mental-illness

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You don’t prolong a vowel sound by repeating a silent “e” doggone it!

Well, here we go.  It’s Monday.  It’s the start of another “traditional” work week, and I am participating in that tradition.

I don’t really know why I am doing so‒though, on a reasoning kind of level, I could probably figure out at least some of the proximate causes‒since there is nothing of value for me to sustain by getting an income, and I feel less and less a member of society or civilization with every passing day (or so it seems).  And whatever I am (metaphorically), I don’t like me.

I also don’t know whether the WordPress people were able to fix my site or not*, so I don’t know if I’m going to load this onto it in the usual way or not.  That almost threw me into a nervous breakdown the other day (I suppose the official term would be a “meltdown”, which is apparently what they call it for people with ASD, and though that’s somewhat insulting, it’s not an inappropriate comparison for one to invoke a nuclear catastrophe).

It makes me feel the urge to try to write on Substack or some such similar site.  But I’ve been on WordPress for a decade and a half now‒that’s wild to realize‒and I don’t really want to have to change.  I’d rather just delete.

I’m also having issues with my ride this morning.  I reserved a ride to the station well in advance, which ought to make it more reliable, not less, but evidently that isn’t the case.  Despite the irregularity, I have not been offered a discount, even though if I were late, I would be penalized.  Somehow that doesn’t seem right, and it fills me with at least a slight wish for vengeance.

I know, I know, this isn’t a major deal.  But it feels major to me, relatively speaking, and it makes me want less and less to bother participating in anything at all.  I’m already jogging along the edge of a canyon with unstable sides.  Even little gusts of wind could be enough to push me over the edge, if it comes at a time when I am already unsteady and have taken a bad step.

I take a lot of bad steps.

Speaking of bad steps, I would like to make a public service announcement, aimed mainly at younger folks online.  Here it comes:

It makes no sense to try to convey the impression of an elongated spoken vowel sound in a word that ends in a silent “e” by repeating the e!

The most common use (that I have noticed) of this idiocy is to prolong the word “love” to provide emphasis.  They write things such as “I loveeeeee this restaurant” or whatever.  But “loveeeeeee” would be pronounced “luv-eeeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island were wailing for his wife as they became separated on a failing getaway raft, like in Castaway.  (Think the analogue of yelling, “Wiiiiiiilsooooooon!”)

If one wants to prolong the main vowel sound of the word “love” then it makes more sense to repeat that vowel, for instance, “I looooove the show Gilligan’s Island.”  The “e” is silent in the original word; it doesn’t make sense to multiply it.  That changes the word’s pronunciation entirely.  It bothers me every time when I see such blatant, if not terribly important, idiocy.  I haaaaaaaaate it!

See how that works better than “hateeeeee” would?  That sounds like someone greeting their beloved head covering, to which they refer by the nickname, “Hatty”.

I think I will make that subject the headline topic of this post (I did).  Maybe someone out there will see it and apply it.

Ugh.  I already feel overwhelmed, and it’s just Monday morning, and work hasn’t even started.  We also have supremely Florida weather here today, very hot but even more humid.  I’m sweating copiously just sitting still.

And now my train is going to be delayed, it turns out.  I really ought just to go back to the house and lie down and not ever get up.  That might be hard to do, of course‒not going back to the house, I mean the “never getting up” part.  For one thing, even though it’s stupidly humid and so I’m probably somewhat dehydrated, I would eventually have to get up to go to the bathroom.  I have no desire to lie in my own urine.

Of course, if I took enough of the right medicine or combinations of medicine, I wouldn’t have to worry about that.  At least, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I don’t know what to say.  I really don’t feel well.  I don’t feel any sense of belonging or connection with the life I have (and am), but I don’t see any change that’s within my power that would do anything but make things even harder and more stressful.

I can’t just throw myself on someone else’s mercy and beg for help.  No one I know has the resources to be able to help me, even if they knew how to do so.  And I don’t have any insurance of any kind, nor any other such things.

I don’t even use my bicycle because the rear tire is punctured and I don’t have any bike stores within bike-pushing distance, and I don’t know how to fix the rear tire myself.  I guess I could learn, but I know that I probably never would do it.  I don’t handle maintenance tasks very well, especially when they’re geared (no pun intended) toward me.  I don’t really have any reserves of will and energy.

