Lifestyle

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They will eat like wolves and blog like devils

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 14th of December in 2023 (AD or CE), and it’s the second to last day of Hanukkah.  Not that such a thing matters to me, really.  I don’t have anyone with whom I’m celebrating this or any other holiday.

I’m not really celebrating anything at all, come to think of it.  That seems appropriate.  What, really, is there in this world for me to celebrate that isn’t drowned out by all the noise and idiocy and spitefulness and pettiness?

I’m waiting for the second train today, not the first.  I was awake well in time for the first train, but there was not really any point in trying to get to that one.  It was at least as crowded as the second train has been, and getting to the office an hour earlier just left me puttering around there.  Also, it may have contributed to me writing quite a long blog post, yesterday.

I’m not sure if anyone actually read yesterday’s post all the way through.  Certainly, no one appears to have left any comments, even on “social” media—although I guess someone might have commented since yesterday afternoon, which was the last time I checked.

I’ve decided to go back to wearing my slightly larger Timberland boots, which—obviously enough—I have neither given away nor discarded.  They are simply more comfortable and feel more protective than most of my other shoes or boots.

I haven’t been doing any long-distance walking for a while, but I’ve walked in total 2 to 3 miles a day each day this week, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular problem with the boots.  Of course, my back and my legs hurt—a lot—but they almost always hurt, so it’s difficult to attribute that to the boots.  I’ve also not been wearing knee or ankle braces at all this week, because they’re irritating me.  They probably give me some benefits, of course, but sometimes I just don’t care.

I’ve been trying to eat a somewhat healthier diet this week—heavy on legumes and beans and nuts and stuff and light on breads and cheeses and all that.  I haven’t even had any meat at all.  So far, it’s given me terrible gastrointestinal discomfort and has made me feel unwell, but I’m hopeful that this is just because of the shift in diet, and that my system will adjust itself.  If it doesn’t do so soon, I may give up on the notion.

Basically, I’m trying to do something, almost anything, to improve my overall daily mood and energy and motivation.  Because I really don’t feel any interest in or joy regarding much of anything anymore.  I haven’t read more than three or four pages of any book this week (in aggregate), fiction or nonfiction.  That’s weird for me, and it’s not a good sign.  But I cannot seem to conjure any interest.

If you’ve been reading my blog so far this week, you know I said that I would try to find health insurance for which I could sign up and which I could afford, and I have today and tomorrow left to try to meet my deadline.

That’s a good word, “deadline”.  But I guess it may be somewhat ironic when discussing health insurance.

Having that task before me really stresses me out; I don’t like it hanging over me, but I also don’t want to do it, particularly when I don’t even want to take care of myself.  The only possible silver lining might be that, just maybe, I might be able to check myself into some mental health facility that’s slightly better than some Florida county or state level shit-holes.  I doubt it.

I probably ought to be in some mental health place.  I’m almost certainly a “danger to myself”, at least for some portion of most days.  Not that I have imminent plans, mind you; don’t get all excited and call the local police.  I’m cleverer than that.

It’s quite windy and a bit rainy around these parts today, as it was yesterday afternoon.  That probably contributes to my back and legs flaring up above their usual baseline.  I’m still keeping up with my pull-ups and dips, though I need to get back into doing more crunches.  Maybe that would help my GI and back trouble.  It might make it worse.  It might have no effect whatsoever.

That’s the conundrum, and I cannot really do a case/control, double-blind sort of test to find out clearly what the reality is.  It may be that the boots I’m wearing now have never actually caused me any trouble, and that it was merely coincidence that I had flares-up before when wearing them.  Or my assessment may have been accurate.

None of it really matters, anyway.  I should just walk and walk, as much as I can, and to hell with the pain.  It’s not as though resting makes it go away, though pain does make one not want to do much.  That’s a biological, organismal thing, though, and it doesn’t necessarily make for the local best decision.

The train will be here in a few minutes, so I’ll wrap up this waste of your time for today.  If you’re celebrating Hanukkah, please have a good last few days thereof.  Please have a good day and good days in general if you can.  If you feel like commenting, please do so.  If you are able to “like” a post and wish to do so, please do.  If not, it won’t hurt my feelings.  I won’t even know it didn’t happen, not in any specific sense.  Eight billion people fail to “like” my posts every day, and I hardly even notice most of them.

TTFN

red eyed wolf smaller

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So it begins, and so it goes, and so it shall end

Well, it’s been a mixed-auspices start of the first work day of the first full week of the month of December in 2023*.

I arrived at the train station almost exactly on time for the first train of said first day—that was a positive thing—but as the train pulled in, I and all the other people waiting at the station saw that it was arriving on the opposite side from normal.  There had been no announcement of the track side change, so I and all the several other people waiting had to scramble up the stairs, over the bridge and down the other side to get on.  Fortunately, the train did wait a bit, since apparently they realized that the announcement had not been given, but still, it was a bit maddening.

So far, I have no chest pains or other indicators of any cardiac event, though it is taking me a while to catch my breath.  I’m mildly disappointed in that absence of angina, because not only would it represent a potential break for me of some kind or other—temporary or permanent—it would also be only too appropriate for the Tri-Rail to face some consequences of their poor management in changing track boarding sides without informing riders who were waiting.  A lawsuit, in such a circumstances, might not be inappropriate, out of spite if nothing else.

However, I suppose I’ve been relatively protected, since I have done a fair amount of reasonably serious endurance (though not speed) exercise until about three weeks ago, when I got sick.  I’m still quite a bit heavier than I want to be, but at least my cardiovascular fitness isn’t too horrible.  Should I be thankful for that?  Maybe I should regret it.  I don’t know.

