Law

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And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course, which is why I opened with that greeting.  I appear to have survived World Suicide Prevention Day.  I suppose one could argue that this fact is a good thing, though it can also be argued the other way.  I’m of more than one mind on this subject, so I’ll perforce withhold my own judgment.

Of course, it is now the 11th of September in 2025 (AD or CE), the 24th “anniversary” of 9-11-2001.  That was a bad day, there’s no doubt about it, and it heralded more bad days to come‒though two days later was, for me, one of the two best days of my life.

Anyway, there was big news yesterday, with more than one violent and newsworthy event happening in the western US.  I’m not going to get into my specific takes on things, since I don’t really do that sort of thing here.  I’ll just say that I was annoyed by the senators and representatives on the democrat side (probably there were some on the republican side) who immediately sent their “thoughts and prayers” (i.e., nothing whatsoever) and then said things like “political violence is never acceptable in a democratic society”, some of them being broader and saying political violence is never acceptable, period.

I just had to point out that our country (the US) was founded via political violence‒the American Revolution, you know.  I also pointed out that, when government no longer respects the Constitution and the rule of law, and legislators (and law enforcement personnel) are not stepping up to hold people accountable to their freely sworn duties, and the judiciary is biased in favor of those who ignore the judiciary, then sometimes violence becomes the only recourse, just as was the case when this country was founded.

I will make one judgment-type statement and say, when someone has only engaged in speech of one kind or another‒even if that speech ironically seems to endorse or at least express acceptance of certain kinds of violence‒then the proper response is more speech or counter speech (by which I do not mean trying to shout someone down).  Speech is not the same as violence in nearly any situation‒unless you’re one of the Fremen of Arrakis in the older movie version of Dune‒and should not be countered with violence.

It is, however, less scary to use violence against someone who is not immediately threatening violence than against those who actually are threatening or ordering or enacting violence.  That, though, is the path of cowardice.

Naked house apes are, finally, just apes.  If they recognized and accepted that fact, then they could be on guard against the baser primate drives and habits and instincts that no longer serve them well in the modern world.  But so many of them seem, either implicitly or explicitly, to consider themselves something other than animals, and that delusion lays the groundwork for much error, which can be catastrophic and tragic.

It’s a bit like someone believing for no good reason that their car is partly self-steering, and that once the cruise control is on, they don’t even need to watch traffic or steer for themselves.  Things are not going to turn out well for such a person.  And unfortunately, things are likely to go badly for other, perhaps more sensible, people who just happen to be near the first person.

“Heavy sigh,” to quote Justine from The Accountant (and The Accountant squared, which is what the name of the sequel is, apparently*).

In other, less momentous news, I practiced the guitar (and sang) a bit yesterday.  Among other things, I looked up the form of the “Blues” scale (and the major and minor pentatonic scales and the so-called Japanese scale, a slightly different pentatonic scale) and fiddled around with them.  Well, I guess I guitared around with them, actually, since a guitar is not a fiddle (though Jonny Greenwood has been known to use a bow on his guitar from time to time).

I did this because of a suggestion in the comments a bit ago by one of my old friends who is also a stellar guitarist.  He suggested that I might use a blues guitar bit for the possible lead on my song Come Back Again.  Unfortunately, I had to admit that I didn’t know specifically what that entailed.

I have a sensitive ego for such a self-hating person, so I ended up looking it up and playing with it to correct my shame.  I must admit, the blues scale is a real blast and sounds great for something so simple.  The pentatonic scales are a bit more boring, but I sort of already knew that.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever be an improvisational player; I tend to have to plan things out and lay them out and think them through and do trial and error.  But still, it never hurts to practice one’s scales.

Well, actually, when one’s arthropathy is acting up, it can hurt to practice, and it often does.  But that’s not exactly what I meant, as I suspect you already knew.

I hope you all have a good day, and don’t dwell too much on political violence, recent or older.

TTFN

*One could expand out The Accountant2 to be The AAccccoouunnttaanntt, and we could then group like variables together, which would get us The AAaaccccoouunnnntttt, or The A2a2c4o2u2n4t4.  It’s probably not as catchy that way, but I suspect the title character of the movies would appreciate it.  Of course, the preceding presumes that the “squared” bit on the original title applies to all the letters in the word “Accountant”, since it’s one word.  Otherwise, in traditional mathematical notation, it would end up being The Ac2ouan2t3.

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I must have liberty withal, as large a charter as the wind, to blog on whom I please

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.

It’s also the 4th of July, which in the USA is Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate the official founding of the country, the date on which the Declaration of Independence was signed and “published”.

I’m often led to wonder how many—or should I say, how few—people in the US have actually read the Declaration of Independence even once.  It’s really not a very long document.  It’s not.  There are, so I’m told, 1320 words in the document proper, which goes up to 1458 words if you count the title and all the signatures*.  I’ve written many blog posts longer than that!  And yet, I wonder how many of the most vociferous “patriots” have actually read it.  There are even YouTube videos of someone else reading it to you, if that’s easier than reading it yourself.

Most of the loud and proud advocates of one or another political affiliation aren’t really people who have first evaluated and then adopted a particular set of ideals.  They are sports fans, rooting for their arbitrarily chosen team, angry when a coach or player they don’t like is seeing prominence, happy when their team is winning for the moment, imagining that they have some effect on the game—and perhaps they do have some effect—deluding themselves that they really understand or intuit their sport well.

Ironically, of course, many actual sports fans really do have deep knowledge of their sport.  They know a bit about its history, they study actual statistics, they recognize hidden complexities, all in fields where there is almost literally nothing important at stake—beyond the salaries and careers of athletes, coaches, and commentators, and the joy of fans.

But in areas where it can potentially, truly matter to them, most people accept random streams of noise from various websites and social media platforms and pundits and—Cat help them—Fox News as more than enough data for them to use to choose political candidates.  Except, they don’t really, actually even  use any of that information, at least not any pertinent information, to pick and choose candidates.  That would require effort.

Cat forbid any of them read the Constitution.  That’s a little longer than the Declaration of Independence**, but unlike the Declaration, it is an actual, legal document—the operating system of the United States of America, if you will.  To read the whole thing, once a year—or even once in a lifetime—doesn’t seem too high a bar even for the average person to clear.  Again, I believe there are YouTube videos that basically consist of someone reading the document aloud.

