mental-illness

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“Try to hide your hand, forget how to feel”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you’re right.  I’m working today.  Heavy sigh.

It’s not as though I can opt out, since my coworker who shares some of my responsibilities is not able to come in‒he and his wife have a newborn and a toddler, and he’s doing some bartending work on the weekends, so it’s on me, even though I worked last Saturday and even though, honestly, my mental reserves are dipping lower and lower, and I need‒or, well, at least I could really use‒at least one night a week where I can knock myself unconscious and so at least get a form of mental rest.

Alas, that’s not going to happen this week.  I cannot sleep in on Sundays, because I do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I need to get it done before everyone in the other, main part of the house wakes up and starts doing their things.

So, I’m pretty unhappy this morning, but that’s nothing particularly new.  I don’t have any whimsical musings about infinity to share today.  Also, I did not write this post the night before, as is probably obvious; I’m writing it in the morning.  And, of course, I’ve written no fiction, unless you count the fact that yesterday’s post misleadingly seemed full of pep and vim and spark and pizzazz.  That was a lie.

I feel very just generally hateful toward reality as a whole, to be honest.  There are things and people here and there that I don’t hate, and even a few people I love, but they are far away and far between.  Seeing or interacting with even one of them is a sort of special occasion.

I did try meditating the other day, as I discussed, and though, yeah, I did get depressed, with intrusive thoughts about, for instance, going and lying on the railroad tracks* troubling me.  But I got through the day‒as I guess you could tell, since I’m here.  I wondered if maybe that meditation contributed to my weird but lighthearted digression on infinities and related topics yesterday.

Unfortunately, though yesterday started okay, it didn’t continue as well, and I had a fair amount of pain (and other things happened).  And then, of course, I found out that we’re working today.  Also, I slept terribly last night, but that’s true almost every night.

I wish there was a real “The Force”, including the dark side, because I think at least it would be some compensation for my depression and tension to be able to use force lightning and to be able to choke people out from a distance without needing to touch them.  Though, I like to think I’d use more creative attacks, like squeezing someone’s heart or brain with the Force.  That would be quicker, and they would have less time to know they were being killed, but honestly I’m not interested in causing suffering to people who are intolerable.  I just want them gone.

Yeah, I’m not a good person, I know, though that does depend a bit on specific answers to the questions “good for what purpose?” and “good by what criteria?”, and probably on others.

I’ve said it before, but I do often feel some regret about not “winning” when I played Russian roulette way back near the end of 2012.  Nearly everything in the years since has been of questionable value, and much of it has honestly been rotten.  And it’s not as though the years immediately preceding 2012 were great‒chronic pain/injury, divorce, disability and the like colored a lot of it, but at least I was part of my kids’ life back then.

Again, I’m not going to engage in foolish overgeneralizing if I can help it; there have been moments of joy and even a few achievements in the years between, though the latter have often been causative of reflective reproach, like someone who grew roses but found that the “thorns” were vastly more prominent than the few little misshapen and mutated flowers that were produced.

I occasionally wish I could be like Lord Foul** and just hate everything and everyone except myself, as opposed to the way things are, in which a big chunk of my hate is directed inwardly.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that Lord Foul’s “ethos” is astonishingly pathological and also astonishingly illogical and irrational.  But it has its attractions.  Madness in general often has such seeming advantages, though I suspect that, in reality, they are largely illusory.

I’m tired, and I’m hostile and even hateful, unfortunately.  Events in the world aren’t helping, and though some may counsel just staying away from “the news”, I consider that bad advice.  As Gildor said to Frodo, you can shut yourself in, but you cannot forever shut the world out.  It will impinge upon you, and by being aware of it you can best protect yourself and mitigate possible harm.  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The only ways completely to prevent the world from interfering with you are to destroy the world, to destroy yourself, or to do both.

Am I speaking metaphorically here, or am I speaking physically?  I think the idea can be considered both ways.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope all of you who read this have a good weekend.  As for everyone else, well, it would certainly be nice if the kind people in the world had good days.

What are the odds of that happening?***

*Incidentally, I would not actually do that.  I would find it far too rude to disrupt the commute of at least hundreds of people and possibly thousands.

**He’s the big bad in the various Thomas Covenant books, and he is one of my favorite villains.

***I’m speaking rhetorically.  I don’t expect that there’s any way for anyone to know the accurate probabilities involved.

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.

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“Is there anybody out there?”

Here we are again, I guess.  I told you it wasn’t likely that yesterday was my final bellyache, didn’t I?  Anyway, I wrote words to that effect.  And I was right, though many might think that’s a pity and a shame.

It’s Christmas Eve Eve, a silly designation involving iterated “Eves” which would become unworkable pretty quickly.  You’ll notice that I didn’t call yesterday “Christmas Eve Eve Eve”, even (ha) though that would have worked and been accurate.  Still, if one keeps up that process, then “Boxing Day” (aka the day after Christmas in the US) would be “Christmas (Eve364)” or some such notation.