I haven’t really slept well at all this weekend, and certainly not last night, but at least I did rest, as far as that goes.  By that I mean that I did nothing that was productive, and almost nothing that required any exertion at all.  I watched the second of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials, but though it was good, as far as it went, I wasn’t as moved or interested as I thought I would be.  I fear that the huge time gap since the last special—The Power of the Doctor—was just too much, and I rather lost my momentum for the show.

It’s disappointing, but it’s not unique.  I’ve lost my momentum for pretty much everything lately.  I don’t play or even listen to music, anymore.  I don’t write fiction.  I don’t watch any new shows or movies.  I’m even getting sick of reading.  I haven’t read anything at all since Friday evening, fiction or non-fiction.  I didn’t watch any football games or golf yesterday (or Saturday) which I have been known to do if the urge strikes me.  It didn’t strike this weekend.

Hanukkah is coming up this Thursday night, and I’ll send my kids each a rather unimaginative present, since I don’t really have a good idea what to give them specifically that they would want, other than things I’ve already gotten them.  I don’t really know what they like or like to do.  I don’t really know my own kids, anymore.

Mind you, I don’t really know anyone else, either.  I don’t even know if I know myself.  And, I guess, if you don’t know whether or not you know yourself, then it’s pretty clear that you don’t actually know yourself, because if you knew yourself, presumably, one of the things you would know is whether or not you know yourself.

Something like that, anyway.  Possibly I’m wrong.

I don’t really have much else to say today that I haven’t said a million times.  I’m still in the process of crashing and burning; it’s just happening slowly, like something that’s been filmed by an ultra-high-frame-rate camera, so when you play it back, it looks like barely anything is happening.  But it is happening.  In the end, I’m sure it will be possible to “play it back” at full speed, and you’ll make out clearly the whole sweep of the event.

But no one is watching for that right now.  No one really cares, and I’m afraid that I can’t blame them.  What use am I to the world and what cost would it be for the world to lose me?  “Vanishingly little” is the proper answer to both questions.  Indeed, I’m probably more of a net detriment while I’m around, so the loss of me would probably be to the world’s gain.

I guess I’ll never know, myself, but maybe some of you will know, eventually.  I wish I could find out for sure.  I imagine it would make certain decisions easier.  Then again, maybe it wouldn’t help at all.

Oh, well, that’s enough for today.  Have a good day and a good week, everyone.

*Hereinafter I’ll just assume you know I mean CE or AD when referring to the year, and will only put an acronym—if that’s the proper term—after the year if it is other than that era.

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At LEAST three thresholds

It’s Friday morning, and it really is the end of the work week for me this time.  I’m at the train station waiting for the first train of the day…

…aaaaaand now it’s arriving.

And now, I’m on the train.

It’s a bit strange—there were only four people waiting for the first train at Hollywood station this morning, and that’s counting the Tri-rail™ security guy who was just waiting there for his pickup to start his workday (I think that’s what he was doing).  Still, the train itself seems to have roughly as many passengers as it usually does, so I don’t think today’s some weird, low-usage day.

It is, of course, the first of December, and if one uses monthly passes, today is the day to get one*, so maybe some people put that off a couple of days, since they probably also have to pay rent and that sort of thing.  I don’t know.  Possibly I’m overthinking it.  It may be nothing more than ordinary fluctuations and ebbs and flows of numbers of people doing particular things.  Who knows?  Also, who cares?

(It seems that I do, at least in passing, though why I notice and bother to think about such things is not clear even to me.)

I’m going to try to keep this brief today, mainly because I’m very tired.  Of course I didn’t sleep well; that’s why I’m here on the first train.  At least this really is the end of the week for me, though it’s the beginning of a new month.  But it’s the month that’s at the end of the year, so that’s two to one in favor of ends over beginnings, at least for today.

I’m still having trouble seeing and commenting on, or at least following, the website I usually follow, and that’s very discouraging, though I have evidence that at least it is not about me, personally.  My paranoia wants to tell me not to believe that, though.  I mean, just because other people are suffering similar troubles, and they are certainly not being singled out, doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be having troubles and be singled out because I’m an annoying git.  They’re not mutually exclusive states of reality.

Anyway, that’s one daily source of assurance or comfort or whatever that isn’t working like it usually does.  I’m also getting pretty bored with a lot of the YouTube channels I watch.  I am also bored with almost all of the books in my Kindle library, though I’m rereading at least parts of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies.  It’s an excellent book—really it’s a collection of blog posts he did over quite a long time on a site called “Less Wrong”, or something like that.  I know the book has been published split into two parts as well.

I highly recommend the book, in whatever form.  Since it’s a collection of posts, each individual section is relatively brief and easily digestible, so to speak, so don’t worry that it’ll be a slog.  Yudkowsky is also an engaging and entertaining writer, and he’s really effing smart and knowledgeable.

I don’t really know what I’m going to do this weekend, other than watching Doctor Who on Saturday and doing my laundry on Sunday.  I probably won’t really do much of anything.  Hopefully I can at least sleep a bit.  I plan to take some Benadryl® tonight.  I know its effects don’t engender truly healthy sleep, but even an increased amount of physical rest—even just an increased amount of oblivion—is worth quite a bit.

I’m very tired.  I think I said that before.  I’m also very discouraged and rather lost.  I feel increasingly like a ghost of myself, and I also feel increasingly that my hold on a superficially normal life and lifestyle is slipping.  I don’t think I’d want to go on, even if I could, but it’s a moot point, because I don’t think I’m going to be able to go on much longer.  I think I’ll end up in some type of hospital or the morgue or something similarly non-ideal soon.  At least the morgue would be a cool place (in the physical, temperature-related sense of the word).