And Schoolhouse Rock did such a lovely and catchy song version of the preamble to the Constitution when I was young that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it while I am alive.  Indeed, it may be that, if I ever haunt some location after death, unlucky visitors to that place after midnight on moonless nights will hear a hollow, chilling voice singing, “We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”

Given that people read all sorts of stupidities and absurdities on social media, one might think that familiarizing themselves with the documents that underlie the society in which they live might be not just useful but doable.  It might even be useful to study something of the political and moral philosophy behind these documents, and the jurisprudence that has grown up around them since the country began.

I’m tilting at windmills, I guess.  Still, if you live in the US and haven’t read the Declaration of Independence in a while, I encourage you to do so.  Even atheists often sing carols on Christmas; if they can do that, how hard can the other thing be?

Remaining in nation-level politics:  today is also the day of a General Election in the UK.  It’s apparently expected that the Labor Party will win the majority of seats in parliament and that the Tories will be ousted from power after quite a long time “in charge”***.  I suspect it will just be another instance of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, but we shall see.  While no one actually runs or controls anything, there are actions and laws that can have effects on patterns and outcomes in the short and long-term.

It’s not as straightforward to achieve any given end as politicians and pundits would like to believe, or would like you to believe, but it does happen.  This is one reason I think we should treat all new laws and regulations literally as experiments, with pre-chosen measures of outcomes upon which to evaluate the successes and/or failures, as well as side-effects, of any given act of legislature.

It’s simply not enough to have good intentions.  It never has been, and it never will be.  Good intentions are merely the beginning of actually doing good, and they are barely even that.  They are more akin to the very first, mild early pangs of hunger that eventually must be turned into actions such as hunting and gathering and starting fires and cooking food and then chewing and eating it, or the modern equivalents thereof.

In other news, I wrote only 3,752 net new words on Extra Body this week, since I had last Saturday off.  It’s now 107 pages long (in current format), and yes, it really, honestly, is nearly done—at least the first draft is nearly done.

I’m not sure why it’s taking me so long to finish.  Maybe it’s because it’s not in any sense a horror story, so I can’t bring my darker self to bear upon it; darkness is, after all, my dominant aspect.  I don’t think that’s really the cause, though.  I think it’s really just because I am nearly out of gas, with no thoughts or hopes for any future worth having for myself.

I’ve had very bad pain this week, and my insomnia continues, and my tinnitus and disequilibria continue, and the noise and not-infrequent idiocy is no more bearable than before.  And I have very little in my life to counterbalance the negatives, to make up for the minor tortures of daily life, not least among which is the willful human stupidity to which I alluded above.

I probably ought to expunge myself from the world before I decide to try to expunge the world itself.  It’s always a temptation.  I frequently brainstorm ideas for relatively modest interventions that could destabilize the world, both politically and physically, just to try to put it out of its misery and mine.

Speaking of misery:  does anyone actually like the new Aptos font that Microsoft has made its current default?  I find it repulsive, and it makes me lean toward preferring Google’s alternatives to the Microsoft word processing and spreadsheet programs.  To whomever designed this font, I say:  I’m sorry, I’m sure you put significant effort into it, and that you did your best given the circumstances and your innate abilities and all the various vectors impinging on your state at the time…but you fucked up.

Oh, well.  That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  In the UK, I hope you have a good General Election, with outcomes that are overall beneficial or at least not detrimental.  Keir Starmer may be a bit lackluster, but it’s not as though Sunak and his eighty-three or so immediate predecessors over the last several years have been all that impressive.

In the US, I hope you all have a nice holiday, and I encourage you to take a moment to read at the least the beginning and ending of the Declaration of Independence—you can skip the list of grievances if you must.  If nothing else, you’ll encounter compound complex sentences that would be daunting even for me to write.

TTFN

happy independence day

*I haven’t counted them myself, so I make no guarantee, but those numbers certainly seem about right, so I don’t really doubt them.

**Excluding the Amendments, it is apparently 4,543 words long—or 334 words fewer than the net new words I wrote on Extra Body before last week’s blog.  That’s far from an insurmountable task to read.  With the Amendments included, it’s still only 7,591 words.  That’s only twice as long as my shortest short story, Solitaire, and it’s far less dark and horrifying.

***No one is ever really in charge of anything, not on any significant scale.  Also, queen ants don’t actually organize ant hills, and queen bees don’t run their hives, and queen termites don’t design and manage the construction of termite mounds.  Get over it.

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Late-arriving, futile “justice” and reminders of a life that has been all but annihilated

I read the news yesterday, oh boy.  And yes, it was about a lucky man‒luckier than I am, anyway, at least in some ways.

There was a doctor in the heartland of America somewhere, I don’t recall where, who had been convicted of, apparently, inappropriately prescribing very large amounts of pain meds, the report quoting the number 500,000* (It seems unlikely that there were 500,000 prescriptions**, so it probably was that number of pills).

Anyway, his conviction was overturned on appeal, because apparently, in 2022, the SCOTUS handed down a ruling that the prosecution had to prove in such cases that there was “intentional or knowing” inappropriate prescription for it to rise to the level of a crime, and the jury hadn’t been appropriately instructed regarding that fact.

I looked up the case, and I’ve even downloaded the PDF of the case.  Although I haven’t read through it yet, the summaries make it clear that, yes indeed, this is a new and specific requirement.

Silly me, I had always thought that mens rea was a crucial requirement for nearly any criminal case, certainly one that rises to the level of a felony charge.  I brought that up with my (public) defense attorney, trying to point out that I shouldn’t be convicted of a crime since I literally had never intended to do anything but treat patients who had chronic pain‒which I did because I had chronic pain, and it had already severely harmed my life.  I knew how hard it was for even a physician, who at the time had good health insurance, to be able to get adequate treatment and even to get his prescriptions filled by often-judgmental pharmacists who looked at him as if he were a criminal just because he wanted to try to mitigate his pain with the most effective medicine that was available.

But no, apparently, according to my attorney, the prosecutor didn’t have to prove any such thing specifically; it could just be inferred.  And apparently I’m not exactly the sort of person to elicit sympathy from a jury in south Florida, because my voice tends to be monotone and my face tends to be expressionless and I don’t look like someone who is frankly worthy of sympathy.