Things would be easier if not for chronic pain and the consequences of taking lots of medicine for a long time to try to control it as best I can.  It would also be nice to be able to have an actual, restful night’s sleep.

I want to say that I cannot remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, because that sounds rhetorically impressive, but I do remember:  it was a night/morning in the mid-nineties (I do not recall the exact day and year, because at the time it didn’t seem so noteworthy, though it was wonderful).  As far as I can tell, that was the last time I felt well-rested.

Speaking of rest, I’m going to give this post one for now.  I hope, I truly hope‒and if I thought it was any use, I would pray‒that each and every one of you is feeling much better than I am right now.

*They hadn’t completely, but I am able to do something at least more like classic writing on it than it looked to be as of last week.

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Wotan can KEEP this day as far as I’m concerned

Okay, first off, to begin with‒or should it be “with which to begin”?‒it is the 6th of May today (a Wednesday, though that fact is not terribly relevant) and to continue the Star Wars related references, I will note that today is the date of the Revenge of the Sixth.

Get it?  It’s a bit tortured, I’m afraid.  I don’t think anyone would have come up with the notion had it not been for “May the 4th be with you”.  That, at least, is a more straightforward play on words, and is specific to this month and that day.  “Revenge of the Sixth” doesn’t specify the month; one could, in principle, use that line on any 6th of a month.  But one would not, because this day is “celebrated” only in reaction to Star Wars Day on May 4th.

It’s sort of funny and fun, but it reduces the Sith to merely a perverse notion, existing only in reaction to the Jedi, like a whole order of Force users acting out the parts of rebellious teenagers.

Of course, probably that was sort of what happened in George Lucas’s mind when he came up with the Sith:  They were the anti-Jedi, a parity-violating, distorted reflection of the “good guys”.  But, of course, a whole philosophical movement that sprang up only as an enemy to another is intellectually and narratively vacuous.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the moronic religious people who seem to think that if one does not believe in God, then one must worship Satan.  It can be very hard for some people to get around the whole “if you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy” notion.  Only in this case it’s not even a philosophical enmity, but is merely a reactive enmity.  Also, it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that such a situation would seem to imply that whichever of the two sides came first would be assumed to be the “good guys”.

But one doesn’t look at any random patch of spacetime and think, “if there’s no electron in this spot then there must instead be a positron”, or vice versa.  As a matter of physics and of logic, this is a pretty glaring error.  Just as indifference, not hate, is the complete absence of love, the default state of reality is not the opposite of some particular presence, it is simple absence.  In physics, that means all the quantum fields being in their vacuum states, with minimal energy (it’s not zero because of the uncertainty principle).

In the Star Wars extended universe, the Sith have a background that is separate in origin (I think) from the Jedi.  I think they began as a race of Force users.  I could be wrong about this; I’m not all that much of a Star Wars nerd.

Ask me questions about the backgrounds of things in the universe(s) of my stories and I could share some serious lore with you.  But no one is going to ask me about those because essentially no one has read them.

Boy, it would be cool to have someone write fanfiction based in the worlds of my stories.  I remember reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction while waiting for the next book(s) to come out, back in the day.  Some of it was bad, of course, but not much of it, and some of it was really quite good.  People who love to read and feel the urge to write an homage out of love for a work and its characters tend to be at least somewhat okay at it.

Some of it was downright brilliant.

Of course, humans being what humans are, some of it was smut.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, when you get right down to it.  Members (ha ha) of a sexually reproducing species are going to tend to find sex…engaging, to say the least.  Every human alive (and that has ever lived) comes from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who had sex at least once*.  That includes your parents and your grandparents, by the way.  You’re welcome.

In a species like humans, those who are more into sex and more driven toward it and obsessed with it are, ceteris paribus, going to have more offspring.  It won’t take very many generations for any genes that make one less interested in sex to fade out of the gene pool‒again, and very importantly, ceteris paribus.

All other things are essentially never equal, of course, and there are complex tradeoffs in all such behavioral tendencies, but that’s a can of bees I really don’t have the energy to open right at this moment.

