mental-illness

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Is this blog good for MY mental health?

For the first time in quite a while, I’m using my mini lapcom to write this blog post.  The main reason for doing this is that my thumbs have really been bugging me lately.  Also, as I’ve often said, it feels more natural to type on the lapcom than on the smartphone, at least so far.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I have been typing far longer than I’ve been using a smartphone; indeed, I’ve been typing far, far longer than smartphones have existed.

How do you like them, Apple™?

Who knows, maybe someday I might get to the point where typing on the phone is at least as natural as on the lapcom.  I suppose if I wrote an entire book on one, that probably would make quite a bit of progress toward making it feel more natural.  But it isn’t as natural, and I don’t think it’s likely ever to be, at least for something like typing, because the scale is wrong; it’s too small*.  And of necessity, it either doesn’t have as many available functions as the desktop programs, or they are more difficult to access with any decent speed.

Okay, enough of that topic and/or subject.

I have, as you may know, been having somewhat worse than usual trouble lately with my chronic mood disorder(s).  I’ve been trying various personal interventions (nothing pharmacological at the moment), because it’s getting fairly bad and potentially very dangerous (to me).  Regarding those personal attempts, though, one thing I’ve noticed over time is a kind of internal barrier to certain specific interventions, and it’s kind of puzzling and a bit disturbing.

A long time ago—when our own galaxy was far, far away from where it is now**—I read a lot of various kinds of self-help and psychology books, trying to figure out, among other things, why I was so weird and how to get along despite that fact and such like.  In them, I learned about autosuggestion.  I also learned about a famous case of a proponent thereof who was ridiculed for encouraging people to try repeating to themselves on a few occasions throughout the day:  “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Now, I’ve always thought that sounded quite interesting and potentially beneficial, especially since I tend to ruminate on and repeat things in my head anyway, and if I could make it something useful, then I might as well do so.  So, I applied it.

I never applied it in its original form, though.  I used to give myself messages about my mind getting stronger every day, or my will getting stronger, or my power (whatever that meant) growing, or me getting smarter, or me getting stronger in all senses of that word, those sorts of things.  But somehow, I always balked at telling myself that I was getting “better”.

I have tried doing the auto-suggestion thing again lately in various forms.  I think it at least gives me some mental focus, and at times at least makes me feel that maybe I’m getting stronger, or my will is improving, or whatever.  It’s a little silly but not without merit.  However, when I try to do the “better and better” version, it’s as if someone had cast one of those “langlock” jinxes on my mental tongue, and the phrase doesn’t want to come out.

It’s similar to the resistance I have to telling myself that “I love my life and I love myself”.

Interestingly, I was able to do that one while in prison, which feels sort of ironic, since I wasn’t loving life then.  But I knew that my situation was temporary—more so than life itself is, even—and I was able to keep looking forward to getting out and being part of my children’s lives again***.  Having something in the future toward which to look really helps keep your spirits up, or at least your fortitude.

I sometimes wonder if I fear getting better—not morally, I don’t think I have any issue with that.  But I do worry that some aspects of my personality could be quite harmful if I were to think too highly of myself.  I also have real internal revulsion (bordering on literal nausea) toward the idea of being delusional, especially about my own abilities and nature.

I guess it wouldn’t be too big a stretch to say that I fear it.  So many of the ills that I see in the world—current, past, and potentially in the future—are born of people who are too sure of themselves, too convinced they are right, too sure that they are exceptional, too convinced they know “better”.  I would hate to fall into such a banal and pathetic personality trap.  It’s all very silly, probably.  It might even make some of you laugh, or roll your eyes, or throw your hands up at my melodrama.

I suppose if I had anyone around with whom I could just talk about these things, I wouldn’t bother sharing them here on my blog.  They are, after all, quite personal.  But if I don’t share any of the thoughts I have, they are merely evanescent fluff inside my head that will never have any contact with other, external ideas, but merely have autologous impacts.  Of course, everything is like that (as far as we can tell), but I’d like to have some beneficial local impact on myself, at least.

And who knows, it may be possible, in the fullness of time, for the descendants of humanity, or similar beings, to break free of the nature of the transient and vanishing, and become, like the virtual particles near the event horizon of a black hole, real particles, things that endure indefinitely, and actually gain some degree of control over not only their own future but that of the universe itself.

When I’m being somewhat fanciful, I imagine myself contributing to such progress, and even being able to see it to its fruition.

See what I mean by getting egotistical?  I fear that tendency toward grandiosity, because it can be toxic all by itself, and because it is a frequent hallmark of more serious mental illness.  I’m more than a little afraid of that, because I often feel that manic magma of grandiosity rising up inside my mind.  I think it would be all too easy for me to lose my grip on myself entirely.  My mind, such as it is, is pretty much all that I have going for me; I’d rather not lose it if I can help it.

But the more time I spend on my own, the more likely it feels that it’s going to happen.  And I am not enthusiastic about it.

*That’s what she said.  Ha.  Ha.

**On a cosmic scale that doesn’t really mean anything, but time has passed, and the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the local group, and so on are all moving.  From a cosmic scale they don’t seem to change much, but if you zoom in, even the surface of the Earth moves at nearly a thousand miles per hour (depending on your latitude) in its daily rotation alone.  Here’s The Galaxy Song to put it into context.

***It turns out that was overly optimistic and did not come to pass, but there was no good way for me to know this at the time.

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Warning: Reading this blog may be hazardous to your mental health

Well, it’s Monday yet again, though I don’t know why it bothers, and it’s the beginning of yet another thoroughly pointless work week.

Okay, I suppose one can honestly say that it’s not pointless at the local level; people need to work to be able to pay rent, buy food, get medicine as needed and so on so they can survive.  But that, of course, just kicks the can of meaning farther down the empty dirt road of reality, since why they should survive‒why they should want to survive‒is a debatable question.

There are empirical answers to that question, of course, but ultimately, it probably gets down to the brute fact that this shit just is.  There’s no sign of any kind of meaning beyond what people invent for themselves in their own (individual and/or collective) heads.