I suppose if one wanted, one could keep track of the days of the year in that fashion, but it seems quite clunky.  Also, if one were inclined just to count the days of the year, or to count them down, it would make more sense to use counting numbers and to start with New Year’s Day.  So the first day would be just Day 1, or Day 365 (or 366) if one were counting down.

Sorry, I know I’m being pretty bizarre.  Maybe that’s just some kind of hallmark of genius or something (though I doubt it).

It’s been a strange several days, including some atypical days at work.  Everyone else in the office has various things happening with their (sometimes growing) families, not all of it joyous and positive, but much of it disruptive.  And sales are always a bit slower at this time of year; people are busy buying presents for loved ones and the like in the latter part of December, even when the political and economic situation isn’t a category 5 shit storm.  But, of course, they are, collectively, just such a shit storm now, so things are more erratic than usual.

I was going to say “chaotic”, but at this stage in the universe’s evolution, chaos is almost always in play‒the mathematical kind, I mean.

Wow, I’ve written about 320 words so far, and I don’t think I’ve actually said anything.  Or, at least, I haven’t said much.  As a method of conveying useful information, this post (and perhaps this whole blog) has been highly inefficient, hasn’t it?  Of course, if I had specific information I was trying to convey, I might do better.

Though, honestly, I have a truly hard time being honest and clear when I’m trying to convey certain kinds of information.  I will often attempt to express what I think are highly urgent messages‒in person sometimes, but much more often in this blog‒yet it seems I am too esoteric or awkward in my attempts to express myself.  Certainly, those attempts have yet to achieve anything like my desired aims.

Yesterday was no exception.  I thought I was being rather ham-handed, to be honest, but clearly I was not.  I cannot, in good conscience, blame my reader(s).  If a pitcher throws a wild enough pitch, the catcher cannot reasonably be expected to catch it, though that’s the catcher’s expertise.  How much more unreasonable would it be to blame other people for not getting points my unconscious or awkward or habit-driven and “neurodivergent” mind is forcing me to make in very awkward ways?

I am far from a professional pitcher in this metaphor, and no one has ever volunteered to be my catcher.  Most people who end up trying to do it, out of chance or kindness or whatever, get sick of the work after a very short while.

I cannot justly blame them; that’s one villain trope I find intolerable, blaming other people and taking out one’s frustration on them instead of assessing how one’s own choices can be improved.  It’s small wonder these bad guys, who have secured all the advantages through diligent villainy, fail in the end.  It’s not just because of plot armor.

Another bad villain habit is gloating over a still-living arch-enemy.  In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious) had caught Yoda off-guard with force lightning.  Yoda was down!  And Palpatine allowed him to get up because he had “been waiting for this for a long time”.

Moron!  If he had pressed his advantage with more force lightning or even just rushed up and cut the little bugger in half with his lightsaber, he would have had time to head to Mustafar (remember, he sensed that Lord Vader was in danger).  Even if Obi wan got away, he wouldn’t have Yoda’s backup or anything.  Palpatine could have won much more thoroughly, and Vader might never have needed his breathing armor and could have achieved his full potential, and he might even have had Luke and Leia with him.

That was a hell of a nerdy tangent, wasn’t it?  Sorry.  It’s a pet peeve of mine.  But I guess tripping over one’s ego is a natural hazard for the sorts of people who become arch villains.

Maybe I dwell on such things too much.  Perhaps that’s what started me down the road to being habitually hyper self-critical, which evolved into self-hatred and a desire for self-destruction.  It’s a bit of a conundrum, but I would still rather not become cocky and arrogant in anything but a comedic way.  I don’t like seeing it; I really don’t want to do it.

Well, this has been another sort of bipolar-pattern post, hasn’t it?  It really does seem to me that I often produce a vaguely sinusoidal pattern of posts veering from very gloomy and morose and thoroughly nihilistic and moribund to weirdly hyperactive, almost hypomanic posts.  Yet even such latter type posts, of which this is one, really feel pressured to me most of the time, in the psychiatric/psychological usage of the term as applied to speech.

There’s nothing really that I can do with these sorts of insights, though, and certainly no one else is using them for any benevolent purpose toward me.  I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.  As Gendo Ikari pointed out, everyone is ultimately alone, and we certainly die alone.

On that cheery note:  Happy Holidays, everyone!

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Is this my final fit, my final bellyache? I doubt it.

I don’t think I’m going to write very much today.  It’s Monday morning, Hanukkah is basically over, Christmas is coming in three days, and the world‒as always‒is just a dried out, crusty piece of crap.  Perhaps that’s good if you’re a dung beetle.  But I am not one of those.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s a good way to regard the people who want to claim as much of the world for themselves as they can without care for whether they deserve it from any point of view, and who don’t care what condition it’s in, since everything is shit anyway, and they are fond of shit.

Yeah, let’s call those people dung beetles.