All the charges against me were created by the PBSO, who sent in undercover people with (evidently) faked MRIs and fake complaints, who complained of chronic, severe pain and said they were in pain when I examined them***, and whose own secret recordings and records showed that there were often only one or two other patients in the whole office when they were there‒hardly what one would call a “pill mill” I should think.

Anyway, I was offered a plea bargain and I took it, because unless you’ve got a lot of money or you literally have nothing to lose, you will take a plea bargain in the right circumstances, even though you know you’re innocent.  I’ve written a blog post about how the plea bargain system is an extortionate game slanted against especially the underprivileged.

The statutes involved in my charges were designed by that <sarcasm> bastion of intelligentsia and morality, the Florida State Legislature </sarcasm>, to give judges no leeway, and to grind away maximally at anyone charged with “trafficking”.   If a jury decided that they should convict on at least one charge, since the state had created so many charges against me (each prescription being a charge, and twenty something having been conned out of me by various lying police officers over time) and the number seems impressive, I still could have faced a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

In retrospect, I think I would have been little worse off if I had, given the mockery and shambles my life has become.  But at the time, I hoped to see my kids again, perhaps sometime before they were adults.  Three years was better than fifteen (or potentially the rest of my life), and I had no one else to help me with a legal fight, and certainly no reservoir of money, so I took the deal.

The way things are now, though, I might not have been charged, or might have been offered some misdemeanor plea deal.  Or I might have gone to trial and won with relative ease, since the fact that I never knowingly or intentionally mis-prescribed medicine was a fact I knew for certain, at a Cartesian, cogito ergo sum sort of level, since it was a fact about my own mental state.

I may be naïve, and I often do not understand humans.  I am often easily misled and manipulated and used and misused and probably abused, because I am socially and emotionally very clueless and believe in giving other people the benefit of the doubt (to hold them innocent until proven guilty, in other words).  But I have never been greedy or unscrupulously opportunistic, and I took the practice of medicine and my duty and goal to relieve suffering very seriously.  I was never into making a lot of money, though it was good to be able to buy books I wanted and to take care of my kids.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and drove a ten-year-old Toyota Sienna.

Before yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d bothered thinking about what my life might have been like if things had not gone the way they did.  There didn’t seem to be any point.  I was a lost cause and that was that.  But this has made me feel acutely once again the cut of all the lost time with my kids and my lost ability to practice medicine, and all the other losses I’ve experienced as part of this debacle of a life.

What’s more, there’s been salt and vinegar rubbed into the wound by the fact that it took a Supreme Court dominated by many justices who’d been appointed by The Donald to require courts to require prosecutors to prove something that was supposed to be a necessary element of almost any serious criminal charge:  actual criminal intent.

That’s all leaving aside the un-ethics and illogic of the government of the “Land of the Free” dictating what people can put into their own bodies when it doesn’t directly harm other people in the first place.  I won’t get into that because it had no bearing on my medical practice‒I was not in the business of dealing in euphoriants, I was trying to relieve actual suffering.

One cannot really apply new jurisprudence to old cases in which a sentence has already been carried out and finished, and when the consequences thereof are already irrevocable.  I cannot regain the time I have lost with my children or the time I have lost when I could have been practicing medicine, or the time I spent at FSP West or in the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, where even the people who worked there frequently asked why the hell I was there, or still there (I spent 8 months in the place, on the mental health floor, because I couldn’t make bail, but finally my former girlfriend’s mother helped secure it‒at least she got all her own back after I was sentenced, and I appreciate her very much, though I might as well just have stayed in jail, since at least the whole sentence would have ended earlier given “time served” and I was basically homeless when out on bail, having lost everything I owned and relying on the generosity and kindness of friends/former coworkers).

So I am stuck with a ruined life and a twisted mockery of myself.  The fruits of a considerable number of years of time and effort and thought and creativity on my part**** were all taken away by the mindless grinding of a huge stupid machine of “criminal justice” that has little to nothing to do with the latter part of the term.  I don’t claim not to be stupid or foolish or not to have ever made mistakes in the whole situation.  I make many mistakes.  But it is maddening to see how misapplied the law can be and to experience it for oneself, especially when one is now by oneself, partly thanks to that misapplication, and then to learn that now the law is changed (or correctly applied) such that I could have been in a better situation had that change come sooner.

I often consider the possibility of going to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in various flammable liquids, and turning myself into a “bonfire of the unsanities and inanities”, to bring attention to some of the costs of misapplied “justice” and to bring an end to my own mis-called life.  I even have two gallons of paraffin lamp oil and six liters of charcoal lighter fluid and a big enough backpack to carry them all, in case I decide to do it.

Death by fire is intimidating, though‒I am no Buddhist monk by any means.  And I also dislike causing inconvenience to other people, even those involved in an institution that had no qualms about recklessly “judging” me and ruining my life.  But it is tempting, and I feel right now even more than usual the utter pointlessness of continuing, even while stupidity in the office in which I work grinds away at me further (though, to give him credit, my boss tries hard to keep things as sane as he can).

I feel rotten enough and alien enough even at baseline, and all this doesn’t help.  I have lost almost all that mattered to me, and I live alone in a stupid one-room (plus bathroom) “in-law” suite that is smaller than many hotel rooms.  All my previous friends are far away, and most are doing much better with their lives than I am and don’t really have much in common with me anymore.  In any case, I don’t really talk or otherwise communicate with them, though it would be nice.

There are also plain few people where I am now who have anything in common with me.  Very few people have much in common with me:  a disgraced physician unable to practice, with a love of math and physics and biology and of Shakespeare and horror fiction and science fiction/fantasy (reading and writing it) and of science and rationality-oriented podcasts and books and videos, who wants to learn or relearn more about modern physics at a deep level and whose brain doesn’t seem to run the same operating system as most of the people around him‒a Linux in a world of iOS, or worse.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Knowing me, I’ll probably just grind along until I’m worn to a nub and then tumble into the trash can, unmarked and largely unlamented.

I know that I won’t be sorry‒not about that.

*This sounds like an awful lot of pills, but it’s deliberately chosen to sound that way in a manipulative, rhetorical tactic as used by reporters and prosecutors alike.  Let’s run the numbers, as I am wont to do, to see how impressive they really are.