And that would be just fine, too, as far as meaning goes, if people could just own the fact that it is all artificial, it is invented‒any (and all) of our senses of meaning and purpose, any of the stories we tell ourselves and each other about the telos of reality.  But people have this irritating tendency to start to believe their just-so stories, no matter how absurd, because they would rather delude themselves than face the possibility that everything is‒on the deepest and largest scales‒meaningless.

I suppose it’s related to the recognized fact that the best way to convince someone that you’re telling the truth about something is actually to believe that you are telling the truth, even if you are not.  If you believe something, no matter how absurd, you are likely to convince others that you believe, and that might make it more likely that they believe you.  Of such bootstrapped fictions are cultures and civilizations made, at least initially.

By the way, my plans for meeting up with my youngest this weekend fell through at the last minute, so to speak, thanks to a prior engagement with a friend (theirs, not mine) who came in from out of town, and about which meetup they had forgotten.  These things do happen, of course.  I could hardly blame anyone for preferring to spend time with someone else rather than with me.  Not that I think this was the situation!  I’ve no real doubt that the conflict was true and real and regretted.  But even if it were not, although it would make me sad, it’s not something for which I could blame anyone.

Well, I guess I can blame myself.  After all, it is surely because of what and who I am that people don’t really like to be around me much, and don’t like to stay around me longer than they are required to do.  If I knew that there were some precise and specific, alterable attributes in me that were responsible for this, I would probably try to change those attributes.  But it’s probably the gestalt of me that is the problem.  I simply am that which I am, and this portion of my four dimensional structure seems to tend to repel other such four dimensional beings.

Even if I could fix myself, and with relative ease, I might not.  I don’t honestly feel that I deserve to be fixed.

I could, of course, fall back on the true words of Will Munny from Unforgiven and say:

But, while I can recognize that fact in my frontal lobes and other parts of my neocortex, unfortunately my basal ganglia hate me, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.  They have tremendous neuropsychological inertia, and I don’t even know where to get a grip to try to move them.  But I sense that pushing them in just some random direction is more likely to make things worse than better.  I’ve gone into that general reasoning before, and I’ve encountered nothing to change my conviction on that count.

You know, it occurs to me that I should probably have some kind of disclaimer on my blog in general*, to the effect that people shouldn’t read this blog unless they have a pretty strong sense of self-worth and so on, and that people who have mental health issues should definitely not read it.  I fear that a person who is vulnerable might be inadvertently convinced to do themselves harm after reading my work.

Possibly I think too highly of my lowliness, but I’ve long since recognized that my inherent nature veers toward destruction.

So, yeah, I guess you can warn anyone who expresses an interest‒if such a being exists‒that if they so much as doubt their courage, they should not try to enter this particular Cave of Caerbannog, for death awaits them all here with nasty, big, pointy words.

Oh, and finally, let’s just take a moment to mark and to celebrate the Apollo 11 Moon landing, which took place 57 years ago today.  If you are one of the people who claims to think that humans did not land on the moon, well…I won’t tell you that you should end yourself and thereby raise the overall intelligence of the world by a small but measurable amount; that would be uncharitable.  But I do suggest that you please either get a vasectomy or a tubal ligation, because if there is any genetic component to such stupidity, we don’t want it to propagate forward in time.  Let’s put a bit of chlorine into the gene pool.

Otherwise, have a good day.

*I have put one in today’s headline, at least.

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Winding down at the end of the week

It’s Friday as I write this (and as I intend to publish it), and I do not expect to work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis*.  There had been some sort of slight possibility of doing something with my youngest one of these weekends, but I’m not sure if that is ever going to pan out.  There certainly hasn’t been any finalization of anything, nor really any tentativization (which is probably not a legitimate word).  I guess I’ll find out.

I don’t like to try to push things from my end, because I don’t want to elicit any sense of obligation or guilt in my child.  While I definitely want to spend time with them (with both of them, ideally, but that’s another matter), it would be horrifying to discover that such time was spent only because of a sense of remorse and duty, not because they wanted to spend time with me.

Then again, I have a hard time imagining that anyone ever wants to spend time with me, at least not anymore.  In the past, I would say that I used to be at least some degree of “fun” as a person with whom to hang out.  But I don’t know that I am capable of being that way anymore‒actually, based on many people who have spent time with me perforce, I think it’s pretty clear that I am not pleasant company.  Maybe I never really was.  Maybe most people just put up with me in the past.

Given such facts, on my current weekends off, such as this coming weekend, I basically just spend time by myself.  That’s good for getting rest from the effort of interpersonal relations, and it also lets me rest my back some, but I do feel quite isolated and gloomy and, yes, lonely.

Waah.  Poor baby.

I’m running out of interesting YouTube videos to watch, despite there being many billions of such videos available.  I do enjoy going for walks when I’m able, usually, and they are good for me overall.  Except, right now, at this time of year, the heat index gets well above 100 Fahrenheit here starting quite early in the morning, meaning my body’s cooling mechanisms cannot adequately function to maintain a healthy temperature, so I’m in danger of heat stroke if I push much at all.

It turns taking a long walk into a possibly suicidal gesture (even potentially a deliberate one).  That’s a bit fascinating, because they can’t Baker Act you for taking a walk, at least not readily.  But overheating and dehydration can put one at risk for kidney stones, and that is something well worth avoiding, believe me.  Well, you don’t have to believe me, but if you end up having kidney stones yourself, I’d be willing to bet that you would agree.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m trying to discuss.  My mental health has not been good lately, even for me.   By which I mean it isn’t just not good on average, which is true, but that it’s worse than my typical, average, poor state.  I don’t know if that’s obvious to people around me‒as far as I can tell, no one can ever see when I feel truly horrible‒but I can certainly tell, even if no one else can.

Oh!  This brings up a personal pet peeve of mine (I guess all “pet peeves” are personal, but you probably get what I mean):  I despise the recent tendency to use the term “mental health” as a euphemism for mental illness, as in “that person suffered from mental health”.