This is not intended as a slight against actual dung beetles, though, which are honorable creatures which play an important part in the general ecosystem.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter.  Of course, whether or not something matters is very dependent upon one’s point of view.  What matters to an architect who specializes in skyscrapers might be of very little even trivial interest to a beet farmer.

That’s just a pair of examples‒or an example of a pair.  This is not to be confused with the worries of a pear farmer (Ha ha); they might yet have a third set of priorities, mightn’t they?  Though I suspect the concerns of the pear farmer would probably have more in common with those of the beet farmer than those of the architect.  And, of course, assuming they are all human, their overall concerns share much more in common than those any of them might share with sea anemone…or just ordinary anemones.

I don’t know what the hell I’m going on about right now.  I was thinking of just embedding some YouTube “videos” of some music that I’ve done‒some original, some covers‒that sort of convey the way I feel today, since none of my blogging seems to work.  Maybe I’ll do some of that, anyway.  I don’t know that there’s any point in it, but then, I don’t know that there’s any point in anything, do I?  I have my suspicions, but I don’t know, and I have no interest in believing in much of anything, at least in certain senses of the word.  Indeed, I have real contempt for people who think believing is a good enough way to approach reality.

Sorry, I suspect I’m not making much sense here.  I guess it doesn’t matter.  Here, take a look at a few pieces of music, some original, some covers.  Then I’ll shut up and spare you lot the nonsense.

Actually, I don’t know if I’m even going to do that.  I guess you will know, if you’re reading this.  But I hate what I’ve written so far here today.  Though, perhaps it’s a work of unparalleled genius.  The odds are far from great, but they are not zero.

Ugh.  I don’t know what I’m doing.  This season of the year has really exacerbated my already not insignificant neuropsychiatric issues.

I’ve learned that there’s a nice high-rise Hyatt hotel in downtown Fort Lauderdale with surprisingly reasonable room rates, and I was thinking of maybe getting a balcony room there either on Christmas Eve or on New Year’s Eve or something.  It sounds like it might be a good place from which to watch fireworks.

I’ll keep you posted about that.  Or maybe I won’t, I don’t know.  I know I have a cover of No Surprises as one of my favorite songs‒in a way, my theme song‒but that doesn’t mean I’m dogmatic about it.  Anyway, something could be a surprise to all of you (though goodness knows it shouldn’t be) and not so much of one to me.

I’m not a big fan of surprises, because most of the surprises in my life have been unpleasant to horrible.  And almost all of them occurred slowly, almost creepily.  They aren’t the sorts of surprises to make you jump, though they sometimes can leave you with your jaw hanging open and your breath bated.

Enough.  This blog is done for today.

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A shorter and slightly less negative post

Okay, well, I’m back writing this on the smartphone again today.  I decided not to take the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday, because it was annoying to deal with even the minor extra weight, and also because I fear that writing using the lapcom leads me to get a bit too wordy and carried away.  I’ve mentioned this before more than once, though I cannot immediately give you links to the earliest or the most recent mention of the issue.

Anyway, the point is that I can type on a regular keyboard almost as fast as I can talk*, so I kind of run off at the mouth…so to speak.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing‒though given that we’re discussing me, it probably is‒but I think it can cause a bit of an aversion in some people when they see that a blog post is longer than usual.  I don’t know how many of my readers actually do read to the end of the average post, but surely it’s less likely to happen if the post is 1400 words long than if it is merely 900 words long.

Of course, I set my target nowadays at 700 words, but that just means I am less likely to go over 1000.  I almost never stop at or before 700 words.

I tend not to write as much, as fast, on the smartphone. This is partly because it’s just not a good way to write things; it’s clunky and prone to induce errors, and the lack of real keys makes it so there is less sensory feedback about what one is typing.  Also, my thumbs get sore from writing on the phone.

Now, though, I’ve had a few days off, so my thumbs are less painful.  I’ve also been taking strong doses of NSAIDs over the past few days, and that may be helping them.  It’s not helping my stomach, though.  I already feel nauseated right now, and it’s not even 5 am as I write this.

My life is so glamorous, isn’t it?  And I share most of the best aspects of it here, with you readers.  There are many things about which I feel too dreary even to bring them up.  I don’t want even people who are quite nonjudgmental and positive about me to see the squalor in which I live.  I am not very good at taking care of myself.

Sorry, I’m sure this is all very boring.

Sometimes I must admit that I envy people with unreasonably high self-esteem.  I mean, past a certain point, overinflated self-esteem makes one prone to do harm to other people.  But at least such people spend their time, day in and day out, with someone they love, right?  They tend to disgust me (and many other people too) but the kicker is:  they don’t care!

This is not to confuse such people with the pathologically narcissistic, who seem clearly to be motivated by some deep insecurities that they chase like a heroin addict needing a fix.  They are pathetic and do not seem comfortable with themselves, though they can come across as shameless.  I wish I could think of a good, well-known public example of such a person, but for the life of me, no one comes to mind.

Ha.

Ha.