I’m running on empty, running on fumes, near the end of my rope, teetering on the brink; I’m also running out of figures of speech.  Anyone who knows me well enough will know how unusual that is.

I wish I had something fun or funny or “clever” with which to leave you for this week.  Nothing’s coming to mind, though.  All I can say instead is, as always, I hope you have a good day, and a good weekend, and that you have a good beginning to the month of December.  Major Holiday Time® is coming, but try not to be too stressed about it.  If you can, try to look forward to spending some time with your friends and family.  Try to spend time with people you love and who love you.

I guess if you love yourself, that last bit is easy enough to accomplish, though I wouldn’t know from personal experience.

*Actually, today is the first day to get one for the month whether or not one uses them, but it’s not really a relevant fact for people who don’t.

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I blog you give me leave to go from hence

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in three weeks, I’m writing a Thursday style blog post.  You can all start breathing again.

Yesterday’s blog post was kind of weird, wasn’t it?  I’m not even completely sure what I wrote.  I certainly haven’t reread it since editing it before finally posting it, but I feel I said a lot of strange things, and wrote about things I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about with anyone before.  Maybe I have.  I don’t think there was anything particularly shocking except that it was weird for me to say some of them.  Also, I feel it was more erratic and bizarre even than my usual posts.

It’s now the last day of November in 2023 (AD or CE).  That’s mildly momentous, or at minimum a mediocre milestone.  There shall be no recurrence of the month of November in 2023 (AD or CE) in any of our lives again, unless the ways we “define” the terms are changed.  Even if we had a time machine to come back to this day, we would not experience a new November in 2023 (AD or CE) if we were to return to it; we would be re-experiencing the same one, albeit from some different perspective.

I don’t know if returning to the same month would initiate some new Everettian branch of the universe, as in my short story Penal Colony, or if it would instead be some manner of closed, time-like loop in spacetime, which always happens exactly the same way—since it only actually exists in one instantiation—even if you were to experience it more than once.  It might be like coming to a crossroad, going through the light, looping around a “cloverleaf” in the road, and coming back to the crossroad in the perpendicular direction, then going on forward.  There’s only one route; it just happens to cross itself.

And, of course, if you did a self-Oedipus and somehow killed yourself at the crossroad, its not as though you would be changing your future in any sense;  that would “always” simply have been the way you died.  So, 12 Monkeys would be much more like the nature of such reality than, say, Back to the Future or Time Cop or that newer time travel movie with Bruce Willis that I haven’t seen.

I don’t know quite how I got on that subject.  My mind meanders morosely (and occasionally merrily), and I don’t necessarily know where it’s going.  As I noted above, sometimes I don’t even know where it’s been.

That’s why I never eat off of it, if I can help it.

One thing I’ve tentatively concluded after my thoughts from yesterday, though, is that I really am not capable of managing life in the human world.  I don’t think I ever have been; other people have helped me out in the past, and I have no such other people available now.

I have skills and tenacity and intelligence enough to survive for a time, and to create an illusion of “getting by” that’s convincing enough for people who aren’t really part of my life—which is everyone, these days—but everything is falling apart, and I don’t know how to maintain it, nor do I have the will and the wherewithal to do so.

You might as well ask a moth to maintain a termite mound.  Or even just ask an ant—maybe that’s a better comparison.  An ant could sort of get the idea of a termite mound, and if it’s already been built, the ant could sort of help maintain it to some degree for a bit.  But really, it’s not where the ant belongs, it’s not the lifestyle to which it is adapted.

Ask a human to try to live the life of an ostrich, among ostriches.  The human might put on an interesting show for a bit, and since humans are smarter than ostriches, the human might even succeed at things the ostriches couldn’t from time to time, but if the human is committed to living and behaving like an ostrich—if there are only ostriches anywhere to be found in that human’s environment—that human is inevitably, eventually going to fail catastrophically.  It may be a slow catastrophe.  Maybe it’s nothing anyone would make into and share as a video on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok.  But it would still be a catastrophe.  It would not be pleasant to experience.

Drawing closer to home, it would be hard enough for, say, a chimpanzee to try to live with and as orangutans or vice versa.  Even chimpanzees and bonobos—as closely related as primates get one to another—would probably not be able to thrive if one were placed within the other’s society.  I would guess that a bonobo would probably be abused and die before too long in the company of chimpanzees (who are notorious assholes) but a displaced chimpanzee would probably have just as confusing and frightening a time, if more subtle, trying to blend in with bonobos.  It would have a few slight advantages in strength and size, on average, and it might even be able to learn to try to fit in and make its way.  But it would be living a lifestyle subtly but profoundly different than the one to which it is adapted.

Anyway, that’s all a bit tangential and weird.  I don’t think I’m making myself very clear, and for that I apologize.  I just realize more and more that I don’t think I’m going to survive much longer, even if I were to find the motivation and desire to do so.  It’s a slow crash and burn, perhaps, but I think I really am crashing and burning.  And I don’t think that there was ever a chance for anything otherwise to happen, with me trying to live among and adapt to the world of humans—or normal humans, or “neurotypical” humans, if you prefer those metaphors.  So, what should I do?  I don’t know.

In the meantime, though, I hope you all are having and have had and will continue to have or (if that’s the best for which I can hope) that you begin to have a very good day and week and a very good new month starting tomorrow and so on.

TTFN

Hermit or magus

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Urchins shall forth at vast of night that they may blog all exercise on thee.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, that day with which DentArthurDent always had so much trouble.  It’s the first Thursday in November, which means that (in the US) Thanksgiving will fall on the 23rd of November, since it’s celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November, which is always going to be 21 days after the 1st Thursday in November.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m at the train station, and I was early even for the 610 train today.  I’m not going to get on the 610 train, because I still want to cool down* and begin this blog post, and it looks like the 630 is running on time.  I got here early partly because I got up early this morning…but really, that was only about 5 minutes earlier than usual, and it had little relation to when I first woke up.  The main reason, I believe, for my comparative earliness is that, as I mentioned yesterday, I tried to jog a bit this morning.