I don’t understand what people think they are accomplishing‒or avoiding‒by attempting such linguistic gymnastics, but it’s maddeningly absurd and idiotic.  “Health” and “illness” are antonyms, dammit.  One doesn’t suffer from mental health (though I have seen that exact expression used unironically), one suffers due to a relative lack thereof.  It’s as if you said someone went bankrupt from a surfeit of goods and money.

I don’t know why people feel that avoiding words that describe unpleasant things will make those things somehow less difficult, but it doesn’t work, as far as I can see.  It just obfuscates the issues and makes it more difficult to improve things.  You can’t get your mechanic to look at the part of your car that’s having trouble just by saying that your car is really driving lately.  That may not be the best absurd parallel, but that’s okay; the thing itself is so stupid and absurd and insane that it stands alone.

You don’t say of someone who is dying of metastatic cancer that they are suffering from physical health.  They are suffering from a terrible illness.

Likewise, depression (and its various related issues), chronic or otherwise, is a mental illness, and it has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, and worse than some.  There is also much more stigma associated with it than with such ailments as cancer, which doesn’t help.  I’m not sure what can be done about all that.

One thing I can say is that my mental health is poor.  That’s nothing new overall, obviously, but it gets just more and more tedious all the time, even as it continues to have its usual effects.  It becomes harder and harder to see any point in trying to fight it.  What would I gain?  What do I have to which to look forward in my life?

Nothing.  I anticipate no new revelations or relationships or creations or friendships or companionship (redundant list entries, I know).  I anticipate no new accomplishments.  I expect only gradual and rather pathetic decay and dissolution, unless I’m lucky enough to have something take me out more precipitously, or to arrange some such thing for myself.

Well, whatever.  Sorry.  I hope you have a good weekend.

*Barring the unforeseen.

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‘Tis all men’s office to speak patience to those that blog under the load of sorrow

Hello and good morning.

I’m back on the smartphone again today, so hopefully I can at least avoid going on and on and on like I did yesterday.  That ought to be easy enough, but apparently, it is not.  I don’t know why I get so “talkative” here all the time, but it doesn’t seem to be because I have anything important to say.

As I’ve noted before, typing on a QWERTY keyboard feels almost more natural than speaking to me (and I do it far more often now) but that’s definitely not true for using the smartphone, and it probably never will be.

For one thing, I haven’t stopped having arthralgia/tendinopathy in and around the bases of my thumbs related to such use.  It’s not severe discomfort, certainly not compared to my chronic pain, but it is there and it is annoying.  It seems, however, to interfere with playing guitar more than with using my smartphone (or anyone else’s, I would guess).

Yesterday, I wasn’t sure I wanted to play any, so I figured I’d give fate a hand in things.  I carry four dollar coins with me every day‒two Susan B. Anthonys and two Sacagaweas‒and I use them to help make decisions when I feel no particular pull in a given direction.  I also use them to clarify my own inclinations:  if I get a result and dislike it, I know that I really want to do the alternate thing.  I’m told that my son has adopted this sort of habit as well.

Anyway, I flipped all four coins and got a unanimous set of heads*, so I played guitar and sang some.  I did it somewhat reluctantly, but when all four ladies agree, I find it hard to ignore them.

It wasn’t anything fancy, I just mainly went through a series of songs I know by heart, plus I think I played through Desperado using the pdf I have of a printout of the chords.  There were a lot of twinges in both thumbs/wrists while I was playing, though.  Still, I’ve come to realize that I have a decent repertoire of songs that I can do off the cuff, so if I needed to do some busking, I could probably do it.

I also recently realized that the Radiohead song(s) Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2) ends with the same chord on which their song Fake Plastic Trees begins.  That was too funny a coincidence (given the subject matter/titles of the songs, especially), so I’ve taken to playing them as one combined song, a sort of mini-medley.

Several days ago, I even tried taking a video of me playing and singing (not those songs), using the desktop’s camera, and I discovered something:  if I ever do want to record myself doing music again, then I need a new microphone, probably more than one.  The sound quality was terrible, full of clipping and distortion and such.  Also, I need a new face, but that’s a separate matter.

I have also been working on learning Bach’s Two Part Invention number 13 for the guitar (mainly the right hand part so far‒the left hand had to be restranscribed and brought up an octave and I don’t enjoy it quite as much).  This has long been one of my favorite piano pieces to play, though I am way too rusty to play it now on a keyboard.  I used to like it so much that, whenever I was antsy, I would find a surface with an edge and “play” that Bach piece.  I guess I have always been a “stimmer”.

Anyway, all this crap isn’t really here or there, it’s just silly trivia that I’m spouting in lieu of having anything substantive to say.  I’m sorry if it’s boring or all over the place.  My mind has not been doing well lately, in case you haven’t noticed (or just haven’t read my blog lately).

I was just thinking recently about whether it would be workable for me to start going back to writing fiction maybe say two or three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday for instance) and blogging only on the other days.  I don’t know if that would lose me readers on the blog or perhaps bring more people in, but it’s not as though I ever have more than a few dozen people coming to the blog in the first place.

Then again, no one’s exactly champing at the bit to read any of my fiction, either.  This is mainly just a self-indulgent, foolish exercise, a lab sample of concentrated futility.  Come to think of it, that could actually be said about pretty much my entire life since roughly 2013 (at the latest).  Trying to find any meaningfulness in my life since then is like wandering through the ruins of an ancient Egyptian city, looking for a 7-11.

Anyway, that’s enough of my stupidity for now.  Not that my stupidity will stop, but at least I won’t spew any more of it on you for the moment.  I hope you have a day that improves after you finish reading this; it’s unlikely to be much worse, right?

TTFN

*This is not terribly improbable; it will happen in one out of 2 to the 4th, or 1 in 16, runs of four coin flips.