Now, if there were one patient, taking one pill per day‒perhaps the person only takes one prescription, say an antidepressant or a cholesterol med or a long-acting antihypertensive‒it would take nearly 1400 years to use that many pills.  Plain few patients live that long (see my recent blog post), and most pills would long since have expired and become inactive before the end of that time.

Still, the average physician is responsible for the care of 2,000 to 3,000 patients (see here and here), meaning that if, on average, their patients each only took one prescribed pill a day, they would go through 500,000 pills in 6 to 9 months.  But many prescriptions call for more than one pill per day, and uninsured patients cannot tend to afford the long-acting pain meds that claim to allow for steadier doses and thus slightly less risk of rebounds and escalations and all the horrors involved in that.

Now, presently, I take three to nine aspirin a day, sometimes more, and I also take two naproxen and some supplemental Tylenol as well, all of which are more directly toxic to the body than opioids, but are nonetheless over the counter (as they should be).  If I averaged ten total pills a day, then it would take me only 137 years or so to take 500,000 total pills.  That’s longer than I’m likely to be taking pills, but I’m only one person (that, as Dave Barry said, is the law).  An average practice of patients who took only six pills a day would go through 500,000 pills in one to one and a half months.  Many ordinary, non-pain-specific patients, especially those middle-aged and older, take that many and even more prescription meds a day.

In any case, an ordinary general practitioner with a light patient load of two thousand patients, each taking only an average of two pills a day, would prescribe 500,000 pills in 3 to 5 months.  So don’t be too impressed by the carefully curated numbers that prosecutors and media choose to elicit your alarm and disgust.

**Even 500,000 prescriptions, in a modest 2000 patient practice, would require only 250 prescriptions total per patient.  That would certainly take quite a bit longer than 500,000 pills would take, but given an average of only one prescription per patient per month (counting refills) it would only take a bit over 20 years, a decently short length of practice.  Many doctors see more than 2000 total patients and many patients get more than one prescription per month.  And, of course, one cannot even apply refills on “controlled substances”, they have to be literally re-written every month, and patients have to come to the doctor’s office to get them, assuming they can even get them filled.  Monthly doctor’s visits can be hard for someone trying to work a regular job while dealing with chronic pain.  Thus, the whole “mill” part of the “pill mill” trope is created by the law itself, leading to greater costs in time and fees for the patients who are trying to survive after job-related and other injuries or conditions that have caused them chronic pain and make it difficult for them to find consistent, gainful employment or to sustain health insurance.

***Pain is a symptom, not a sign, in medical terms.  We have no reliable ways of testing it, beyond patient report.  We try to find physical correlations when we can, often to see if we can find some treatable cause, but even Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine (I think it was on page 80 or 81 of the 14th or 15th edition, whichever one I had at the time) has clearly stated that, for instance, back pain does not correlate well even with specific injuries noted on MRIs and the like.  As large a number of people without pain will have nerve root impingements and bulging discs and the like seen on spinal MRIs as do have pain.  NO ONE KNOWS all the wherefores of this situation, but there is no serious doubt that such pain is quite real.

****It did not all happen during medical school or residency‒one does not coast along from K-12 and undergraduate college and only then start to work hard in med school, especially if one grew up in a blue-collar, factory town outside Detroit.

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Let’s put the day in a box, or something

It’s Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas‒called Boxing Day in the UK and related places, though I’ve encountered no consistent, good explanation for that name‒and I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the 2nd train of the day to bring me toward the office.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone because I semi-accidentally left my laptop computer at the office on Saturday.  I say “semi-accidentally” because although I realized that I hadn’t packed it in plenty of time to correct that oversight, I decided to give myself a wee break from carrying it.  It’s not that much of a chore, but considering how unenthusiastic I am regarding doing anything at all, I think it’s a tolerable reduction in load.

I haven’t yet signed up for health insurance.  I really ought to try to do it sometime this week.  My sister has offered to help me with it, since such processes are so unpleasant for me that I usually honestly feel I would rather sicken and die than do them‒I’m predisposed that way, anyway, so it’s not that big a leap‒but when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, I completely forgot to ask how she might do that.  She’s over 1000 miles away, so I’m not sure what the help would entail.  I should check with her.

I certainly don’t want to go through any government services.  Quite apart from my own experiences of injustice at the hands of state and county and federal levels of government, the disgusting spectacle of how our government has run itself, and how our politics have become so moronically fractured, gives me not merely a lack of faith in their ability to carry out their roles, but a kind of anti-faith.  I believe, or at least suspect, that they will not merely fail to ensure justice and order but that they will actually engender and even enforce injustice and will, over time, make all things worse.

This is not a partisan position.  Though the specifics of their degeneracy and dysfunction differ, both political parties in the US have attributes ranging from the pathetic to the disgusting (and almost no remaining redeeming features).  They are mere mockeries of political parties that are supposed to represent the interests of the people of their communities and states and the nation.  Watching the misbegotten antics of the cretins in positions of power, it is only too obvious how much each and every one of them is but a baboon with delusions of grandeur, trying to work a machine which it has not even the capacity to understand.

All three branches of the federal government have become little better than frat boys from opposing universities at a college football game, chanting idiotic, drunken slogans at each other, getting into brawls, trying to show off for each other, painting their faces, going topless in below zero weather…not doing anything productive at all but definitely doing their best to prevent the “other side” from doing anything productive.  Meanwhile, the actual work that is supposed to be done by these people‒whose chosen and sought-after role was nominally to work for the good of the people they represent, regardless of party affiliation‒is not even addressed in anything but sound bite form.

Oh, asteroids and alien invaders, where are you?  We need a catastrophe that cannot be “blamed” on any other political affiliate to remind everyone of how government is a tool, not a fundamental entity, and that political parties are not-so-necessary evil.

The people in our local, state, and national governments are NOT our “leaders”.  They never have been.  Leaders create innovation, they march in front, they accept responsibility, and they put their personal well-being on the line in service of some (hopefully beneficial) goal.  We do not elect leaders‒that’s practically a contradictory notion.  At best, we elect managers.  These people are our servants, our employees, and we should treat them as such.  When they do a crappy job‒as almost all of them do‒we should fire them, not invent excuses to blame their poor performance on the “other side” or whatever.