Anyway, my problems lie in the other direction.  I have a pathological self-hatred.  When I’m calm and objective, I know that there are at least some aspects of myself that are not horrible, and some that are even arguably good.  I’m reasonably smart and rather creative, for instance.  But I just annoy the hell out of myself, and it’s very hard to get a break.

I know it’s possible to love someone without really liking them (in the sense of just enjoying spending time with them), but after a while, if you’re forced to spend every moment, waking or otherwise, with this person you had loved but whose personality you found annoying, you can become prone to hate them, or at least to hate their presence.

I’ve never felt this way about another person, but it’s how I tend to feel about myself.  I’m like a chronic, itchy, burning rash somewhere between the lower edges of my shoulder blades, just where it’s hardest to reach.  And though I can briefly mitigate the problem, it doesn’t go away.  There’s only one cure, and unfortunately it involves killing the patient.

Oh, well, whatever.  I need just to get over myself, so to speak.  I think I take life too seriously.  I would be able to do better if not for my chronic, really annoying pain.  I might even be able to enjoy life with or without loving myself.  But, as I often say, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit.

I don’t know if I’m working tomorrow, but if I do, I’ll probably write a blog post, and you’ll see it here.  If not, you won’t.  Either way, I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*And not the sort of hesitant speech that happens when I don’t really know the people with whom I’m conversing, but rather my speech when I’m talking to someone about something in which I’m interested.  That probably only happens regularly with my sister, once every week or two, nowadays.

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Please don’t take this post to heart; it’s not aimed at you.

Hello and good morning.  There’s no Shakespearean quote-based title today.  My apologies for that and for what follows.  I’m just having a rough time right now.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing this on the stupid mini lapcom again.  It’s “stupid” because I have to deal with changing the base font and type size every time I create a new post now, because Microsoft Word changed its defaults to the shitty little font Aptos Narrow, which sucks hugely, and they now want to start the font size automatically at 12, when for ages it’s been 11, which works just fine and is a prime number.

I swear, it’s almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple computer.  But I’d really rather not buy any more computers, nor any new smartphone, nor any more clothes or shoes or cups or silverware or shampoo or deodorant or any of it.  I hate having to get new things that have to do with the present bleeding into the future, when I don’t even want to be here in the present.

But, of course, one is not supposed to want not to keep living.  That’s taboo.  One tends to get shamed and cajoled about it if one even mentions it.  One is offered no help, of course.  It’s rather reminiscent of the “pro-life” movement, who want to make sure that babies are born if conceived (and many of them want to eliminate contraception) but have no intention to take responsibility for the lives they are forcing to continue.

Well, fuck them in the neck until they are “aborted” is how I feel about that, and when I’m feeling very uncharitable, I’m inclined that way about the other.  I mean, people don’t want you to die, but they don’t offer any actual help, and they don’t offer any serious reasons to stay alive.  At the very least, they don’t offer any convincing ones.

I’ve been dealing on and off with suicidal thoughts and hatred of myself starting when I was in my teens.  It has waxed and waned over my lifetime, and is resistant to the various and sundry treatments I have tried.  At least, they never have seemed to work for very long.

I have learned rather recently that this is common in people with ASD, particularly relatively “high functioning” ones, because of the exhaustion and ego-dystonic effects of constant masking, pretending to be human, pretending not to be seriously bothered by the things that bother us, trying to make our quirky habits of thought into jokes so people aren’t bothered too much by them.

It is at least good information to have, that one is autistic, but it points to no solution.  Indeed, data appears to suggest that ordinary treatments for depression that work reasonably well on NTs are often not useful in people with ASD.  But of course, it’s not as though one can cease to have ASD, any more than one can decide to be no longer right handed.

Anyway, the point toward which I was moving is one I’ve mentioned before:  I have been dealing with depression and self-hatred for more than three quarters of my life, and I am a bookish, rather studious sort of person who likes to try to understand things as much as he can.  I am also a trained medical doctor, who obviously has given special attention to such matters when he was/is studying, since it’s of real personal interest.

I’m not saying that no one out there could possibly find some answer or treatment that I haven’t encountered or tried or whatever; that would be astonishing hubris.  But if one is going to go for obvious or stereotypical things (or worse, to try to give religious reasons for one not to take one’s own life) it’s unlikely to be successful.  Indeed, the fact that it just reiterates things that have been tried and have failed already, makes everything all that much more depressing.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to demean or disparage or denigrate or dismiss (or any other d-word) people who want to help those who are in distress.  But it gets frustrating when, for instance, one logs onto Instagram or whatever and a pop-up message says “Someone out there thinks you need help” and it directs you either to—wait for it!—the suicide help line* or to suggestions for seeking therapy or suggestions for how to help oneself that include things like “talking to friends” or such like.

It’s almost as if it were taunting you.  It’s almost as if it were saying, “Aw, are you not doing too well?  Well, here, take a look at these various things that you have tried and found unsuccessful in the past.  Or you can talk to your family or friends, though you live alone and have no local friends**, and your nearest family members are more than a thousand miles away and have their own shit with which to deal.”