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“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous”

Well, I’m writing today on the lapcom, not for any particular specific reason, but just because, as of yesterday afternoon when I was preparing to leave the office, the various strengths (or magnitudes) and directions of the vectors in my brain came together and produced enough impetus for me to pack and then carry the lapcom with me.  After that, there’s much less of an energy barrier in the way of actually writing using the lapcom in the morning.  If I have it with me, I prefer to write using the lapcom rather than the smartphone.

As for the subject/topic of this blog post, well…I don’t know.  I have no idea what to write or what to say, other than to say whatever comes out of my (figurative) mouth here.  I don’t know what I’m going to write ahead of the actual writing any more than you know what my next word will be before you read it.

I guess that’s how conversation happens in real life as well.  People (at least, neurotypical people) don’t tend to script their conversations.  They just start talking, and the process of talking is identical with (or at least part of) the process of forming the ideas in the first place.

You don’t think about that to say before you think and say it, nor do your think about what to think about and say before you think about thinking about and saying things.  One cannot in any literal sense fully plan ahead what one says or thinks, because it would imply an infinite regress.

No, most of the time, expressing one’s thoughts is the first circumstance in which one formulates those thoughts (though of course it might well not be the first time one has had the same or similar ones).  Ideas, and even memories, do not exist fully formed within the brain, as if on some SSD drive; they must be reformed every time they are brought up.

This is part of why memory in humans is so malleable.  All memories bring out not just information from the past, but also color it with whatever information is leading to the memory being recalled at a particular moment.  This feeds back on and can alter the memory over time.

The things that happen with neural nets/deep learning systems/LLMs is teaching us at least some things about how thoughts and minds work in non-linear ways, though it’s important not to draw too many or too literal parallels to actual brains.  For one thing, brains are vastly more efficient than any kind of software/hardware we have.

Though your brain is certainly the most energy-hungry portion of your body, using about 20% of all the calories you burn, this still is only about 20 watts or so.  That’s less than your typical lapcom uses, and far, far less than any LLM or similar system uses.

The brain is also more complex on many levels.  Synapses are not simple binary switches, like transistors; they are more or less continuously variable in the amount of neurotransmitter they release into a synapse, and the number of receptors in the receiving synapse, and the degree to which activation (or inhibition) of those receptors affects the functions of the postsynaptic neuron and how that interacts with other inputs and the basic metabolism and chemistry of the next level of nerve cells.

Those functions are also affected by hormones of various kinds, from peptides to steroid hormones to things like histamine and glutamate that are neurotransmitters and hormones and (some of them) even amino acids.

Then, of course, there are the inputs from the many and various “glial” cells, which are not neurons, but which “support” neurons in the brain, and which (among other things) create the myelin sheaths that allow nerve transmission to happen much more quickly in “white matter”, and so on.  These things can alter and tweak the “weights” in any particular neuron “node” in ways that are more complicated than the nodes and weights in neural nets.

And of course, the scale is daunting.  You have about a hundred billion neurons in your brain (give or take), and each one has connections with 1,000 to 10,000 other neurons, making the total number of synaptic connections in the brain on the order of a hundred trillion to a quadrillion.

Just imagine if every star in the Milky Way galaxy had some kind of hyperspace links to 1,000 to 10,000 other stars.  That would be a complex galactic network.  The brain is this scale of network.  And the synapses, again, are not binary switches like transistors, but are more or less continuously variable within a given range.  Likewise, the impulses traveling down an axon, though binary in a sense (each nerve impulse either happens or does not), actually vary continuously, because it’s the rate of impulses arriving that affects the release of neurotransmitters.  But it’s not the only thing that affects it.

Anyway, this is all interesting stuff, I guess.  Learning about neural nets is fascinating, and is yet another use of linear algebra, matrices and the like (which are also good for General Relativity).  And learning about how gradient descent works in machine learning and so on is interesting and thought-provoking (an amusing coincidence, not an irony).

I’m reading some things about this and trying to pick up on it, just for general understanding.  I doubt that I’ll ever do anything with any of it other than maybe “talk” about it here (which is nearly the only place I talk about much of anything).  But at least it’s interesting.

It’s futile, of course.  But nearly everything I do or have done is or has been futile.  And that’s not just on a cosmic scale, but on a human, day-to-day, interpersonal scale.  Almost all my efforts are either wasted or fully counter-productive.  This is the outcome of something like me trying to do and be good as much as he can; it just tends to be pointless or worse.

None of it matters, though.

Anyway, as often happens with the lapcom, I’ve written too much of nothing today, and that’s irritating to me.  I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to my readers.  At least, the rest of your day will probably be less annoying by comparison with this post, right?

Right?

I guess maybe it doesn’t really work that way.  It’s all just irritating, isn’t it?  It’s irritating that I don’t catch a terminal illness, some kind of deadly but not-too-quick infection or cancer or something.  It would be good to be able to have people know that I was dying, so that if anyone out there is mad enough to want to see me or greet me or say goodbye to me before I die, they could.  I think I would appreciate that.

Odds are, though, I’ll just disappear and be gone someday, perhaps very soon, and almost no one in the world will notice.  Those who do notice will only do so vaguely, because there is practically no one to whom my life is integral or even very strongly connected.  I’m just background static for the most part.  When I go, it will just be good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.  There’s really no sensibly available better alternative of which I am able to avail myself.

As Kurt Cobain sang, “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”  He had some good ideas, did Cobain-sensei, and he carried them out.

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Imagine whatever headline you want; I don’t care

Welcome to the Monday of the first full week of July in 2026 CE (or AD if you must).  I hope that those of you in the USA had a nice Independence Day weekend.  There are no more significant holidays (that I recall) until at least September, now.

I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday‒unless you count trying to burn some kudzu‒because holiday celebrations generally involve other people, family and friends and such like, and I did not have any such group with whom to celebrate.

