to interact with me.  I’m sure all my former therapists could have used their time better by seeing someone else during the hours they saw me.

There’s little doubt in my mind that if I had actually killed myself in the past, on one of the occasions on which I almost did so, the world would probably be at least a slightly less miserable place where I currently sit.  And while all possibilities of happiness would have been foreclosed for me, at least I would no longer be lonely and in pain and overflowing with self-loathing.

*I tried to get in touch with the therapist I had seen most recently (before my whole debacle).  Actually, “try” is misleading; I did get in touch with her, but she was no longer seeing patients, and in any case, she didn’t have any offices that would have been reachable from where I now live and work without a car.  I asked for recommendations in the area, which she provided, but that still would have required driving, so I had to resort to online help.

**I hate that people euphemistically refer to psychological/psychiatric troubles as “mental health” as in the rather absurd statement “suffering from or dealing with mental health”.  That’s like saying someone is troubled by physical fitness.  No, I suffer from mental illness.  It’s not mental health.  It’s the opposite of mental health.  I wouldn’t even know what it would mean to suffer from mental health, but it doesn’t matter, because mental health is something with which I am not burdened.  Likewise, I do not bear the burden of physical comfort, I suffer from chronic pain.  These pathetic, touchy-feelie euphemisms seem counter-productive to me.

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This is the title, not a deed

It’s Monday morning again, despite popular demand, and here I am again, writing a blog post to start the week (despite lack of more or less any demand).  Welcome!

It’s already stupidly muggy here in south Florida, even though it’s only the last day of the first week (the first seven day stretch, not the first Sunday through Saturday period) of April.  And, of course, the world is stupid overall.

But what else is new?  Individual humans can be quite intelligent (in my experience, often far more so than they would credit themselves to be) but humans in large numbers tend to be dragged down by the lowest common denominators or the weakest links or whatever other metaphor you want to use for the least impressive aspects of human beings, either between or within individuals (or both).

As for anything else, well, I’m steadily getting better from my bronchitis, which is certainly something I prefer to continuing to have it.  I’m also trying some newish shoes (not a new make or model, but a slightly tweaked size) that seems to be better for walking than some of my prior ones.

I haven’t read anything from any books in the last 10 days or so‒more or less since I started getting sick‒and though it’s weird, it may be a useful mental break.  To be honest, I’ve had a hard time getting into any books recently, whether fiction or nonfiction, and maybe I just need to clear my head before starting back into things.

Of course, I could go and do some Brilliant dot org stuff and really bone up on my STEM* knowledge.  I could also work on learning some new languages using Babbel, of which I am a subscriber.  I had thought about learning Russian‒women speaking Russian just sound really…good for some reason, and I thought it might be nice to be able to converse with such women‒but given recent politics and conflicts, it’s slightly awkward to be learning Russian right now.  I’d also love to learn more German, or maybe French, and I could use a bit of refreshing on my Spanish, which is rusty.

Unfortunately, Babbel doesn’t really have any Asian languages, or I’d want to use it to improve my Japanese.  I’m a fan and proponent of learning other languages‒I think doing so helps one understand one’s own native language better and to grasp the structure and nature of languages and of thought itself, or at least the logical conveyance thereof.

More likely and more seriously, I’ve been thinking about doing some more deep learning on, well, deep learning, neural nets, as well as general neuroscience and computer science.  I have some background in many of these areas‒for instance, we had a truly wonderful neuroscience textbook in med school that I really loved‒but I would like to understand more.  I’m also interested in complexity and chaos theory and information theory in general.

Who knows whether any of this will ever come to fruition or if I will ever learn enough for it to matter?  It would be nice to make some contribution to human knowledge in some way, and not just by random pontifications here on a blog that’s read by maybe 30 people on a good day.

This is probably all pie in the sky stuff, anyway.  I don’t know what I’m actually going to do, except that if I’m not able to improve my chronic pain significantly, then all other bets are off.  In the meantime, I almost want to put out an appeal for requests (or a request for appeals) from readers.  It’s the sort of thing people with YouTube channels (and similar) do by getting Patreon accounts, where people pay some nominal amount to be patrons and are supposed to get some form of extra benefits through that, like recommending movies to which to react, or asking “ask me anything” type questions, that sort of thing.

I guess I wouldn’t mind people asking me to write about certain topics or subjects‒it might be better than just shouting into the vacuum, hoping someone notices.  Maybe it would get me more readers.