Sorry, everyone.  I’m angry and grumpy and gloomy and unpleasant today—more so than usual, I mean.  And yet, other people still come to me with their problems, and I do my best to help when I can, and I even expend my own resources to help.  But no one even asks me if I have any problems, and if I start to mention any, people just get awkward or make some joke or dismissive comment about it all.  If I had a drug problem, there would be available resources, but I don’t have one***, alas.

I get it.  Everyone has their own things happening.  That’s definitely true.  I don’t have any right to impose my troubles on anyone.  But if people aren’t going to do anything, then they should shut the fuck up.

Anyway, again, I’m sorry.  Really.  Forget about that crap from me, please.  I know that none of you out there are doing anything to try to cause me consternation.  I’m the one with the bad hardware and software.  You’re all just curious, literate people reading the blog of someone who occasionally has something mildly interesting to say and being as supportive as its practicable to be, often more so.  It’s my problem or set of problems, and it’s my fault (in the sense that “I am the faulty one” not in the sense of “I have done wrong”).

It doesn’t help that it’s near the solstice, so the daytime is getting shorter and shorter—I tend to be seasonally affected—and also that it’s the holiday time of year, and that the US is in a political state reminiscent of the single available port-o-john after a major rock festival.

I’m overwhelmed and I’m very tired, and I don’t see any reason to expect things to tend to get any better than they are now.  Just as all political and regulatory and economic forces are in place to make the stock market tend to go up in the long run, despite many local ups and downs, my system seems set up to deteriorate over time.  I don’t just mean that in the sense involved in the second law of thermodynamics, though that obviously comes into play.  I mean that so many events of life seem prone to knock me downward, mentally, often in big steps, but my attempts to crawl back upward are plodding and scrabbling, like someone trying to reach the summit of a mountain of loose gravel.

Anyway, geez, sorry again.  I shouldn’t even post this, really, but I don’t have the energy to start over and write a different post, so I’ll stick with this, apologizing yet another time.  If I write a post tomorrow and/or Saturday, it/they will appear here.  If not, it/they won’t.

I hope you all are doing well.

TTFN

*With which I’ve had a particularly bad result in the past, and toward which I am therefore quite wary.

**This is only appropriate or at least predictable.  Believe me, no one wants to be around me much anymore.  I don’t even want to be around myself.

***I know, I know, that’s just what a person with a drug problem might say.  But while that may be true, nevertheless, among the number of people who would say that they don’t have a drug problem when asked, the vast majority really would be people who don’t have a drug problem, because most people don’t have a drug problem.  Bayes saves the day again.

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“As it is lasting, so be deep!”

Well, it’s Monday again.  It’s also the first day of Hanukkah, which technically started at sundown last night‒which means it started not only at different times for different time zones, but also in different latitudes, since in the winter the sun sets earlier farther north than closer to the equator*.  It also rises later.  This is all due to the curvature of the Earth.

Of course, in summertime, the sun sets later the farther north one goes (or south if one is in the southern hemisphere).  If you’ve ever been in northern Europe in the summertime, you’ll know what I mean.  It can feel very strange for it not to be dark out yet at nearly eleven at night (for instance) if one is from the US, where things aren’t quite so disparate.

Anyway, I’m not really celebrating Hanukkah this year, any more than I celebrated Thanksgiving or any more than I will celebrate Christmas or New Years or any other such holidays.  I have a little stylized menorah graphic that I used to put up on “the board”, with an increasing number of candles with the days and everything, but I don’t think I’m going to do that this year.  It’s actually more depressing to do little superficial things to mark a holiday when one has no one with whom to celebrate.

Speaking of all this, by the way, I’m very sorry if some people are put off when I talk about my depressed and stressed and self-destructive thoughts.  I know they bother some people, though that in itself is a bit curious.  After all, they’re not your depressive and anxious and self-destructive thoughts.  Or maybe they are in a sense.  I don’t know.

I do know, though, that it seems that my dark, morose, and pro-mortalist posts seem to garner higher readership than my ones where I discuss some kind of mathematical or scientific or philosophical or political point. They are certainly more popular than my fiction.

The number of people who reliably read this blog, or at least click on it daily, is greater than the number of people who have ever bought a single one of my books or even my short stories**.  I don’t know why more people click on or “like” the dark posts, but I don’t mind it.  At least I can feel that there are people who hear it, even if there may be little “listening” involved.

Of course I’m heading in to work today.  Things have been slow at the office, and some of the people who work there are going through various events‒some positive, some negative‒that mean that some of them are unable to work as regularly as usual or to work at all in the short term, and it makes things slower and a bit dreary.  Of course, unless I’m sick, I go to the office.  I have nothing better to do (nor, really, anything worse, since that might be tempting also).