After getting to the end of my block and turning, I jogged 40 paces, as I had said I was going to do.  That was so comparatively easy and bracing that, at my next 90 degree turn, I did another 40 paces (each pace being 2 steps, at least the way I define the terms).  Then again at the next 90 degree turn, then at the last one.  So, I jogged a total of 160 paces, and walked the rest, and the jogging didn’t make me feel breathless or sore (so far) because it is such a limited amount.

It’s rather curious and amusing to note that my pedometer reads as if I’ve gone slightly less far than I usually do, because of course, jogging steps are quite a bit longer than walking steps, but the pedometer still just reads them as steps.

It’s a nice feeling to have done even that very little bit of running.  It’s a good way to start a day, to have accomplished that little bit of a goal, as part of a general pattern of exercise.  It is the first time (I think) that I’ve tried jogging while wearing a backpack.  That turns out not to have been a noticeable problem.

It’s quite windy today‒which is rather pleasant‒and there was a bit of rain on and off while I walked, though it’s really been negligible.  I got my umbrella out at one point, but even if I hadn’t used it, I don’t know that I would have gotten unpleasantly wet.

I decided last night to revisit the “mantra” notion I mentioned earlier this week, but with a slight downgrade or alteration from my previous idea to make it more workable.  If you’ll recall, I had started with the plan just to say “I love myself” as a form of auto-suggestion, then expanded it to “I love the world and I love myself”.  Anyway, I found that, upon awakening the next morning, I could not even make my mind’s voice speak the words.  They simply felt too utterly at odds with my thinking.

However, only one of those phrases was really the problem.  So, starting last night, I’ve tried to repeat to myself the mantra “I love the world” when I’m not otherwise engaged.  This seems to work much better.

I have a hard time even saying that I love myself, but the world…well, I’ve always loved nearly all branches of science, and they are all about understanding and exploring the world.  And I like mathematics and philosophy, and I even like history.

It can be easy to get discouraged by the way people behave at any given moment, and certainly humans say and do some ridiculous and destructive things.  But loving something doesn’t require it to be perfect.  In most cases, the concept of “perfect” isn’t even coherent.  Indeed, loving something can entail wanting to help it get better than it already is.  If you hate something (or someone) there’s no sense of trying to improve anything.  Wanting something (or someone) to improve is a positive, beneficent emotion.

To clarify, when I say “the world” in this context, I don’t just mean “the Earth”, I mean “the Universe”, to whatever level of multiverse and/or higher dimensionality might exist‒everything, all time, all possible stuff.  And let’s be honest, when you start thinking about things like that, while they can be daunting‒since, compared to infinities, anything finite is vanishingly small‒they’re still just mind-blowingly cool.  Don’t even get me started on the uncountable infinities of the “real” numbers and “complex numbers” and functions that are discontinuous at every point**, or infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces!

So, anyway, when I woke up this morning, I was easily able to start thinking “I love the world” to myself, and that was a pleasant surprise.  Hopefully, I can keep it up.  At the very least, it would help make other things easier to tolerate, even if it doesn’t help me like myself.

Would that be a peculiar kind of dualism?  Possibly, but it’s not a formal distinction of type or substance; it would just leave me as an exception to a general tendency.

Anyway, that’s about it for now.  My coworker who had a stroke is apparently stable, and no clot was discovered, so I’m still puzzled, but I don’t have much information.  Hopefully we’ll find out more soon.

And, hopefully, you all have a good Thursday.  Thank you for reading.

TTFN

urchins on kelp

*I keep accidentally writing “cook down” when I try to write “cool down”.  It’s not a nonsense phrase, but it probably never would apply to me.

**There’s a term for this, but I’m dipped if I can recall it‒something like “continuously discontinuous functions”*** but I don’t think that’s quite right.  I know next to nothing about the subject, but just the notion of a function that is non-differentiable at every point is astounding.

***Though I heard at least one mathematician refer to them as “infinitely kinky functions” in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.

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I don’t have any vember…do you?

It’s November now, so Happy November, everyone, if that’s something that people say on any kind of regular basis.  October is generally my favorite month, and now it’s over, so at some level that’s disappointing.  On the other hand, I don’t think I can remember ever having a worse October (subjectively speaking*) than the one that’s just finished, so I guess I can’t feel too bad about it being over.

I’m quite concerned about a coworker of mine, who is one of the few people I would consider a friend at work.  She had some weird sensations and weakness (subjectively) in her hand Monday, and said she felt weird, though when I tested her grip strength it was normal.  But I guess it got worse by the end of the day and she went to the hospital.  Third-person (and thus unreliable) information is that she had a small stroke of some kind, which seems strange to me given that she is only 41.  It’s not impossible, of course, but I certainly didn’t consider it likely.  I thought it much more probable that she had slept oddly on her arm or something along those lines.

I feel bad not to have been more proactive and not recommending that she go quickly to the doctor or emergency room, but it’s not as if I’m in practice anymore, and I don’t really give medical advice one way or the other when I can help it.  Also, frankly, my own mental state is far from good, and is trending lower over time.  I can’t trust myself to care for myself; it’s hard to be able to do my best for other people (though I usually like them more than I like myself).

Still, I would wish that I could have worked some miracle of prevention or whatnot on Monday.  It would probably have been better to encourage her to go to the ER sooner…even if it probably would not have made a difference (some of this is talk is likely me just trying to make myself feel better, but I think it’s nonetheless true).