It’s not really about “blame”.  It’s about actually getting the job done.  I don’t necessarily blame a person for being a bad carpenter, for instance‒maybe that person tries really hard but just doesn’t have the knack.  But once I realize they aren’t very good, I’m not going to use their services.  And even if I don’t know for certain how good a new person is going to be, if the current carpenter has less than a 20% approval rating, most random alternatives are likely to be better.  And we can keep trying new people until we find good ones.

I fear the system is going to have to burn itself down across the board before any better setup occurs.  That’s a shame, because at its root, the US Constitution has some pretty good ideas.  It’s a decent operating system*, and it has a built-in ability to be updated.  It’s certainly a better system than nearly all the people involved in elected positions based upon it, and that is the advantage of rule of law versus rule of person.

But of course, all laws have to be created and then carried out by naked house apes who are more driven by personal dominance hierarchy jockeying that serves inbuilt reproductive urges than by any higher brain functions.  Their cortexes** appear to be used almost entirely for making excuses, for post-hoc justification of actions they took on whims and urges of personal indulgence, instead of assessing reality and deciding what is honestly best to do.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out, if you enter the final balance in the ledger (or list of pros and cons) before you begin to do any figuring, all your figuring is irrelevant.  It does not provide any information.  At most, it’s there to deceive, and the fact that it serves to deceive the deceiver as well provides no absolution for the deceiver.  Reality gives no free passes.

Anyway, I don’t know how that got started.  I certainly didn’t plan to write about it.  But there it is.  I guess it wasn’t far from the front of my mind.  Honestly, if it weren’t for my children, and the children of my sister and some of my friends, I would just as soon see the whole world literally burn.  It’s going to happen someday, in any case, and if humans are just going to be carrying out their dumbshow over and over, with rises and falls of cultural intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator always thoughtlessly sabotaging the higher, it may well be a net gain simply to head off decades or centuries or millennia or eons of net misery with a return to zero.

Hope you’re having a happy holiday season!

*Maybe part of the problem is that, though the operating system is good, there’s never been any chance to reboot or even “sleep” the system.  So, it has continued to accumulate errors, inefficiencies, conflicting bits of data, until they make every program unable to run efficiently, or at all.  We don’t need to change the Constitution, and probably not even the laws (at least not to start); we need to change all the people (and the political parties).  We should just sweep them away, clearing the browser history and the cookies and the RAM and all that, and restart with the operating system unchanged, but without all the baggage.

**Should that be “cortices”?

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Apologies, but this is a much darker and more erratic post than yesterday’s

I did not walk to the train this morning, because I’m planning to walk again this evening, on the way back to the house from the train station, and I don’t want to push things too fast and give myself frustrating negative outcomes.  Of course, I’m quite pleased to note that I’ve appeared to suffer no negative physical outcomes from yesterday’s walk at all.  My body appears to be adapting.

My body, that is, by which I mean everything outside the blood-brain barrier.  I guess I had a sort of negative outcome in that I got a slightly giddy feeling after my walk‒I think you could probably recognize that fact in my post yesterday, which was written starting right after the end of the walk.  It was a low-grade version of a runner’s high, which I used to get quite wonderfully when I was running regularly.  How is that a negative outcome, you ask?  Well, it’s quite temporary, unfortunately.  It lasted a few hours, but then, by the time work had been underway for a short time, it faded and disappeared, and I was left feeling thoroughly down and grumpy and gloomy.

I know that if I had eaten or drunk something with sugar or starch or whatever, it probably would have perked me up briefly‒probably more briefly than the exercise high‒and then I would have felt physically much worse afterward, and my energy would be lower, and I wouldn’t have the capacity to do my walks or anything of the sort for a while.  I know this; I’ve done those experiments, with as much rigor as I could bring to bear.  So, all the good feelings I have at ready disposal are short lived and have rotten side effects or withdrawal symptoms.

It’s quite frustrating.  But then again, nearly everything in my day to day life is frustrating.

For instance:  I’m almost due to renew my state ID card, and I tried to access the online system to do so, but it’s different than it was when I did it last (several years ago).  Though technology has advanced a great deal since then, the website for renewing IDs and driver’s licenses in Florida has become shit.  Anyone out there with any inside input with the people responsible for such things, let them know:  that website is shit.  SquareSpace could’ve done a better website for you 12 years ago, and I know because I used them.

Anyway, it also asked various questions to try to confirm one’s identity, but they were bizarrely worded, making it unclear what the correct answer should be, and also asked about things like what previous address was associated with this ID.  I think my previous address was at the work release center‒I certainly haven’t moved since then except to the house where I am now, because if I move (at least within Florida) I’m supposed to register my new address with the state, since, you know, I’m an ex-felon and they need to know where I am in case I’m prone to further felonies and all that bouncing bullshit.  But I wasn’t sure about the correct address, or the right answer to some other questions, and so wasn’t able to log into the system.

I swear, I am often tempted just to buy a bunch of bottles of charcoal lighter fluid and go to the Palm Beach courthouse, sit in front of it like a good Buddhist monk, pour the fluid over myself and set myself on fire.  Maybe I could livestream it with a message and a protest about things like the extortionate nature of the plea bargain system, and the absurdity of a criminal justice system that allows private lawyers of any kind‒which means that the affluent-to-wealthy will always have a better chance of being found not guilty, while the more or less indigent* are given to the hands of competent and hard-working but overworked and underpaid public defenders**.  Then, to save themselves the trouble of actually having to prove a case in court, the prosecutors offer some “plea bargain”, which includes the threat (yes, of course it is a threat) that if it’s not accepted they’ll pursue the greatest possible charges with the greatest possible penalties they can achieve.

And, of course, if the prosecutor loses this game of chicken, and they somehow fail to convince a jury that even one of their thirty or forty dubious-to-confected charges is true, then what?  They lose a case.  Part of the job.  You win some, you lose some.  Next!

But if the poor (in multiple senses) defendant loses****, well, he could face a minimum of fifteen years, by statute.  He would have no chance to see his kids before they were in their twenties!*****  So, though he has never willfully or willingly attempted to traffic in controlled substances in any sense, but was honestly (if naively and possibly “neurodivergently”) trying to help other people suffering from chronic pain, he decides to take the plea bargain, which will include the extensive time he has already served, and fuck what the legal system or society at large thinks of him.