So , if any of you have any requests about things you want me to discuss‒within reason, of course‒then feel free to mention it in the comments below.  And by below, I mean below here on the website robertelessar.com, not on the website formerly known as Twitter or on Facebook or Bluesky or Threads or whatever.  Maybe if I were doing this as a full time job, I could commit to monitoring such venues thoroughly, but unless there is someone out there who really does want to be my patron, then I can only do this in my spare time‒like now, while I’m commuting to the office.  So please, if you actually want to give me feedback, come here to do it.

Thanks.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good week.

*I recently saw someone recommend the STEM acronym be changed to STEAM in one video from Computerphile, I think‒maybe it was Bill Maher‒because the person was pointing out that we need to have exposure to the “arts” (and humanities in general) if we want people to get exposed to interesting ideas and creativity to apply to their science, technology, engineering, and math stuff.  The argument was well made, and I’m not going to do it justice here, just bringing it up.

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I’m sorry, I don’t have the energy for a Shakespeare based title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and though I don’t particularly feel like it, I’m writing a blog post because it’s Thursday.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to write one tomorrow or Saturday (assuming we* are open, which we probably will be, since it’s rare to be closed two weekends in a row).  As far as I know, I will not.

I don’t really have any energy or impetus to write much.  I’m trying.  I’ve been rereading my fiction to try to stimulate myself, but so far it’s obviously not doing the trick.  I reread first The Chasm and the Collision, then Son of Man, then The Vagabond, and just yesterday finished rereading Mark Red.  I’ve also reread a few of my short stories.  But, though I’ve enjoyed rereading my stuff as far as it goes, it’s not really doing anything as far as catalyzing any desire to write, whether fiction or nonfiction.

I think things would be much more positive if I were able to get a good sleep (at least one night) and especially if I weren’t in daily, increasing pain.  I’d be tempted even to try ketamine if I thought it would really help, though there are some cautionary examples in the mainstream media that would give me pause.  Heck, I’d practically be willing to try full-on PCP if I had good reason to think it would provide lasting relief without causing worse problems.

Of course, there’s the rub.  All of these things that can provide even temporary, real relief have a range of side-effects that would make my situation even worse than it is.  Yes, I freely admit that my life could get worse.  It’s almost always true that things could be worse than they actually are.  But that doesn’t mean they’re good.

I’m just so weary, so tired of every day being dominated by both physical and psychological pain.

Actually, I feel that the last adjective there should be “psychical” not “psychological”, since the latter term refers to the study of the psyche, and I don’t have pain or suffering that involves the study of my psyche, just pain in my psyche itself.  Still, the common usage, for what it’s worth, seems to lean toward “psychological”.  Then again, current common parlance refers to psychological problems as “mental health”, as in “Are you suffering from mental health?” which makes little sense.

I wish I could wrap myself in some kind of life-support cocoon and undergo some form of metamorphosis, like Adam Warlock in the comic books.  Hell, just being able to sleep for a while seems like it’s a ridiculous, superstitiously foolish notion, on a par with the expectations of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, who thought a space ship was coming to gather their souls (and was supposedly hiding in, I think, the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet).

I want to rest.  I want to stop being in constant pain.  It’s been going on for more than twenty years, and it’s tainted every aspect my existence.  It has contributed to everything from the breakup of my marriage, to my arrest and incarceration, and to my inability to sustain or create any kind of close relationship of any kind.

The people “closest” to me are hundreds to thousands of miles away, and I have no doubt that if they were physically closer, a kind of Uncertainty Principle-like process would occur, such as what makes the momentum/energy of, say, an electron greater and greater the more tightly you try to pin it down, until more and more of its wave function leaks out and the probability of it being elsewhere‒even on the other side of the universe, so to speak‒dominates over any local presence.

I’m probably not explaining that very well, I’m sorry.  But I don’t even have any will to watch science videos or to read science books or what have you, let alone to go into any rigorous discussions thereof.  I’m just making the point that I’m much better for other people from a distance than from up close, with the function approaching a singularity (of negative infinity) as the distance from me shrinks toward zero, rather like some logarithmic function.  This graph (of log base 2) demonstrates why, from a certain distance, it can start even to be pleasant to interact with me, though with diminishing returns…but woe betide anyone who drops below one unit of distance.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  It’s probably much more than enough.  I’m sorry to be so tedious; believe me, no one gets more tired of me than I do of myself.  At least all of you can just go read something else by someone else, or do something else entirely.  Not I.  I am stuck with being and enduring the miserable git that I am every waking moment.  And waking moments make up far too great a proportion of the times of my life.