I did not walk significantly yesterday‒a total of only about one and a half miles.  Today though, I walked to the train station, and arrived nicely just as the 610 was pulling in, which I am again rather foolishly happy to say I felt no urge to try to catch.

The walking is getting easier, which is nice.  I think the spandex knee and ankle supports are making a difference, and it seems pretty clear that these shoes are going to be simply better than the boots would have been.  I’m still sad about that, but reality is that which it is; we do not have veto power over it.

It occurred to me this morning, as I was getting near the end of my journey, that I may be getting fit enough that I could throw a bit of jogging in‒very slowly and gradually‒without hurting my back.  I’ve always enjoyed jogging/running, and maybe, if I take advantage of the delayed and postponed nature of my epic quest, I can thereby turn it into something even more impressive.

I imagine myself starting by doing perhaps a brief warm-up walk‒say, to the end of the block‒and then running forty paces the first day, then eighty paces the second, then one hundred twenty the third, and so on.  I’m sweaty in the morning and bring a complete change of clothes anyway, when I walk to the train, so it would make nary a difference as far as I can anticipate.

One of the advantages of such a practice would simply be the decreased time for the journey in the morning.  It takes just about an hour and a half to walk the five miles to the train in the morning, but even a light jog could bring that down to less than an hour, though that would be a long-run goal (no pun intended, but it’s slightly funny, so I’ll leave it).

It would also be quite nice to start every day with a real endorphin rush, which jogging/ running always tended to give me.  Even when I was in residency, for part of the time at least, I used to jog about four miles in the morning on days when I wasn’t post-call.  I had to use a treadmill usually, because this was in New York, and much of the year it was too cold for jogging outdoors.  But it was a good habit, and I felt good, and I looked good (for me, at least).

It’s something to think about.  Meanwhile, November is a month with a very important US holiday:  Thanksgiving.  It’s a nice, foody holiday, and even though I don’t have anyone with whom I celebrate it anymore, I still tend to get something like a turkey sandwich with cranberry based topping, which is available not far from me.  I may do that this year.  Maybe I won’t.  I don’t know what I’ll do, but there doesn’t seem to be any real reason to specify my plans, or even to have any such plans.  We’ll just see what happens.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a good month.  Thank you for reading.

*Event-wise, of course I’ve had worse Octobers.  After my divorce, and then while I was in prison, those were objectively worse months, and my chronic pain was worse than it is now.  But weirdly enough, my mood was less low.  Possibly this is is a matter of some kind of emotional erosion.  More of it was going on back then, but I’ve now been eroded to a lower level than I ever was in the past.  I’m probably overthinking things.

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Sometimes every night can feel like Devil’s Night

I walked to the train station this morning after having walked less than a mile and a half total yesterday‒it was a deliberate break.  I arrived just as the 610 train was pulling in.  Indeed, I was stopped at the railroad crossing by the lowering of the gate that presaged that train’s arrival.  I’m pleased to be able to say (honestly) that I felt no urge whatsoever to try to catch that train.  It would seem that I’ve internalized the fact that waiting at the station for twenty more minutes is both useful and pleasant, giving me a bit of time to cool down and dry off a little.

It is a bit less breezy today, so I’m a bit sweatier than I was most days last week.  I also decided not even to bother wearing shorts this morning, since‒given the spandex knee and ankle supports I wear‒it exposes all of about three centimeters of very pale and faintly scarred legs to be cooled down.  I imagine that I look like some old Bavarian school child wearing weird, black lederhosen when I dress that way.  That’s not as big an issue, though, as the fact that I’m building up too much laundry.  It took way longer yesterday to clean all my clothes than it usually does.

I know that I received at least two comments on my post from Saturday, but I have not stopped to read more than the first few words of either one.  I just want right now to thank the people who made those comments‒it was obvious from the first few words that they are positive and supportive‒and let them know that I appreciate their responses.

I’m sorry to reveal that I haven’t read them fully yet, because of a very strange but intense anxiety that doesn’t quite make sense to me.  I’ve really sunk pretty low, I guess, when I find it stressful even to read comments on my blog that are obviously positive.  I don’t get it.  What is wrong with me that I get intimidated by even that level of interaction?  It’s absurd, but not in a pleasant or funny way; it’s frankly rather contemptible. Those people deserve a better response from me, and I do intend to make some reply soon, hopefully today.  Sorry it’s taking so long.

I wish I could tell you that I had a good weekend, or that I feel less depressed, but it really wasn’t any kind of restful time or anything.  Mostly what I did Saturday evening and Sunday was eat a few indulgent things and watch “reaction” videos on YouTube.  I may have noted this before, but watching such reactions is, in some ways, almost like watching a show or movie with a friend who hasn’t seen it before.  Even that fact, though, is rather depressing.

Speaking of friends and reactions and comments, I just want to make it clear again that I don’t really respond to Facebook comments about my sharing of my blog posts on that venue.  I don’t even necessarily read them.  Dealing with Facebook and the like is more stressful than dealing with comments here.  TwiXter would probably be even more stressful, but I don’t really ever get replies to anything on that venue, though I share each post there.

I finished Sapolsky’s new book, and it was good.  I can’t help but recommend it highly.  I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t say more about depression.  In the end, what he mostly said (apart from reiterating that it was, like all else in the brain, a purely biological process) was to relay some facts about depressive people being more accurate in their assessment of many things rather than being irrationally negative‒whereas most people are irrationally positive, especially about themselves (I’ve known about this research for years).  So, to paraphrase Sapolsky, depression in certain circumstances can be seen as a pathological dysfunction in one’s capacity for self-deception.