It’s probably just as well for such groups that I am not a part of them; I’m a serious downer and an unpleasant person* to be around for very long.  This used not to be the case; in my default or older settings, I’m naturally more hyper and sometimes rather silly (that too can be irritating, I fear).  Since my chronic pain began, however, I have become a much grumpier, angrier, more irritable person.  Things that I would have laughed off in the past, or about which I would have been more “philosophical”, easily get my ire up, even tiny little, minor, innocent things.

Using the seven dwarfs as personal descriptions, I spend most of my time these days Grumpy, rarely if ever Happy, frequently Dopey, quite Bashful almost always, from time to time Sneezy, not Sleepy nearly as often as I would prefer.  But I’m always Doc.  Take that for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing.

Anyway, yeah, I didn’t do anything pleasant on Saturday, nor much on Sunday, though at least I did talk on the phone to my sister.

I toyed with the notion of “celebrating” the 4th by making my way to the front of the Palm Beach County courthouse and making a fireworks display in the style of Thích Quảng Đức.  However, it was not only a Saturday, but it was a federal holiday; no one would have been there.  Also, I don’t know that I would have the courage to go through with it.

I need to do something though.  I cannot keep doing what I’m doing.  But I don’t see many options which I’m capable of embracing, given my dearth of personal energy and motivation.

I’m sorry I’m not being more positive or interesting, or at least quirky and strange in a less negative way, today.  Actually, I don’t really know if I’m ever interesting.  But, anyway, I just don’t have the energy right now to pretend not to be depressed, like I often do.  Maybe I’ve been pretending all my life that way**.  They do talk a lot about “masking” in neurodivergent people, and it has struck me as a very accurate and apposite notion since the first time I encountered it.

But, of course, there’s not necessarily any identity underneath such masks.  There’s certainly nothing very consistent, since “who we are” at any given moment or stage of our lives is but a three-dimensional slice of what is actually a four-dimensional being.

In case that sounds weird, I just mean that who we are at any given moment is true for just a point in time, a snapshot of a being that has not only spatial extent but also has a beginning and an end in time and which changes with every moment of that time, taking in and losing particles, maintaining that roughly constant but always altering configuration from frame to frame of of the movie that is a person’s life.

So, a question like “Who am I, really?” is perhaps best answered by saying, “I am the being who is asking that question.”  There is probably no deeper answer, at least not any much more specific one.  There is no “character description” in some Platonic realm that lays out who we really are, or if there is, I’ve encountered not the slightest intimation of it, and I would be very surprised if it existed.

Anyway, enough gobbledegook.  I’m just tired already, and it’s only the very beginning of Monday morning.  I’m so very tired.  I really ought to go before I spoil the party, to paraphrase a good Beatles song (see below).  I fear that I will just be a black cloud for everyone around me today, and probably in general.

I can’t even seem to find a book I can stick with reading right now; I shuffled through several different genres, let alone books, in my Kindle library a few dozen times in recent days, weeks, whatever, trying to find something interesting.  But after a brief time reading each thing I lose momentum and interest.  Even The Noonday Demon, a well-written book about depression, loses me after a bit.  Even Physics isn’t interesting to me, and that’s a bad sign.  Ditto for music, or movies (or shows) or what have you.

Everything is just a drizzly, insipid gray‒metaphorically, and sometimes also literally.  And I sometimes don’t have the energy to keep pretending that I can see anything else.

Like Ed Deepneau said in Stephen King’s Insomnia, “…sometimes the world is full of colors…but now all the colors are turning black.”

Enough, this has gone on too long already.  I apologize.  I hope you have a good day and a good week and a good remainder of your lives.

*More than one person has told me this, and they did not compare notes.

**Probably not.  It would be very bizarre indeed to be born depressed, though the tendency thereto can certainly be congenital, much like both forms of ASD that I have/had.

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Don’t make such a phus, you Sisy

Well, it’s Saturday and, as I predicted, I am writing a blog post.  I’m writing it on my smartphone, because I felt lazy about bringing the mini lapcom along with me when I left the office yesterday.

I’m still in pain, of course, but it’s not as bad as it was Thursday, and combinations of NSAIDs and Tylenol and some cbd related medicine makes me able to tolerate it‒though the latter leaves me a bit loopy and slightly foggy.

Anyway, it’s Saturday, and I won’t be working as late today as during the week, so that’s good as far as it goes.  It’s not much good, though, because the day is pretty much still used up, especially given my commute.  One certainly cannot rest very well.  Then, of course, tomorrow is the one day in which I can get things done around the house‒or around the room, as I should say, since I live in one room with an attached bathroom.  So, Sunday is laundry day, among other things, and then it’s back to work on Monday.

What a lovely boulder that is, Mr. Sisyphus‒but what on Earth do you mean to do with it?  It’s not actually doing anyone any good, you know.  Initially, constantly rolling it up that hill made your body stronger, but you’ve long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns and entered full-tilt into the negative returns stage, where you’re wearing yourself down.

It’s sort of like a ballistic arc:  for a bit of time it goes up nicely, but it slows and slows, then it goes around the point of zero velocity and starts going down at an ever-accelerating rate.  We all know the eventual outcome.  As Radiohead sang, gravity always wins.

Forget Atlas Shrugged.  What about Sisyphus Shrugged?  It could be a story about what happens when people give up on just rolling their daily boulders to the top of the hill only for them to roll back down again, to start everything over again.

Of course, what’s-his-name‒Camus, that’s his name‒would argue, indeed he did argue, that though Sisyphus’s actions are ultimately futile as well as futile from moment to moment, Sisyphus is okay.  I think his (translated) words are “we must imagine Sisyphus happy*”

Must we?  I don’t know, maybe.  Certainly he has a felt purpose.  He has been given some drive to push the boulder up, over and over, and it’s clearly an overwhelming drive.  I suppose acting on such an impulse can at least give one the satisfaction of being able to act on one’s drives**, which is almost certainly better than having strong drives and being unable to act on them.  See Harlan Ellison’s classic, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Have pity indeed for a truly celibate priest, though at least he imagines he will be rewarded for his abstinence (though I’m pretty darn sure his only reward will be oblivion…which is not without its charms).  Have even more compassion for those who are truly starving.