He knows he’s innocent, that he had no mens rea whatsoever.  He knows when he was in that pain management practice that he even asked the PBSO officer who did inspections if there was anything that the practice for which he was working was doing wrong or what have you, because he didn’t want that.  He just wanted to try to help people who were in pain.  The deputy made no mention of anything.

So he took the plea.  He did it because he was threatened…by the prosecutor.  And prosecutors have terrible power, a great deal of it‒they also work with the police, as colleagues‒and in the course of their business, they destroy countless lives, with little to no risk to themselves.  The only saving grace for them is that, for the most part, I think most of them really do mean well and want to do good.

But meaning well‒believing you are right‒can still be dangerous, often far more dangerous than psychopathic malevolence and selfishness (My own failures while meaning well, as described here, at least mainly blew up in my own face and didn’t do too much collateral damage).

Psychopaths tend to try not to cause themselves too much harm or pain.  It’s people who are moral and tend to moralize, who believe that they are right, who are willing to sacrifice the lives and comfort of others for some imagined “greater good”.  Assholes.  Idiots.  Pathetic, delusional, driverless semi-trucks full of explosives and rotting garbage is what they are.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’m sorry it’s swerved so far from yesterday‒but yesterday’s post doesn’t seem to have been too popular, anyway.  No one much likes to read about relatively pleasant times or thoughts (me included); the dark stuff is much more gripping, and that’s true for good, sound, biological reasons.

So, just to keep my options open, I am ordering and buying a decent supply of charcoal lighter fluid.  It wouldn’t take very much to get the job done.

Have a good day.  Please, if you can’t do anything else for me, please, at least have a good day.  Somebody should have one.  Why not you?

*Which I was, certainly after waiting in jail 8 months before being bailed out.  Remember, I had been working locum tenens after “temporary disability” and chronic pain and failing to be able to keep up with a few other positions, due to my back injury/surgery and pretty bad depression, even for me.  I’d been off work for more than a year and a half, maybe longer, before restarting, and I ended up giving away a fair amount of whatever I brought in.  I was never great at managing my life and finances and stuff like that.  This may be related to my possible ASD, I don’t know.  I’ve never been very good at caring for myself, though I’m okay at doing it for other people.

**Prosecutor’s offices also tend to have much higher budgets than public defender’s offices, a fact which certainly does seem to fly in the face of the supposed “presumption of innocence” hypocritically spouted by Americans who have never had the experience of a misfiring justice system***.  Imbeciles.

***The fact that private defense attorneys are allowed in the criminal justice system, by the way, contributes to  the fact that there are far more black men in prison than is predictable by population rates.  It is well known that the mean and median wealth (not to be confused with income) of black people in America is much lower than that of white people, for clear and obvious historical reasons.  Well, wealth is what you dip into if you need to hire a top-notch defense attorney‒very few people have the income to afford such things.  So, the criminal justice system, by allowing private defense attorneys, stacks the deck even further against the economically impaired, which disproportionately includes all minorities, and particularly black people on average, even if there is no active racism in any of the people or in the system itself.

****Because when a prosecutor throws all sorts of counts of things at the defendant, charging any prescription someone writes, for instance, as a count of “trafficking”, then jurors are going to be inclined to think that, if there’s so much smoke, there must be at least a little fire, no matter how much it flies in the face of the character the defendant has shown his entire life (jurors don’t know about the stage-effect smoke machines working behind the scenes).  And when the defendant has a bit of a wooden face and a monotone voice and isn’t good at expressing his emotions or even recognizing them in real time, but tends to be analytic and logical and rather esoteric, he’s unlikely to elicit sympathy from jurors.  So I was told even by my own attorney and her supervisor, among other things.

*****The idiotic irony here is that, despite the plea bargain, he still hasn’t seen his children so far since then, anyway‒by their wish and request.  So, he (I) might as well have just gone to trial, even if it might have meant spending fifteen or more years in prison.  What’s the difference?  Prison was not significantly worse than my current life.  I might even have written more books and stories there.  Maybe they wouldn’t ever be published, but that wouldn’t do much to change the number of people who have read them.  It would be no loss to the world, certainly.

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oh, yeah, Happy Presidents Day, by the way

It’s Monday morning, again—a fact for which surely we must all have cause to celebrate.

I’m beginning this blog post sitting at the train station instead of at the bus stop, in the fashion in which I always used to write it, waiting for the second train of the day*.  I feel quite weird and tense, almost anxious, interloping back into my old venue.  I worry that I’m going to be taking someone’s seat at the station by taking the seat I always used to take, or taking someone’s newly usual seat on the train by—hopefully—taking the seat I always prefer to take.

I don’t like things that disrupt my routines, and by extension and logical coherence, I don’t like to disrupt other people’s routines.  I also feel nervous about possible social interactions, e.g., someone saying something equivalent to “long time, no see,” and asking where I’ve been and what happened.  Thankfully, I’ve never been publicly sociable, so there’s no real precedent for anyone to say much, but it’s not impossible.

The base of my right thumb is really acting up today (and it was yesterday) and that’s frustrating because I have been doing my blog posts on my laptop—as I am doing this one—and that definitely gives my thumb comparative rest.  Also, I’ve done something to irritate my right shoulder rather badly, probably the supraspinatus and/or related structures, and raising my arm laterally (aka abducting it), even a little, is quite painful.

It’s frustrating to have all these new pains occurring.  They distract me from my usual, chronic back pain, with which I’m at least familiar.  Unfortunately, they don’t make it go away; they just add to it and sap the energy I usually have to be able to deal with it.

I’m not sure what to write about today, which is somewhat ironic given that I’ve written over three hundred words so far.  Perhaps this is my writing equivalent of small talk?  I’ve never been very good at doing small talk in real time, or at least in being able to understand the point, or endure it when nearly anyone is doing it.  But maybe this is my version of that, and maybe other people find it just as mind-numbing as usual small talk is for me.  In my ethical defense, though, I will say that no one is socially pressured** to read my blogs.  No one corners anyone at a party or in an office or whatever and shoves a computer or phone or tablet under that person’s face and insists that the person read this blog.

Do they?  Has that happened to anyone out there?  If it has, I want to extend my thanks to the person who did that to you—they’re really helping me out!

I’m kidding.  That would be a horrible thing, and I would feel guilty-by-proxy for their deeds.  Or, rather, not “guilty”—since one cannot even in principle actually be guilty or responsible for the deeds of other minds that one has not forced or otherwise caused them to commit—but I would feel chagrined, embarrassed, and just generally bad.