Maybe.  Certainly it is possible that simply to face reality in as unbiased a fashion as possible is inevitably depressing‒which is a further depressing thought in and of itself‒and that all optimism entails delusion at least at some level, or at the very least, it entails ignorance.

This is related to the fact that I ask for people to give me (hopefully) new ideas when trying to offer their support against my depression, because I don’t want to feel better by means of self-delusion or even via neurological manipulations (though the latter may be a bit better).  But maybe ideas alone can’t help against my depression‒certainly CBT didn’t work that well for it‒since it’s more about the tendencies of the state of the system than the outputs of any particular thought processes or program or whatever.

What I should probably do is just give up on trying to feel better.  As those who read Saturday’s post can probably tell, I often get close to that.  It certainly can be hard to keep trying; I’m ever more discouraged.  And now we’re approaching the end of my favorite month, and we’re getting deeper into the longer, darker days of the year.  I didn’t really want to make it this far, to be clear, but I derailed my momentum for my previous plan for the sake of coworkers, and I haven’t yet regained it.  But that can be corrected, at least mostly.

Meanwhile, I continue to tread water, but the ocean gets colder at this time of year, and the waters get choppier.  It wouldn’t be surprising if a particularly big wave drove me under for the final time soon.  It wouldn’t even be really unwelcome.

I’m also constantly, if half-heartedly, seeing if I can lure in some sharks.  That’s a further metaphor, of course, but it has a specific meaning in my mind; it’s not just a vague notion.  I won’t get into it more for now, but maybe I will, later.

I hope you all have a good day, and have a good week.  For those of you who recognize the pseudo-holiday, have a Happy Devil’s Night.  Try not to burn down any inhabited buildings or anything, okay?  No need to give Devil’s Night a bad name.

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Blogging…blogging and rolling. Down to the train I’m strolling

This is all getting a bit boring, isn’t it?  I mostly write the same old, same old stuff from day to day‒even after I have had a day off, like yesterday.

Although today, at least, I have a modicum of good news to convey:  the temperature went down significantly overnight, so that when I left the house this morning to walk to the train station (which I did) it was only 69 degrees (F) out, and there was a slight, pleasant breeze.  69 degrees might not seem that cool to those up north, but compared to 83 degrees with nearly maximal humidity, it is quite pleasant.

I wore one of my “athletic” shirts, but almost had to wear a different, warmer, cotton shirt.  The athletic one loses its moisture quickly, by design, and with the breeze, I was worried it would be unpleasantly cool.  However, I walk at a pretty good pace on my not-very-long shanks, and so I was in little danger of hypothermia.

Weirdly enough, yesterday afternoon when I walked to 7-11 and back (about 3 and a half miles total) I felt cooler than I usually do in the morning, though it was in the eighties and rather sunny, and I always wear all black.  Somehow, I was still less sweaty than I usually get in the morning, perhaps partly because the sun heated and evaporated the sweat, and partly because there was a nice breeze blowing.  In any case, I did feel cooler, even by the time I got back, though perhaps I was also more dehydrated than usual.  That was easily remedied, however, since I’d bought three seltzers and an unsweetened tea at 7-11.

I am sorry to say, though, that after wearing my newer boots yesterday, I think I may need to dispense with them for longer walks (this morning I’m wearing my New Balance walking shoes).  They seemed to cause some stress on the arch of my left foot that bothered me for the rest of the day and the night, though not too severely.  Also, while I walked, the boots’ increased sturdiness relative to other footwear seemed particularly to irritate my right Achilles tendon, which has some chronic strain and irritability that the NBs don’t seem to exacerbate.  Maybe I lace the boots too tightly.

It’s frustrating.  Those boots are quite good otherwise, and I felt nicely armored walking in them, even through some fairly extensive unpaved areas between the house and the 7-11.  In fact, I had two “wild” encounters when in that region, in one of which my boots made me feel quite secure (there was no real worry, anyway).

I first literally almost stumbled upon a large iguana nestled in some tallish grass next to a fence.  It was easily five feet long from snout to tip of tail‒the latter of which it whipped a few times in my general direction, defensively.  It was more surprised than I was, I think‒it clearly had been rather oblivious to my approach.  Tall grass, it seems, is a double-edged sword.

Anyway‒as I said to it while stopping for a moment to pass pleasantries‒its tail-whipping, though an excellent display, was no threat to me, because I had on boots and long pants.  Still, I meant it no harm, of course, and I chided it for its lack of alertness; other creatures might not be as benign as I.  I doubt that it understood me even vaguely, but it was nevertheless long gone by the time I returned.

The other encounter‒not nearly as “close” as the first‒ was with a rooster that was wandering in some apparently undeveloped, wooded land behind a fence right near the road.  There are plenty of people who keep chickens around these parts‒one occasionally hears the roosters crowing in the morning‒but this one wasn’t near anyone’s front or back yard as far as I could tell.  It was quite a fine and healthy looking specimen, though, with lovely brownish plumage and a vivid comb.  It was clearly somewhat unnerved by my presence, and it quickly made its way deeper into the trees.  It didn’t move too fast; roosters don’t like to show weakness, I think.  But it seemed almost as startled as the iguana had been.

I guess I must be pretty quiet when I walk along, certainly relative to somewhat nearby traffic.  That’s nice to know, since I’m not a fan of unnecessary noise at the best of times.  Still, I’d have to change that habit if I were hiking through grizzly bear country, or else court much more dangerous surprises.

It seems unlikely, though, that I will ever be in grizzly bear country.  The most dangerous creatures I encounter, by far, are humans.  They, at least, are a comparatively known quantity.