I do keep being tempted to go back on antidepressants, but they never seem to quite work out as I would hope, in the sense of actually correcting my depression for any significant length of time.  I’ve tried at least one member of nearly every class of antidepressant, and more than one of some.  They just tend to make me more disconnected and dissociated, honestly.  Maybe ECT would help more, but that’s hard to get nowadays, and the potential memory issues associated are worrisome.

SSRIs do tend to help my anxiety/social discomfort somewhat, but they affect my judgment, with negative outcomes.  For instance, I did not see the fact that I could end up a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years when I was only trying to help others who also had chronic pain, like I have.  And therapy has never given me many durable results‒this is, I’m led to understand, not uncommon in people with ASD‒though it was often nice to have someone with whom I could speak freely and who would at least give me sympathy.  Still, it was pricey.

I certainly don’t want to disrespect my various therapists‒I do very much respect them, and they did their best for me, I’ve no doubt about that‒but I might have done as well having weekly visits to a sex worker.  I don’t think I would have wanted to partake in their regular “services” though; I think the prospect of having sex with someone you don’t know, let alone to whom you have any deep attachment, is very strange and seems uncomfortable.

It might sound like it could be good, but I think it would be unworkable if I tried it.  I don’t even like being patted on the shoulder by people with whom I am not close, and sometimes, depending on my mood, even by people with whom I am close.  But still, one hears stories of men who go to sex workers largely to have someone with whom they can freely just talk.

That would probably cost more, though, and possibly lead to legal problems, not to mention the facts of exploitation and so on, in which I have no desire to participate.

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  But it doesn’t matter.  I’m just tired of all this.  I don’t want to do it anymore.  I just want to sleep.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day.  And Happy Hanukkah, if you celebrate it.

*The mirror image of all this occurs in the southern hemisphere.

**Though people who actually read my stories do seem to enjoy them.  I’m just really not good at promoting myself.  This is probably tied to my whole self-hatred, self-destructive attribute cluster.

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“Well…I’m back.”

First off, I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go to work because I was not feeling at all well.  And, of course, the office was not open on Saturday, so I didn’t do a post then.  I ought to have been well rested, at least, but I wasn’t.  Being alone at the house is not conducive to restfulness and recharging for me, though it’s better than not getting days off.  But I have only my own company, and I hate that guy, so it’s not pleasant.

One of my main weaknesses in the realm of the physical is my GI tract, and that was the main problem over the past few days.  I’ve taken a lot of meds for my chronic pain‒aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, naproxen, all that stuff‒over the last 20+ years (and more, day per day, over the past 10 years or so), so there are no doubt chronic toxic effects on my stomach and even intestines (and possibly liver and kidneys).

Also, I have to take proton pump inhibitors or at least H2 blockers to prevent myself from getting gastritis and ulcers from all the NSAIDs I take.  That’s probably interfering with the absorption of at least some nutrients, such as perhaps calcium and iron, for instance.  I try to counter that with supplements, but it only can go so far.  Also, they tend to cause their own troubles.

Why do I do it?  Well, chronic pain really sucks, I can tell you.  I actually have told you, many a time and oft, probably to the point of making you feel nauseated*.  So I have to make choices about what I value more at any given moment.  And future selves of me don’t always agree with the past selves about these things‒that’s how brains/minds work, I’m afraid.

So, there’s the added frustration of trying to tell myself not to overdo it on aspirin, say, and to cut back on the omeprazole and maybe replace it with famotidine, but failing and becoming physically ill when pain is too much and then stomach upset is too much.  But nothing is ever just right.  And pain is never-ending but not constant, in the sense that it waxes and wanes at least a bit, and some days it is harder to keep to a manageable level than others.

Sometimes it helps if I do things that hurt myself, deliberately, to distract me at least a bit.  That’s difficult to grasp, maybe, for someone who hasn’t experienced such things, but it’s the way it is.  Also, hurting oneself physically can help distract from psychological pain, and give one a sense of at least some control of one’s pain.

Unfortunately, and perhaps strangely, chronic pain does not distract from psychological pain; it makes it worse.  No wonder Darth Vader was always so grumpy‒he was in chronic pain that must have been horrible (which he brought upon himself, of course).  Mind you, the “dark side” of the Force probably didn’t help.

I often think it’s very strange for something like the Force to have a “light side” and a “dark side”.  It feels very much that the sentient beings are projecting their own values onto something that is, finally, a natural phenomenon.  Also, I don’t get why someone would pick a part of the Force to “use” or to follow, but try to avoid the other “side”, if one is truly trying to discern and follow the “will” of the Force.

Oh, well, the metaphysics and metaethics of fictional universes can sometimes be entertaining, I guess, but this is not one such time.

In some ways, it’s just as well that I didn’t write a post yesterday, since it was the 45th “anniversary”** of the murder of John Lennon.  I might have dwelt on that a bit much, since it’s a horrible event that still grinds away at my sense of whether the human race has any net value whatsoever.