That raises a little tangent point I would like to emphasize:  No person, human or otherwise, can be held morally culpable for the deeds of others, especially for the deeds of the dead, because one cannot be morally culpable for anything over which one did not have even the possibility of control***.  This is why the insanity defense exists in criminal law, for instance, and in this case, the law in neither a ass nor a idiot.  You won’t find me all too often praising the law and its general practices, so enjoy that little aberration.  In most cases, I come not to praise the law but to bury it.

Well, no, burying the law would probably be a mistake.  Even a somewhat dysfunctional legal system is probably better than no laws at all.  Indeed, I suspect that, were the governments of the world to be suddenly abolished and all their power stripped completely away—perhaps as a practical joke or experiment done by immensely powerful extraterrestrials—after a period of horrible violence and instability, with mass starvation, disease, and infrastructure collapse, new systems of laws would come into place.  Even in places where there is gang rule, the gangs (as the previous term suggests) tend to institute “rules” of their own.  It just happens.  It’s an evolutionarily and game theoretically stable strategy, and it works for tyrants as well as for egalitarians.

One big trouble is that the individual people who want to set up and control governments are rarely the ones best suited to do so.  It would probably be better for us, in general, only to elect to our higher offices individuals who saw government—legislative, executive, judicial, what have you—as an unpleasant but necessary chore, like cleaning toilets, mopping floors, or mucking out horse stalls, rather than as a personally desirable thing to do, a means by which to achieve social status and the like.

Becoming president, in particular, should be done almost like jury duty.  No one who wants to do the job, for personal reasons, should probably be allowed to do it.

Perhaps we could arrange it so that no one could be nominated by anyone in their family or whom they knew personally, but could only be nominated by other people, people to whom they were not beholden and who were not beholden to them.  States could each go through a mass nomination process, by which a certain minimum number of people are suggested by those around them, and then strangers look into their character and nature and a public debate among people in general takes place, pro and con, but in which the nominated people cannot take part.

Then, at some point, a state holds a vote among nominated candidates, and the top twenty (or whatever) candidates are then put again before a public debate, in which, again, they cannot participate.  Only others can promote or detract from them, stating their qualifications and shortcomings.  Then, there would be a newer vote, and the recipient of the most votes would be that state’s candidate.

Then their would be a nationwide equivalent to select the office-holder.  No one would be allowed to refuse the job except based on legitimate and confirmed severe health difficulties.  But that would probably all shake out in the initial nomination and election process.  I suppose, to make it worthwhile, it would be best to have slightly longer terms of office, maybe with the new term overlapping the previous, so the new incomer could learn from the predecessor.  And only one term would be allowed****.

Anyway, that’s all silly fantasy stuff, so don’t worry about it.  I’m just tired and mentally unstable.  I really don’t think I can do this very much longer.  By “do this” I mean “exist on this planet”, not “write this blog”, though the former subsumes the latter.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no one coming to take me back to my home-world, or to the mother ship, or whatever, so I’ll need to figure out some other way.

I’m working on it.

hollywood train

*The irony of the bus-to-train schedule I’ve been doing recently is that it actually all but forces me to get up a little later than I used to, because the buses simply don’t start to arrive as early as trains do.

**Except by me, within my blog, of course.  But that’s a very nebulous kind of social pressure, and comes from someone who, while not anti-social, is surely dis-social.  I’m not sociopathic by any means, but I am “patho-social”, i.e., there seems to be some dysfunction in my ability to socialize, even with people I like.  It’s not pleasant.

***Thus, the notion of “original sin”, for instance, is pure ethical bullshit.

****This makes me imagine another contrafactual scenario, in which candidates for office hold an anti-debate, in which each one is required to denigrate themselves and their own party and give convincing reasons why the other party’s candidate is better, to argue with the other against themselves and their party’s positions.  It would at least be amusing.

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I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rolling ’round the bend

It’s Saturday again, and I’m going to work today, so I’m writing a blog post.  Any of you who follow me on the weekend may be glad (or not) that this is the case.

I’m waiting at the train station for the first Saturday train, and they just announced that the northbound train, the one I take, is delayed “15…20 minutes due to a mechanical failure”, so I’m going to be sitting here longer than I thought I would be.  I wish I had a reliable alternative means to get to the office, but the buses are also slower on Saturdays, and the trip always takes longer via bus, since the train doesn’t have to stop for traffic lights, and has fewer stops to pick up passengers.

It’s curious that the announcements for delays say, for instance, “15…20 minutes” rather than “15 to 20 minutes” which seems to me to be the more normal way to express such a range.  If one took it as giving an estimate in the way people often read off strings of numbers, one might infer that they were saying the train would be delayed by 1,520 minutes, but that’s 25 hours and 20 minutes.  Surely anyone waiting would just take the next train, in an hour, rather than wait until tomorrow morning at 6:09 am.

Of course, based on past experience, the train may end up being cancelled and I’ll be taking the next train anyway.  It’s not an auspicious start for a Saturday, but one doesn’t do what one does because it’s convenient (necessarily).  A lion on the savannah that gives up hunting because the prey seems too difficult to get and it’s an unpleasant day will have a much lower chance of surviving to reproduce than one that just buckles down and keeps trying.

Lions are idiots.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Of course, lions aren’t that bright relative to the average human, but they’re pretty bright as far as the overall animal kingdom goes.  So are their competitors.  Their prey is not necessarily as bright as they are, but they don’t have to be.  It doesn’t take much brainpower to sneak up a blade of grass, but herbivores still need to be smart enough to avoid carnivores as often as feasible.

I’m a tiny bit nervous about today—about how I’ll be, that is—because I have not taken my antidepressant.  I haven’t mention it, but I’ve been back on them for some weeks now (I don’t recall exactly how long) as an attempt to see if they can help me with my worsening depression.

That hasn’t happened, as I’m sure you can tell if you’ve been reading my posts.  My depression has, if anything, worsened, though that may just be a natural progression that has nothing to do with medication.  Also, I cannot know how I would be if I had not taken them, though perhaps, if the many-worlds description of quantum mechanics is correct, somewhere out there in the omniverse are versions of me that have acted as the experimental control to my attempt.