Or, if you want the personal experience, turned up to eleven, you can try having someone waterboard you.  Cutting off one’s ability to follow the urge to breathe, even for a few seconds, is (empirically) the most terrifying and stressful situation for humans.  Trust me, if you ever want to have all other concerns vanish from your mind, just start suffocating*** for a few seconds‒true perspective fall on you like a very massive boulder indeed.

Anyway, even if Sisyphus does have this drive, this motivation, and can act on it, that doesn’t guarantee any form of happiness.  If you’ve ever known anyone with bad OCD, you know that having irresistible and pointless drives does not tend to make someone happy.  It’s not joy such people are feeling, it’s profound anxiety, which let’s face it, is just a comparatively pretty term we use to try to polish the turd, fear.

And fear is, by nature‒I almost could say by design‒unpleasant.  It’s not evolved for you to be able to ignore it.

But people with OCD don’t get any lasting satisfaction by carrying out their rituals; they just get a brief lessening of their fear.  That is undoubtedly better than non-lessening fear, or worsening fear, but that isn’t saying much.  Losing a toe is better than losing a whole foot, but you would rather avoid both if you could.

I don’t know what point I’m making; these are just my random, stochastic thoughts.  But they do seem focused on the fact that people are somehow able to keep going and doing like Sisyphus does, despite there being no evident point or benefit, and indeed, despite their existence and actions seeming like an almost comedic curse from the non-existent gods.

Some people console themselves with fairy tales about Heaven (and Hell, of course, because humans always want a “bad guy” in their stories), and maybe that’s not horrible, as long as they don’t fuck around with other peoples’ lives as part of their delusion.  As far as the afterlife stuff, well, if they’re right, and it’s a good one, then hey, that’s great for them.  Thumbs up.  And if they’re wrong, they’ll never know it, so “whatevs”.

But it would be nice if people overall could reassess the nature of our existence, now that we’re not solely constrained by the blind idiot god, Evolution.  Maybe we can develop actual, real purposes that will make people feel joyful but won’t be driven by fear‒though I suspect this will not be an “evolutionarily stable strategy”, whether for biologically evolved minds or even other kinds of minds one finds.

Humans will probably be replaced by AI, anyway, and it’s looking like it’s going to happen sooner than expected.  Even if AI ends up being entirely aligned with human interests‒a very tiny region in the space of possible or even likely AGIs‒it will still be doing the thinking, the designing, the making, the growing.  Humans, previously the cleverest things they knew, will become little more than pets in such a scenario.  They could be beloved pets, maybe‒pampered and even spoiled‒but still just pets.

Maybe some people would be okay with that.  It’s certainly not the worst possible outcome.  Most other possibilities are not nearly so nice, and we don’t even really know how to steer the future toward which kind of AGI we want because we don’t know how to know what kind of AGI we want.  We don’t even know how to make our own**** wants align with each other’s wants, and we don’t really know in detail what’s happening inside these minds we’re growing so aggressively and haphazardly (not much more than we know our own or others’ more typical minds).

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Civilization:  it wasn’t very nice while it lasted, but it was probably better than what preceded it and what’s to come, at least for those not running on huge banks of GPUs.  But by all means, old Sisyphumans, let that boulder roll.

*I originally made the typo “we must imagine Sisyphus bappy”, which is a whole ‘nother way of thinking about Sisyphus.

**Utterly unrelated parenthetical:  I had a weird thought just while writing this sentence about whether there are any raps in a true 3 / 4 time signature, since it occurred to me that even the ones that had patterns of three syllables repeated ended up being something like three beats and a rest beat or two beats then a half note (a held double beat), but remained in 4 / 4 time.  It turns out that there are a few, but it’s said (by Google’s AI) that such a time signature is not as popular because it produces difficult songs to which to dance.  Evidently, rap fans don’t like the waltz.

***A crucial part of this is the inability to blow off CO2, since that is the primary and almost sole driver of respiration, not the absence of oxygen.  This is why, in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, people don’t even realize that they’re suffocating, or asphyxiating, or whatever the official term is.  All their CO2 is getting breathed out nicely, so they feel no panic or horror as they merely get lightheaded and lose consciousness and…well, that’s it, unless they are rescued.  It doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?

****I know, I know.  I’m speaking, just for the sake of argument, as if I were human.

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I forgot to give this a title at first

This is another lapcom post.  That’s three in a row!

It’s Wednesday now, though why today is named after the “Allfather” is far from clear to me.  Maybe because it’s the “middle” of the week, and Odin (AKA Wodin  AKA Wotan, etc.) supports the weight of time or some such.  I don’t know.  That sort of sounds good, at least.

Anyway, of course, I’m going to work.  It’s payroll day, and the boss should be back from a brief vacation.  It’s remarkable to me how often some people take vacations and so forth.  I’m not against vacations, don’t get me wrong.  But it’s quite annoying when someone takes a vacation while everyone else is working after having asked us to work on days when other people are taking a day off (e.g., Memorial Day).

It doesn’t really matter, I guess.  I have nothing to do on days off, let alone during any prolonged vacation, anyway.  I certainly have no one with whom to spend my time off, whatever it may be, except in rare snippets.

I don’t know.  I suppose some people out there might think I ought to do something about that, but the fact is, I don’t feel good about myself, whatever that might mean, and it is hard to try to inflict myself upon other people; this blog alone already feels presumptuous and probably annoying.

It is a persistent aspect of my experience of myself and the world that I feel strong self-disgust and self-contempt.  This is quite contrary to the concept of “self-compassion” often touted in discussions of getting an autism diagnosis as an adult and learning about it and some of why your experience in life has been the way it has been.

Getting diagnosed and learning more hasn’t given me any more generous attitude toward myself, at least not so far.  Maybe if there were more resources and support available, I might be doing better with it*.