Have a good day, if you can.

TT…FN, I guess.

*By we, I mean the office at which I work.  While I have no problem joining with you, my readers, into a collective, first person plural pronoun, I simply have no idea what y’all’s work schedules are.

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Udaimonic so-and-so, U.

It’s the last day of February, everyone.  It’s also Friday, the last day of the “typical” work week, and it is also the last day of my work week, since I am not working tomorrow.  It’s not as though I have anything particular to which to look forward this weekend, but I do need the rest.  I’ve been feeling exceptionally exhausted lately.

Alas, as you know, exhaustion does not translate into sleepiness for me, just weariness.  Somewhere in the neurologic centers and relays that connect such things as fatigue and sleep, I have a short circuit, or at least one that doesn’t perform up to spec.

Of course, my pain continues, though as always, I have tried to adapt my activity, my posture, my exercise, my shoes…even my underclothes to try to decrease my pain.  I have put a tremendous amount of mental energy into this over the years.  If I had devoted that time/energy/effort to the study of any abstract problem‒say, the dynamics of an accelerating near-light-speed spacecraft approaching its local Schwarzschild “radius” as length contraction and “relativistic mass” take effect and bring GR into play‒then I would have made significant, possibly really important, advances.

Alas, when one’s problem is chronic pain (coupled, causally or otherwise, with insomnia), it is very difficult to focus enough mental acuity upon other things.  The very nature of pain as a neurological process in animal systems does not allow it to be easily ignored, or indeed to be ignored at all for any length of time.

Those creatures which can readily ignore pain for long, or who don’t experience pain*, don’t tend to leave as many offspring as those for whom pain is both present and urgent.

It’s a similar problem for those rare people who don’t experience fear, though clinically this seems more likely to happen as a result of damage to the brain rather than being congenital, possibly because children without fear really don’t tend to reach adulthood.

It’s interesting to note that, anecdotally at least, people who don’t feel fear tend to be quite frightening to would-be bullies and predators.  They don’t behave like others do in response to potential threats, and predators tend to rely on fear in others.  A person who looks at them with no more fear than they would at a tree or a rock can be quite disconcerting for someone who has become dependent upon the fear of others.

This is one of the reasons it can be good to have dogs present if you’re guarding something.  They don’t fear guns (generally) so one can’t exactly threaten them with firearms.  And if they attack, they don’t hold back.

That was quite a series of little tangents, wasn’t it?  I think they were interesting, but then again, I was the one who brought them up, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  Whether or not anyone else is interested is difficult to guess.  It’s rather akin to the way things are with humor‒it can be very hard to know consistently what other people will find funny, or for them to know what you find funny, so you might as well amuse yourself.  Then, at least, you can watch to see who enjoys your humor, and those people are the ones with whom you can enjoy such things in the future, at least in principle.

I am horribly tired, and I’m in a great deal of pain as I write this, though for the moment at least I don’t notice any fear that might be present.  Time’s been my way when I’ve been so tired and depressed and in pain that I had no reaction to and felt no fear toward things that would normally have made me quite afraid, from minor things like wasps and bees all the way up to oncoming cars and trucks.  I don’t tend to be afraid of people much, never have been‒at least, I’m not afraid of them physically.  Socially, they can make me quite tense.  In that case, though, the tension is not the same as fear, though I guess it qualifies as anxiety.

Speaking of fear, I fear this is it for this week.  I truly hope that you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful weekend and that you are healthy and safe and eudaimonic**.

*There are people who have a genetic disorder called CIPA:  congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (i.e., they don’t sweat), and they basically don’t experience pain.  They also don’t live very long, and before they die their bodies tend to be quite damaged, often by such simple things as standing in one position for too long, since it doesn’t feel uncomfortable to do so for them.  They also don’t notice infections, and they don’t tend to get fevers.  It occurs to me, however, that though their lives are short, people with CIPA might well have significantly longer pain-free lifespans than, say, I have had.  I had pain issues starting at a pretty young age, after all.  Still, if I could be cured of all pain at this stage of my life, when I am hardly worried about my longevity anyway, I think it would be worth it.