Hey, they just said the train will be boarding in 10 minutes!  That will, honestly, make it only 15 minutes late, not 1,520 minutes, which is quite preferable.  See, sometimes things go better than expected, even for pessimists.

Anyway, the reason I’m stopping my antidepressants, at least for now is that—in addition to seeming to fail to improve my psychological state—they are giving me side effects that give me even more difficulty interacting with people around me, and leave me feeling more tense, more irritable, and also more dry-mouthed.  That latter bit isn’t such a big deal, but the others are a problem when, possibly because of my supposed ASD, I already have trouble interacting and connecting with people.  And that only makes me feel worse about myself.  I don’t feel worse about the other people; it’s not their job to connect with or look out for me, after all.

Oh!  I got at least some of the editing done on those sound recordings from yesterday.  The one from the middle of the night was really full of background noise, and also, apparently, the microphone on the phone is especially susceptible to breath and movement noise, so that’s required a lot of fine-toothed editing.

The phone app records in stereo, which is interesting.  I’m assuming that means there are at least 2 microphone inputs on the phone, though they can’t be very far apart.  Anyway, I also recorded a brief addendum, which I’m just going to tack onto the end of the first and turn into a “video” which I’ll front with a picture that I’ve manipulated and altered and made, I think, pretty cool.

I hope that having stopped my antidepressants doesn’t lead me to crash and burn today, but I’ve been losing altitude steadily anyway, and sooner or later there’s going to be a hill or a building that I can’t clear, and that’ll be it.  There are rarely survivors of airplane crashes—though I’m not sure what the statistics are for metaphorical airplane crashes.

I think the reason medicines have sometimes worked for me in the past was because I was also getting therapy, and for someone like me, who has trouble connecting, but who can talk about what interests me once I get started, it was very useful to have someone whose job includes listening.  I tried the Better Help website to do therapy late last year, but I think I’ve mentioned that that fell apart because my therapist had to go on maternity leave within a month or so of my beginning, and the online therapy wasn’t a great fit.  I also just didn’t have the strength to start again with a new therapist so soon.

I had to do text-based therapy, since I didn’t feel up to Skype-style talking over the computer, and I didn’t want to talk out loud about my issues in the house where I live, anyway.  Unfortunately, in-person therapy is expensive, and I have no insurance, nor good transportation or spare time.

A lot of why therapy has helped in the past was, I think, because I was just in a better situation then, overall.  I was depressed, as well as being apparently “neurodivergent” without my knowledge, but I was—the first time—happily married, finishing med school and then doing residency.  After that, unfortunately, my back injury and chronic pain and then failed back surgery syndrome and all that jazz made it less effective, as did the failure of my marriage and, later, my professional catastrophic failure.

Prison wasn’t much help, either.  Not because it was bullshit* that I was sent there—I’ve never expected anything but injustice from the world in general, and by that time, with chronic pain and my marriage having failed I didn’t see it as being much worse than where I already was—but because it separated me from my children, whom I haven’t seen in person in over ten years now.  It also made it very hard for me to return to my previous profession.

Anyway, if I get “worse” from stopping antidepressant treatment, well that’s just too bad.  Hell, I may just steer myself toward a hill or mountain if I can see one.  I’ll avoid buildings, because it wouldn’t be nice to injure other, innocent people, just because I hate the world and my life and myself.  That would be petty and pathetic, and I have no patience for people who do such things.

Well, that’s enough for today.  Be on the lookout for my “video” this weekend.  I may do a reading of Poe’s The Haunted Palace for Halloween and put that on YouTube, so be on the lookout for that, too.

Thanks for reading, today and otherwise.  Until we “meet” again (if we do, which is far from certain) I wish you the best.

*Yes, I know, surely everyone who is arrested and then takes a plea bargain because the state has threatened to try to put them away for a minimum of 15 years (and as much as a few hundred) for (naively and foolishly) trying to help others who have chronic pain, but not grasping the societal dynamics of the situation fully (probably at least partly because of ASD) would say that their situation was bullshit.  But I honestly think I’m being objective about this.  It was a politically motivated process, in which I was something analogous to a dolphin caught in a tuna net, but there was no incentive for them to throw me back.  My uncle, who was a criminal attorney for many years, had even said that it was obvious that they knew I wasn’t a bad guy—they barely paid any attention to my case other than to finally offer the plea deal to avoid having to prove anything, knowing that someone who doesn’t have millions of dollars at the ready and so cannot easily defend against a state machine that does, and the risk of getting a possibly very long sentence if found guilty (jurors are unsympathetic toward doctors, apparently, and I was judged not to be a likeable person to put on the witness stand) is going to take it and save the state the trouble of actually trying to prove any crime.  Of course, I figured, three years is better than the risk of fifteen or more, and I’d be able to see my kids again after that at least before they were all grown up**.  But the state wasn’t about simply to drop the case; that would have looked bad and been politically inexpedient.  What wonderful reasons they have for ruining so many people’s lives.

**Insert gales of sardonic, scornful laughter at my own repeated naiveté.  I am so foolish when I’m optimistic.

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Liberty, Independence, Rights, and Patriotism

I’m not planning on writing a great deal today, because I’m going to let other writers, of whom many of you might have heard, take up most of the space of this entry.  But I do want to preface that writing with a few thoughts of my own, some of which I may have articulated previously.

Next Tuesday is the 4th of July, on which, in America, we celebrate Independence Day, with much eating, drinking, and firework firing.  It’s a wonderful holiday, an opportunity to enjoy family togetherness in the summertime, and to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the United States, a pivotal historical event.  However, it should also be, I think, a time for Americans to reflect upon the origins of our country, upon the ideas on which is was founded, and what we need to do to live up to the hopes of its founders, whose reach—as does our own—often exceeded their grasp. Continue reading →

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The Idolatry of the American Flag

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The picture seen here is an edited Facebook posting by someone I know, and as you can see, it supposedly shows the face of a man who was brutally beaten – by a Marine, apparently – in response to having stepped on the American flag.  This would be bad enough in and of itself if it were an isolated incident or sentiment.  It isn’t.  It’s one of many expressions of desire by Americans (including, apparently the current President) that those who “disrespect” the flag should face consequences ranging from prosecution to out and out violence.

This is an obscenity, and an affront to the ideals upon which this nation was founded. Continue reading →