Sorry.  As I said, this has all been rather boring, and I apologize for that.  I’m considering taking a significant hiatus from this blog for a while soon, one which may turn from a hiatus to a terminus, depending on how things work out.  I really need to do something, and I want to do it soon.  It’s going to start to get colder before long‒indeed, it already is starting to get colder up north, I’m sure.  Also, the leaves have probably already begun to turn, farther north, and it would be lovely to see them, even if only for one last time.

Still, wishes are just thoughts.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  But I’ve been preparing things at least a little, just in case.  And depending on what I’m able to make myself decide to do, I may take a hiatus from this blog or give it up entirely.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t (necessarily) keep in communication, if I’m able.

In the meantime, though*, I’ll expect to be writing at least the rest of this week (through Friday, since I am not scheduled to work on Saturday).  Maybe I’ll have further updates about my plans, or about my boots and/or shoes.  It should be vaguely interesting, I suppose.

Watch this space for further bulletins.

*And time can be very mean, can it not?

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Vamonos a escuchar mientras caminamos

I am writing this post on my smartphone today, as opposed to my computer.  Though, of course, a smartphone is a computer, and indeed, is far more advanced a computer than any I’d used prior to the turn of the millennium.  It’s a lot more advanced than the computers that ran the Space Shuttle™ and vastly more advanced than the ones used in the Apollo moon landings.  Thankfully, Newtonian mechanics is straightforward enough to be computable using quite simple systems and some smart humans, of which there were many involved in that program, and Newtonian mechanics is all one really needs to get to the Moon and back.

Anyway, I walked to the train station this morning, as was my plan, which was why I did not bring my…my folding computer back to the house with me yesterday afternoon.  I plan to bring it with me this evening, and to take tomorrow morning off from walking, just to avoid overdoing things in the short term. There will be plenty of time for overdoing things; I need to pace myself at least a little bit.

I feel that my sleep has been getting even worse recently than it usually is, and it’s really quite frustrating.  Yet, even though I’m deeply tired, I can’t seem to get sleepy.  I’m not sure what I can do about this, but it’s quite frustrating.

I do have one rather fun thing to report:  this morning on the walk to the train, I listened to a new audio-book I’d ordered with this month’s Audible credit (which hit my account yesterday).  That book was the first Harry Potter book…but in Spanish!  If there’s one set of books I know well enough to be able to fill in the gaps in Spanish, it’s that set.  The only potentially better one would be The Lord of the Rings; all in good time for that!  So, my tentative thought is that I can listen to the whole Harry Potter series in Spanish and this should help me improve my spoken (and heard) Spanish skills.

Audible also has the Harry Potter books in Japanese, and I almost started with that, but I figured Spanish would probably be the one in which it would be more useful to improve my skills.  I am in south Florida, after all.  The other people who share the house in which I live are primarily Spanish speaking, for goodness sake.

There’s nothing that says I can’t do both, of course, and that is my tentative plan.  I mean to do a lot of walking, so there will be plenty of time to listen.  Even in my hour and a half walk so far this morning, I only got to chapter 4 of the first book, and it’s the shortest of the Harry Potter books.  Just wait till I get to book 6!  I read that one seven times between when it came out and when book 7 was released, because I was impatient.  By the time I finish that, maybe, the audio will feel completely natural.

Once again today, I let the 610 train go while waiting for the 630.  I’m glad I did.  Today’s weather was warmer and muggier than Monday, and there is essentially no wind to cool one down, so that time is well used.  The wait is only somewhat effective, of course.  I brought along a second shirt to put over my “athletic” one, just so that I’m not sweating all over the back of the seat on the train.  My shorts are designed to be very good at letting go of sweat, but even so, given the pattern of accumulation, I look almost as though I had wet myself‒though only if I had done so while lying on my belly.

It’s not that bad, I guess, and I have my little “scent bomb” spray to hide any bad odor…and I’ve been told that my initial sweaty smell isn’t too bad.  Far worse (to me) is the odor of mildew.  If it gets going, I feel nauseated.  I hate that smell.

This is probably why I can’t stand to eat pretty much any kind of mushroom; they all smell vaguely like mildew.  Also, their texture is gross.  I suppose if I were to eat a magic mushroom in order to try to treat my depression, I could probably just force a bit down.  But it would have to be in specific, deliberate, and controlled circumstances.  At least I’m highly unlikely to eat poisonous mushrooms accidentally, which is good, because by all accounts of which I’m aware, they bring about a slow, painful, and horrifying death when they kill, and there are generally no known antidotes.

I don’t have much more to report.  It’s been a weird few days at the office, because my colleague is out of town, on his delayed vacation.  It’s a bit hectic and I am slightly behind schedule on payroll, but that is largely due to a region-wide Internet outage we had yesterday afternoon.  The phones in our office are VOIP, and of course, the reports we get, from which I render the payroll, come through email.  We left the office not long after lunch, after waiting a bit to see if the Internet would return.

The irony is that, after everyone had left and I was just getting ready to lock up, the internet connection came back (earlier than predicted by Comcast, who I suspect use a sort of Mister Scot technique when estimating repair times).  It was too late to do anything about it, and I was practically heading out the door already, but it’s both mildly frustrating and rather amusing.

That’s about enough for today.  Tomorrow, I plan to write using my laptop computer, so the flow might be better.  It seems appropriate for what may be one of my final traditional Thursday blog posts.  In the meantime, please have a good day, today.

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Here we go again, it seems

Well, here we go again, as I wrote above, starting another work week against all of our better judgments.  I walked to the train station and arrived relatively early today, but I’m letting the 610 train go‒it’s just now arriving‒and I will get on the 630.  That way I have time to cool down a bit.  I will use the extra 20 minutes to write this blog post, such as it will be, here at the station.