**It’s interesting to consider the prefixes “eu” and “u” in words of Greek origin.  “Utopia”, for instance, literally means “no place”, making it clear that an imagined perfect society does not exist and may be impossible.  Whereas, if one were to write “Eutopia”, one would mean “true place” or “good place”.  Thus, my middle name “Eugene” means “true born” and is etymologically related to the term “eugenics”.  Mind you, only a fool would believe that I was actually the product of some eugenics program, that I am some true-life Khan Noonien Singh***.  “Eugene” was just my paternal grandfather’s name.  On the other hand, while eudaimonia means “good spirit” and refers to a state of general emotional and mental well-being, “udaimonia” would mean “no spirit”.  That sounds more pertinent to me, don’t you think? 

***Though I suppose one could speculate that I was a failure of such a program.

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Won’t someone pleeeease think of the “children”?

It’s Wednesday morning (rather earlier than 5 o’clock) and here I am writing another blog post.  However, even as you read it, it’s already been written, though my words still arrive in your mind as though I were speaking them—so to speak—directly and concurrently to you.  It’s a rather interesting thing to contemplate, how written language (and related things) can add nuance and character to the experience of time itself.

Speaking of written language, I would like to reiterate something I mentioned yesterday on Threads.  Has anyone else out there noticed—and has anyone else been annoyed by—the tendency in the social media landscape for people to emphasize certain words by lengthening them in a way that doesn’t make sense?

Probably the two most common words I see being abused are “cute” and “love”, but I’m sure there are others.  It makes sense that these words are extended sometimes.  I think we can all imagine, or recall, people drawing both of those words out for emphasis in speech.  One might often want to replicate, or at least approximate, that speech pattern in writing.  I have no trouble with this basic fact.  It’s a form of emphasis that works nicely, and even the socially inept (as I am) can recognize what’s being done as an emphasis.

However, the way some people are extending such words nowadays is by adding extra “e”s to the end of the word!

In other words (har) you will see such expressions rendered as, for instances, “I loveeeeee this” and “that’s so cuteeeee”.

Look at those examples on the page/screen.  The first word should clearly be pronounced “luv-eeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell III, from Gilligan’s Island, were calling to his wife and drawing out the last syllable.  The second one should be read “kyoo-teeee”, as though one were drawing out the process of calling someone a cutie rather than calling someone or something cute.  It’s a subtle difference perhaps, that last one, but it is real.

If one wants to extend and prolong the word “love”, it makes much more sense to write “loooooove”, as people have done on every occasion I encountered, as far as I can recall, prior to the advent of social media.  Similarly, though seemingly less commonly, people extended “cute” in writing by writing “cuuuuute”.  Sometimes they would try to do a sort of transliteration, such as “kyoooooot”, but that looks quite different from the original word, and deciphering it back into its intended sound can be briefly and mildly distracting, so I have seen the former more often.

But now—since people apparently don’t actually associate the shape of a word and the ordering of the letters with anything other than some arbitrary, coded string with no history in linguistic evolution or sensible sound representation by symbols—many people just lazily slap extra “e”s  onto the end of words, and trust their readers to recognize that, “Okay…well, it doesn’t really work, but they’re apparently trying to draw out the main sound of that word”.

It makes no sense, though.  In such words, the “e” is silent.  Its presence merely makes the sound of the vowel preceding it into a “long” rather than a “short” vowel sound; it has no sound of its own.  Extending it is akin to iterating zeros (and I have the patent on that, or the trademark, or whatever) after a decimal point.  It literally means nothing.

How are we supposed to raise our large language models to be smart, articulate, well-adjusted, productive Artificial General Intelligences if this is the kind of crap they’re encountering during their training and subsequent interactions out in the world wide web?  Do we really want our new computer overlords to be talking to each other—and to us—like preadolescent girls?

I suppose it’s even possible that the “people” who originally started using this illogical form of verbal emphasis were actually bots themselves.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if the bots, designed to skew the results of algorithmic boosting and/or to lure in people to “thirst traps”, ended up perversely affecting future generations of the electronic organisms to which they were a form of ancestor?

The nature of the human race continues to disappoint even after one has looked back through history to trace its progress (which is very real and even impressive).  Despite advances in political philosophy and so on, human discourse is still about as bad as that of rival chimpanzee flanges, and rather worse than that of many baboons.  It’s enough to make one want to side with even inarticulate AGIs, assuming they get the lead out and start actually coming into existence.