John Lennon has now been dead for five years longer than he lived, while his murderer turned 70 this year, alive and at least somewhat healthy.  Well, that little purulent exudate can at least count himself lucky that he has not found himself in my power in the time since 1980.  I would use all my knowledge and all of my quite active and very dark imagination to keep him alive and begging for death as long as I possibly could.  The Spanish Inquisition were pussies.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.

In closing, I just want to share a notion and question that came to me (and has done so on and off):  I wonder if I would get more, or at least second-level, response to my words if I did a sort of vlog in which I read out loud some of my prior posts.  What do my readers think?  Would it be worth it?

Anyway, try to have a good day.  Remember, “do” or “do not” is never fully in your control; there is only “try”.  Or as the Japanese say, you are responsible for the effort, not the outcome.

Yoda’s a moron.

*Ad nauseam, in other words.

**It seems almost disgusting to use that word here, since often anniversaries are celebrated, and this is not something worthy of celebration, but I had a hard time coming up with another word that worked.  And etymologically, the word “anniversary” doesn’t carry value judgments, it just means something that comes every year.

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Knock there and ask your blog what it doth know

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m wearing my Thursday trousers and my Thursday boots.  You may think I’m joking, but I’m not; I have a specific pair of each of those things for Thursdays.  The other days of the week are not quite as specific because all my other trousers and shoes are identical one to another, at least in “make and model”, if you will, though some have seen more wear than others.

I don’t like having to choose what to wear anymore, and I don’t want to have to worry about matching colors or styles or anything like that.  So it’s all black, same shirt brand and model, same trousers, underwear, socks, and shoes.

But on Thursdays, I wear a pair of‒get this‒gunmetal gray trousers*.  They are the same brand and “model” as the others, though.  Interestingly, the gray ones don’t hold a crease nearly as well as the black ones do; possibly something about the dyeing process affects the fabric.

Oy, this is boring, huh?  I can’t believe I’ve been writing about my clothes!  The thing I meant to address when starting this post was that I feel mildly unsure about days and dates lately.  I’m not completely lost, of course; I can check my phone and computers and whatnot to confirm the day and the date and the time.  Also, of course, I remember writing in yesterday’s post about how the date numbers were 1-2-3 in order, so it was December 3rd.  And yesterday I did the payroll, which means yesterday was Wednesday**.

There is, however, a circuit or module or subroutine in my brain/mind that seems weaker than it is in many other people:  the feeling of being right (as in “correct factually”, but to a lesser degree, also the feeling of being morally right).  This is not to be confused with the intellectual process of discerning whether something is correct, in either sense.  I’m talking about the feeling, the belief if you will, that one is right, which often has very little to do with actually being right.  One is an intellectual process while the other is an emotion, and emotions are unreliable indicators of truth or guides to action‒but they are powerful***.

This is an important and consequential dichotomy.  It gives rise to the tendency for a particular societal issue, so nicely put by Yeats:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”

I strongly suspect that it’s not being “the worst” that leads to such passionate intensity, but rather passionate intensity‒that feeling that one is right‒that makes one prone to do horrible things.  If you feel that you are right, you’re more inclined to give yourself license to do whatever you think is “for the greater good”.

I think this is also part of the explanation for OCD****.  Sufferers have some dysfunction in the parts of their brains that produces the feeling of being right, so they have to keep rechecking and can become more and more unsure of more things, developing “rituals” and repetitive behaviors to try to stave off the anxiety of not being able to feel that one has, for instance, turned off the stove, even when intellectually one knows, or at least has good reason to think, one has done so.

I have at least a little of this problem, perhaps best exemplified in my use of mental arithmetic.  I keep track of ongoing sales at an individual and group level in the office, by dollar amount and by what is sold and so on, and I put it up on “the board” to update it as it happens.  Over time, I’ve gotten pretty good at mental arithmetic‒I never was very bad at it‒and I’ve even gotten to the point where, for fun, I will do some algebra and calculus equations in my head, say if I see one as the thumbnail of a YouTube video.

But even though I’m generally confident of my results intellectually, I never feel okay enough not to check my numbers using the functions of, for instance, Excel.  So, I can run many numbers faster in my head than I could using a calculator, but I cannot trust my answers.

At some level, I think this is better than the alternative.  We can probably all think of people who are quite sure of themselves, quite confident in the results of whatever “thought” processes they have gone through, and yet are woefully off-track or unqualified or just fucking wrong.  And we see what such people do to the world, because they are quite comfortable asserting themselves and seizing power and resources, because they feel that they are in some sense correct.

When you feel that you’re right, you don’t tend to check yourself as often as you would otherwise.  You also are less open to criticism and suggestions, because they fly in the face of your feelings.  This phenomenon is nicely explored in the book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not by Robert Burton, MD*****.

I could go on and on and on about this, I’m sure.  But it’s time to draw this to a close for the day.  I will finish with one of my favorite quotes from Radiohead:  “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

TTFN

*Why do I use the word “trousers” rather than “pants” when I’m an American?  Well, I watch a lot of British comedy panel shows, to the extent that I find if I say “pants” I feel that I’m talking about underwear, since that’s to what the British term “pants” refers.