I have also read suggestions about finding discussion or support groups or online meetups or even in person meetups.  This seems a slightly contradictory suggestion for people who are, as part of the very description of the disorder, socially troubled.  I even get tense whenever new people come to work in the office, until I get used to them.  I certainly don’t see myself trying to interact with groups of strangers, even if they are neurodivergent.

I had a little bit of connection on Instagram with some sort-of communities.  At least, there were other people there with some degree of similar experiences, though interaction was minimal and artificial.  Anyway, Meta arbitrarily kicked me off their platforms without telling me why, so fuck them to death.

I used to be better at this socialization sort of thing.  I probably would be better at a lot of it if not for chronic pain, but it’s rather futile to dwell on that very much.  In this, I try to follow the recommendations of the Stoics.  But sometimes I dwell on it, nevertheless.  Sue me, Marcus Aurelius.

Anyway, I don’t think I have anything productive to discuss today—not that yesterday’s weird, meandering post, which ended up focusing on prime factorizations somehow, was productive—and I don’t know that anything is likely to spill out of me at this point that’s going to be of any use to anyone, even for entertainment.  Sorry.

I did a brief audio recording yesterday about something that was nagging me relating to Sean Carroll’s answer to a listener question on his Mindscape podcast.  He does an “Ask Me Anything” podcast every month; it’s usually more than 3 hours long and is a real treasure trove of thoughts and insights about many things, since he’s a smart guy and a professional physicist and philosopher.  I was somewhat disappointed and therefore annoyed by his mentioning of Sam Harris and free will, because he somewhat misrepresented the arguments Sam has made.  I also thought he didn’t quite give adequate serious thought to the existential threat posed by AGI, though he certainly recognizes many potential drawbacks.

Anyway, I just recorded aloud my thoughts in response.  They may or may not be coherent to anyone else, let alone be very interesting.  Nevertheless, I’ll include the recording below.  I think it’s about ten minutes long.

In the past, I’ve been known to turn these audio recordings into “videos” to be posted on YouTube, but I don’t know how many people, if any, ever watch any of them.  But if any of you, listening to these audio files, think I should make them into “videos” too, please let me know.

I did get at least one person replying to a comment I made on another site that they miss my YouTube channel.  That surprised me.  It still exists, of course, but I haven’t added to it in a long time.

Maybe I will.  But it’s so hard to summon the will to do very much.  Maybe my will can become stronger, I don’t know.  Much of my effort and energy in that area is spent just getting through the day while dealing with pain and being alone and anxiety/stress and depression, frankly.

Oh, well, enough moaning.  My apologies.  I’ll try to make tomorrow’s post better, assuming I do one.  I hope you all have an excellent day by your own standards.

*I am diagnosed as Level 2, which is supposed to mean “requiring moderate support”, rather than level 1, which says someone only needs minimal support or some such.  So I’m not even expected to be able to make it very well on my own.

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Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry, as, to behold desert a blogger born

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I don’t know what to write today.  I’m really, really mentally fatigued.  I feel as if I’ve been working for forty days straight instead of just four.

I guess that’s at least slightly biblical, if you care about such things.  You know, raining forty days (and forty nights) or wandering in the desert for forty days while occasionally getting tempted by the devil and whatnot.

It’s all rather silly, of course, but it is memorable.  Anyway, I write stories about supernatural entities attacking college towns or trapping the spirit of a dead addict in a train station or about whole universes potentially colliding or teenagers becoming demi-vampires.  I can hardly complain if other people’s stories aren’t realistic.  Though, at least I don’t claim, let alone believe, that mine really happened.

Anyway, I haven’t written any new fiction in quite a while, and that is severely demoralizing.  I also haven’t played my guitar or even listened to any music this week.

I have listened to/am listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, because the first one of every month is his “Ask Me Anything” podcast, which lasts over 3 hours and is almost always very interesting.  If you like physics with a bit of philosophy thrown in, you might enjoy it.

Of course, what I should be doing‒or, rather, what I want to want fervently to be doing‒is reading Professor Carroll’s General Relativity textbook, Spacetime and Geometry, as well as other similar sources.  Or I want to wish to go on Brilliant dot org and work through their mathematics and physics and CS courses as completely as I can.  Or I want to yearn to get to work on the Babbel app, learning some German or some Russian or some French‒it doesn’t seem to have any Asian languages (last time I checked), so I can’t use it to bone up on my Japanese, nor to try to learn Cantonese or Mandarin or what have you.

But my mind is so tired.  I don’t even do any singing, let alone playing, like I said.

I know why I’m so tired, or at least, I know a big part of it:  chronic pain.  For just about a quarter of a century‒nearly half of my life‒I have been in pain every day, all day, except for those brief moments when I have had enough medications on board to do their own damage to my mind and my body (depending on which of the many medications it is that I’ve taken).

I’m also always grumpy nowadays, which is really disappointing.  This probably goes back to when my chronic pain really became chronic and exacerbated my depression and everything, but it’s become more persistent over time, and now it seems to be my default state.

The people who know me now just think of me as a grumpy and ornery person by nature; it’s even a bit of a joke, since I know that I am grumpy* and at least retain the capacity to be self-deprecating and not to hold it against people.

But that’s not the way I used to be!  That’s not who I was before my chronic pain started.  I did have trouble with depression (and I was, apparently, always autistic), and that probably sometimes made me irritable, but not like now.  I think‒I recall‒that I was usually a fairly upbeat and enthusiastic person, reasonably friendly and kind whenever I could be.

Anyone reading who knew me in the past, feel free to disabuse me of that notion if it’s wrong.  In some weird way, it might be comforting to learn that I’ve always been just an asshole, I simply didn’t know it back then.

Oh, and teeth; I used to have great teeth.  I took good care of them, flossed all the time and everything.  I had dentists tell me that I was a very boring patient.  But various of the meds I’ve taken (and the mental states into which I’ve fallen, to say nothing of the state prisons into which I’ve fallen) since my chronic pain started have more than decimated my oral hygiene, despite regular, frequent brushing and flossing.