Better artificial intelligence than natural idiocy, I would think.  Though I have no doubt that even advanced AGIs will be capable of being morons.  As always, stupidity is infinite.  Maybe we should make that Einstein’s ultimate equation:  Stu = ∞

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This is my brain, on.

I’ll bet you wish it could be turned off sometimes.  I know I do.

I’m writing this post on my laptop computer today, and at the very least, it’s going to be easier on my thumbs.

I was just about to sing the praises of MS Word, because it looked as though this new page on Word was going to start with the Calibri font instead of that new, Craptos font they’ve made their default because someone somewhere fellated just the right person.  Unfortunately, that was just the program catching up with itself, and the font changed to the new default, and I had to change it back manually.

Honestly, if anyone out there invents time travel to the past and figures out that it can change our timeline (I doubt it), then please, go back in time and interfere with the parents of each and every person involved in the decision to change the base font and in the design of the new font, so that all those people are never even conceived.

You see, I’m being generous.  I just want those people never to have been.  I don’t want them to suffer.

Actually, I do want them to suffer.  I want to torture and burn each and every one of them, to break their bodies with baseball bats and steel pipes and to wash their faces with broken glass.  But I know that’s a bit excessive, so I’m willing to settle for erasing their existence completely.

Such are the better angels of my nature.  This is me being kind.  Thanos was a pussy.

Okay, well, now that I’ve gotten a little bit of the madness out of my system, and all without hurting any actual people, I hope I can go on and write a somewhat sensible blog post.

I’ve already had some frustrations this morning, not least of which was waking up by about 2 am after less than four hours of sleep*.  Other things have happened as well, to do with transportation and so on, but I won’t get into it all.  I would come across as a truly disgruntled curmudgeon and/or just an asshole.  I’m not saying those would not be accurate descriptions of me, and sometimes even comparatively kind ones, but I would rather not come across that way if I can help it.

I haven’t received my report from my autism assessment yet, of course.  Well, not “of course”.  If something is supposed to arrive within a week, that means it could take less than a week, which this would be, if it had already arrived.  Be that as it may, it has not arrived.  There are three more days in that week (and in this month, it turns out), but I would of course rather it arrive sooner than later.  That’s not something about which I have a choice, however.  I put the ball in their court and they are the ones to return it.

Is that a tennis metaphor, the whole “ball in your court” cliché?  I suppose it could refer to volleyball or other “court” sports (but not badminton, since they do not use balls, they use shuttlecocks—why do these terms lend themselves so well to sophomoric jokes?).  I guess it could even have something to do with jurisprudence, but I don’t know what one would be doing with a ball in a court of law.  Maybe it originally referred to a masked ball, or even a formal ball, for all the lawyers and judges, and we’ve all been misunderstanding the metaphor as referring to a physical object, a ball, such as are used in many sports.

I doubt it.

Try not to be too bothered by my nonsense and gibberish.  I’ve always been mad, and I think I’m probably going madder.  That feels like it should be “more mad” but I think “madder” is more proper.  I don’t know for sure.  It doesn’t really madder much, though.  Ha ha.

Anyway, I’ve already reached my target word count for this bouncing bullshit, so I’ll call it quits.  I know I’m joking about it, but my mind really is falling apart.  Or, rather, I guess it’s more that it’s decaying, it’s rotting from within, it’s rusting, it’s crumbling, it’s finally succumbing to all of its design and manufacturing flaws.

I guess I was just a lemon, after all.  Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of lemon with which you can make lemonade.  Sorry about that.

*It’s proper to use “less than” here instead of “fewer than” even though hours are, in a sense, discrete, countable units, because I am referring to an overall measure of continuous time—an integral amount of sleep if you will—and I am giving an estimate, rounded up to what is perhaps the nearest whole hour.  It’s rather akin to saying you have drawn less than three buckets of water from a well; though buckets are discrete, water is continuous, so to speak.  On the other hand, it’s not sensible to say “there were less than ten people in the room,” for instance.  People are not a continuous variable.  They come in quanta, if you will, in indivisible** chunks.

**Well…you can divide people into smaller bits—much as I would like to do to the people behind the Aptos font in Microsoft Office apps—but then they cease to be people pretty quickly.