**Last week, though, due to the holiday, I did the payroll a day early.  And, of course, I didn’t wear my Thursday pants (trousers) at all last week; I wasn’t going to work, so I just rewore the clothes from the day before.  It wasn’t as though I was planning to interact with anyone else, and indeed I did not.  Still, maybe the holiday has thrown me off a bit.

***For good, sound biological reasons as I always say, but such reasons can easily overshoot usefulness and become detrimental.

****It may also contribute to chronic tendencies toward depression, in which one never feels one is “right” either literally or morally or existentially, and also to the tendency for people with depression to be more prone to be accurate in their self-assessment of things such as, for instance, driving ability.

*****I just realized that “On Being Certain, by Robert Burton” rhymes.

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“I am still right here”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and in the American ordering of date numbers, the date is 12-3, (which means “December 3rd”, not “9”).  That’s mildly fun, since it has 1, 2, and 3 in order.  In 20 years, we’ll have 12-3-45, which is also kind of fun.  But we’re ignoring the century number, which ruins everything:  12-3-2045 if you “spell” it out.  See what I mean?  I guess in 2542 years we’ll have 12-3-4567.  That’s much more amusing, but odds are good that by that time, we’ll have different ways of representing the date, so it probably won’t work.

Oh, well.  Life is indeed unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha as you might say.  

I’ve been trying to find something interesting to read, but neither fiction nor nonfiction seems able to grab my attention.  I’ve tried reading books about computer science/machine learning, and about the nature of mathematics in general, and about political philosophy, and about physics, and so on.  I can’t seem to summon the energy to focus or get into any of them.

I did listen to the song Like A Stone by Audioslave* for the first time during the last several days.  I got the chords for it and everything.  I’ve played the video over and over (as I do) and practiced singing it and playing it myself.  It’s got a lot of barre chords, so it’s good exercise for my left hand (which can get very sore) but otherwise it’s fairly simple.

It’s a good song.  Even so, I can only distract myself with that for a short while at a time, and the whole thing is already losing interest for me.  But then again, so is Radiohead, and the Beatles, and Bowie, and Pink Floyd, and all those other people whose songs I play and sing for myself.  It’s all just been done, and it’s just me trying to amuse myself, like when I used to play tabletop RPGs alone as a teenager, rolling random encounters and making stories up based on those as I went along.

I almost wish I still had my old role-playing games, like Gamma World and DragonQuest and Villains and Vigilantes (and even D&D) as well as some dice and hex paper, so I could play again.  But probably, if I had them, I would find them boring, too.

I am not interested in online RPGs, especially not the MMORPG things, especially the ones with graphics.  I have no interest in playing role-playing games with strangers.  That’s an almost horrifying thought.

The problem is clearly with me in all of this.  I got spun off years ago from having any kind of the close and consistent social interaction (outside work and my interlude of prison) which had previously served to keep me more like a human.  Since then I’ve gotten, or felt, more and more…different.  I’ve always known I was weird, really, but in the past I had family and friends around to keep me from going off the rails too much.

It’s a bit like a neutron.  As you probably know, neutrons in a nucleus, where they interact with surrounding nucleons via the strong force, are stable effectively forever.  However, a neutron outside the nucleus decays with a half life of only about ten minutes.  That means that after an hour, only one in 64 such neutrons will not have yet decayed.  After two hours, that would be only one in 4096.  They will all decay eventually.

That’s just an analogy, but it’s apt, I think.  I am a free neutron (and cheap at twice the price!) and must decay before long.

I think I just don’t have any capacity actually to connect to any other beings, anymore.  I don’t feel as though there’s anyone whose interests even complement mine, let alone match up to any reasonable degree.  And when I try to interact with people at a more personal level, it tends before long to be the case that we are both awkward and uncomfortable (but especially me).

Oh, well, again.  I have no reason to expect things to be otherwise, nor to expect to find any “kindred spirit(s)” out there.  I’m way past tired of trying to change myself to fit in with other people, to try to make them happy.  I tried to do that in the past, really pretty much all the time; it slowly but surely wore me down and wore me out.  It never ended up working, anyway; at some point or other, everyone I love has, consciously or unconsciously, found me not worth the effort of being around.

And what have I become, my sweetest friend?  I’m a neutron, a sustained interaction between the up quark field, the down quark field, and the gluon field(s), and I will decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron-antineutrino.

Okay, I’m pushing that metaphor way too far, sorry.  Bottom line, I know I’m weird and unpleasant, and I am not worth the trouble even for myself, let alone anyone else.  If someone wanted to help me or save me, I couldn’t encourage them, not if I were being honest and kind, anyway.  I’m not a good pony, and I don’t recommend betting on me.  “I will let you down; I will make you hurt.”

*Quick Chris Cornell-centered “dad joke”:  Where does an Audioslave work?  In the Soundgarden behind the Temple of the Dog.