I am a shambles.  I’m a twisted wreck of what I used to be, with only just enough in common with that self to remind me of it.  Or so it seems to me.

I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.  I do not want to last much longer‒not like this.  Every day is a trial by endurance, like the stupid “touch the truck” thing, but as far as I can see, there’s no prize…not even a stupid truck.

It’s more like Space Invaders:  see how long you can keep shooting down all the things that are trying to destroy you, but as you succeed, the onslaught becomes more and more difficult, and it never lets up except for brief seconds when it’s about to send a new, harder wave at you.

And then, once you finally, inevitably fail, it’s just…game over.  It might as well not have happened.  Maybe you can put your initials up if you lasted unusually long (thereby scoring more points than others), but no one really cares, and your mark will be displaced very soon anyway.

It reminds me of the final words of my story Solitaire, which you can get as a stand-alone story or in Kindle format or hard cover in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Now that’s a story that’s not silly, but it is very dark and horrifying.  It’s also short, so if you’re interested, it won’t take much of your time.

Okay, well, that’s it for now.  Unless you’re lucky, I’ll write a post tomorrow and also on Saturday.

TTFN

*I sometimes say that I am an amalgam of the Seven Dwarves:  I’m occasionally happy, I am sometimes sneezy, I’m quite bashful in many situations, I’m frequently sleepy but rarely enough to stay asleep for long, I’m definitely often dopey, I’m usually grumpy…but I’m always Doc.

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“Shell smashed, juices flowing, wings twitch, legs are going…”

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m going to work again, despite‒as the Beatles song puts it‒feeling low down.  My trouble is, I more or less feel low down almost every day.  What am I supposed to do about it by staying at the house?  That’s likely just to make me feel worse, because then I’ll just be alone with one of my least favorite people‒me‒and feeling non-productive and useless.

At least I wouldn’t feel “hysterical and useless”.  I don’t know if I’ve ever been what would be called “hysterical” in my life‒I tend to bottle things up and slash and burn my own figurative innards (and sometimes my literal skin) rather than outwardly flipping out‒but if I have, it’s been quite a long time.

I guess I was probably close to hysterical the time I called the old version of “the hotline” and got picked up by a few undertrained Palm Beach County deputies who did nerve damage to my left wrist with a poorly applied handcuff before dropping me at a clearly underfunded emergency mental health facility.  But I think my hysteria was at least somewhat justified at the time.

That was when I was out on bail, had already lost everything, was effectively homeless, and had very few hopes for much good happening ever again in my life.

I wasn’t wrong, either.  Even the psychiatrist whom I saw for the follow up to that 24-hour hold admitted that he thought there was no way someone wouldn’t be depressed if they were going through what I was experiencing.  He knew I was a doctor, as was he, of course, so he had a certain amount more personal sympathy than he might have had for someone else, but I think it was the shape of the situation, not the specifics, that he thought worthy of despondency if not outright despair.

Anyway, that was a horrible stretch of time, and when I was offered a plea bargain I took it, not because I was actually guilty, but because I saw no way of fighting the whole stupid thing with no money and no real allies in the process.  I hoped at least to have it done in a relatively short amount of time (three years minus gain time) so I would be able to see my kids again before I had missed too much of their lives*.

This highlights how utterly, damnably inadequate our criminal “justice” system is.  The fact that a person who can afford a private attorney can consistently expect fewer convictions, lighter sentences for lesser “crimes”, and even often doesn’t serve time despite having been convicted (see The Donald) than people who don’t have the capacity to hire private lawyers is an absolute and inexcusable travesty.

The word “justice” should not be allowed within a hundred lightyears of that system.  I would say it’s a joke, but jokes are more worthy of respect.  It is, instead, a low-flying, long-term catastrophe, and no one who would like to live in a just society should support it as it is.  No one should be allowed to have private representation in criminal trials unless everyone gets it.  Otherwise those with more money are effectively not subject to the same laws as everyone else, and that includes everything from petty shit up to murder (see OJ), which at the very least in practice violates the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Don’t even get started on sex crimes.  I think we all know how rarely and haphazardly they are punished, let alone prevented.

It would be amusing if someone set up a service whereby they would provide assistance to women (and, yes, men) who were the victims of unpunished sexual assault by helping to get rid of the bodies of their assailants (if they killed them themselves) or just helping to delete the perpetrators from start to finish.  Of course, this could easily run afoul of the crucially important notion of due process, without which laws might as well not really exist, but our government(s) are failing miserably in that crucial area anyway.

Enough fantasizing.  I barely have the energy to get up and live my own so-called life, let alone to set up illicit vigilante services.  I am very tired and I am in continuous pain, and I have very little notion of anything good happening in my future.  A few things in my life now are wonderful, of course‒my youngest, my sister, my brother, and yes, my son, since at least I know that he is doing well, and of course, you readers are pretty darn great‒but I know that I am not wonderful.

I am not much more charming or beneficial than a growth of black mold or a teratoma (or even a less benign tumor).  Maybe tumors and mold growths have rights of some sort in an idealized world, if any living thing does.  But they cannot expect to be welcomed or loved or supported.  They are generally only worthy of removal and destruction if anything at all.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, but then again, I don’t know what the point of much of anything is, least of all the point of me.

Whatever.  Never mind.

*That turned out to be a pipe dream.  I also stayed in Florida instead of remaining with my parents up north after getting out of prison for basically the same reason.  I was severely and devastatingly disappointed when my kids themselves asked me not to pursue my legal right to visitation once I was out, because it would be too disruptive of their lives.  I could not in good conscience selfishly force myself upon their time‒not after I had screwed everything up so much and hurt them thereby‒so I acquiesced.  I can easily sympathize when people don’t want me around.  Anyway, now at least I am interacting regularly with my youngest, and that’s a wonderful thing‒it’s better than I surely deserve‒but my oldest still doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.  Most of you reading this blog post have read my stuff before and have some acquaintance with my mind; can you blame my son for not wanting me around?