I don’t know what I’m really going to write about‒though I’ll begin with the annoying fact that “what to write about” feels like a phrase that ends with a preposition.  I don’t think the word “about” actually is a preposition, but it acts sort of as one here, and its object is “what”.  I want to write something to the effect of “I don’t know about what I’m going to write”, but even I feel that’s more awkward than the more common alternative.  It does bother me, though.

On a different subject, I think that maybe I should just give up on talking about the fact of my worsening dysthymia/depression and suicidal thoughts that I wish I could escape.  The combination is what I wish I could get away from, I mean.  Either one, even without the other, is nearly just as bad, and it’s honestly not too easy to imagine the latter without the former.

I often present my intermittent desire to die as if it were a philosophical conclusion arrived at merely through thought, but those ideas are at best motivated reasoning and at worst sophistry.  I just happen to be good at such things, so it’s going to be difficult to argue around me.  And though I have arrived at some conclusions through more and less rigorous means, I am open to new and convincing reasoning and discussion and ideas.  Such things don’t appear to be forthcoming, alas.

Maybe, since my depression precedes and/or is orthogonal to my reasoning about the value of my life, I shouldn’t expect any counterbalancing notions to be arrived at by reasoning or conversation.  I’ve undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy before, which is keyed to targeting the disordered reasoning associated with depression, but it was no more successful‒with or without meds‒than other approaches.

However, it doesn’t mean that certain forms of response are welcome or even remotely useful.  For instance:  being berated is not useful.  I once had a former coworker/friend berate me for being depressed and feeling suicidal*.  They even compared my situation to theirs:  they had (and still have) some form of slowly progressive cancer, which remains under treatment, as it has been for years now.

To me it’s a rather foolish comparison, and not one to make to someone who is alone and feeling suicidal.  For one thing, though I would never dismiss or belittle that person’s suffering, that person did and does continue to share info about the course of their treatment on Facebook, with pictures of them at the hospital, for instance.  When they go, they are always accompanied by their spouse, their children,  their grandchildren, and so on.

I’m not saying their situation is enviable in general terms, but in some ways‒sometimes‒I do envy it, reprehensible though that may seem.  I’m fairly certain that, if such a thing were possible, I would gladly take that person’s illness upon myself if, by my doing so, they would be cured.  It would bring me joy to be able to make their life better, and to give them more and better time with their loved ones.

I would not then fight the illness, most likely.  I would simply ask for palliative care, and let the disease run its course.  Maybe‒but maybe not‒if my kids knew I would be dying soon, they would want to see me again.  I don’t know.

Maybe, even if it were possible, I would not actually go through with the disease transference.  It’s easy enough to think one would, but It’s just an idle thought as long as it’s an impossible thing to do.

But it was infuriating to be berated for feeling depressed and actually judged about it, as though I simply had chosen to be depressed and could choose not to be at a whim if I just stopped being…what?  I don’t know‒mentally lazy or something along those lines.

I am not my own biggest booster‒I’m more likely to be my own detractor and even derogator‒but neither mental nor physical laziness have been hallmarks of my life or character.  And failure to grasp simple concepts or recognize facts is not one of my major failings, though I certainly am capable of it.  I try very hard not to fool myself about things, but of course it’s always conceivable that such trying may lead me to fool myself in other ways.

Still, for instance, unless someone is going to perform some convincing miracle that would persuade even a disinterested extraterrestrial, then supernatural or mystical or religious arguments are not going to convince me of much of anything.

I’ve read the entire Bible (original and sequel) some of it more than once (and a tiny bit of it in Hebrew), and I’ve read as much of the Koran as I could get through, and I’ve read the Tao te Ching many times, and various other works of religion and philosophy.  I’ve tried to read both high and low religious apologia and statements and philosophy as much as I could without puking on myself, but even such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins and Descartes seem to lose their grasp on what it even means to have convincing reasons for something**.  If my discussions about depression and pointlessness and death involve motivated reasoning and sophistry, I’m far from alone in those things.

Of course, my depression and suicidal urges don’t really come from reasoning about my situation.  This is clear if for no other reason than that I had them even at some times in my life when everything was going objectively well for me.

It seems they are tendencies baked into the circuit boards of my brain in some fashion, possibly related to possible ASD***, or possibly orthogonal to that possibility.  Rather than a lack of joy or a surfeit of sorrow, they seem to be associated, at some level, with a setpoint issue‒perhaps a defect in one’s capacity to feel or sustain joy, or an overactive solemnity and dreariness perception circuit.  Certainly I have great difficulty with belief (as opposed to being provisionally convinced about something).

Maybe there is no help to be had, given current states of technology and knowledge.  It might be interesting to try psilocybin-based therapy or trans-cranial magnetic stimulation or some such other, but I don’t have real access to those things.  I’m also not able to advocate for myself.  That’s one of my problems.  I don’t like myself, and I have no real capacity to seek out anything on my own behalf.  I haven’t gone to see a doctor of any kind for some years now.  What I need is probably not argument or reasoning but rescue, and that is not forthcoming.  Why would it be, for such as me?

Anyway, writing this blog is about my only form of self-advocacy and help-seeking, but it seems to suck for those purposes.  Oh well.  I guess it’s something for me to do until my time is up‒which, for today at least, it is now.

*As if it were perhaps some form of “lifestyle choice”.

**And Augustine and Aquinas are frankly often embarrassing.  I suppose one must give them some slack given the fact that they lived many centuries ago‒but then again, Marcus Aurelius lived even longer ago than they, and he was able to write things that make a great deal more sense than these two.

***There are strong associations between the two noted in the literature, and people with ASD have much higher rates of depression and suicide than the general population, and an average lifespan, even among “high functioning” individuals, in the 50 to 60 year range.