I’m in a truly terrible amount of pain this morning, I’m afraid, continuing from last night and yesterday and so on. and it’s making it a bit hard to write, though that somehow doesn’t keep me from running off at the figurative mouth.

I think it would be harder for me not to write right now, though.  I don’t know for sure.  I haven’t tried.

Even thinking about not writing at all makes me feel squirmy and cringey and quite strange.  It’s not quite as bad not to play or listen to or sing any music‒which I haven’t done for weeks now, alas‒but that does also feel bad.

But I think if I were to stop writing, and at least every week sharing my writing‒particularly now that I don’t have access to Facebook or Threads‒I would pretty rapidly feel that I didn’t even exist.

I have no real life here from day to day.  There is no joy, there is only (attempted) distraction.  Other than my episodic interactions with my youngest child (which are distinctly good and real and joyful to me, a real oasis in the desert) everything in my life from day to day feels less real than the events of the most banal video game.

Yesterday, I started searching eBay and other online sources for used ECT devices (they are out there) and looking up whether one can legally buy insulin over the counter (one can, to some degree), or what medications are prone to produce seizures.  The idea was to see if it would be possible for me to induce a seizure in myself and hopefully treat my depression.

I know it can’t help my underlying ASD, but ECT and other kinds of induced seizures have consistently been shown to work against even highly treatment-resistant depression.  I have tried every class of (legal) medication and many different types of therapy for my dysthymia/depression.  I think most regular readers can tell just how well that arsenal has worked.

Of course, pain complicates everything.  It taints everything, it erodes everything, it corrodes everything, it corrupts and desecrates everything.  I really want it to stop.  Sometimes I want it to stop at nearly any cost (at least to me, though I can’t in good conscience invoke avoidable costs upon other people).

If I thought inducing seizures would help my pain, I would probably just do it.  I know how to make such things happen‒the research I did yesterday was just to indulge myself so I could more realistically fantasize about the outcome if it were to work.  It was one of those distractions I mentioned above.  But having seizures would probably make my physical pain worse, since seizures are not easy on the body.

They could also kill me, but that would be far from the worst outcome.

Death‒not necessarily seizure-related death, but death generally‒will probably be the only thing that relieves my pain.  Well, “relieves” is not really the right word.  But could death be what ends it?  Yes.  And thankfully, no one is dependent upon me or is very close to me or is really used to having me around, so the collateral damage would be minimal, no matter what all the simple-minded (but well-meaning) Instagram videos try to tell you.

Maybe I’m just as well off not to be able to go to that site anymore.  Everything there would be irritating.  Though, that’s just like more or less everything else in the world, to be fair.  Right now, I could almost wish for everything else in reality to cease to exist so I could just enjoy some silence.  But that would be unkind and terribly presumptuous.  It would be better to go back to the nidus of the pain and pluck that out.

Have a good day.

Though I suspect Mr. Smear would disagree with me:

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Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my blog and blows it in my face?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.

I had to check the date on my phone a few times in a row to confirm that, yes, not only is it really Thursday, but it is also the 19th of March (in 2026 AD/CE).

It’s not that I thought I must have gotten the day and date wrong.  I keep track of these things and recheck these things all the time, often coming from different directions; I usually have at least a couple of methods by which I am able to reconstruct what day it currently is.  But I always feel‒a bit more strongly than is warranted‒that not only could I be wrong in principle (as is always the case) but that I am not likely to be right.

A similar thing occurs when I do the mental addition to update the various totals on “the board” when people get deals at work.  Intellectually, I know that I’m good at it, and that I’m rarely incorrect.  But “emotionally”, I don’t feel like I’m right.

Even after I check my numbers 3 different ways using Excel (there are 3 totals that should match, and if they do, it’s much more unlikely that I’m wrong), I don’t feel like I’m sure that it’s right, even though intellectually, it’s all but a certainty.  I mean, this is mathematics here, one of the few areas in which we can obtain answers with logical certainty.  And I’m pretty good at it.

I even occasionally deliberately say to myself, after confirming in those 3 ways that I got all the mental arithmetic correct, “Yes!  I am the king!”  It’s an attempt to feel good about myself in a slightly silly way, which is the only way I allow myself to feel good about myself.  But it doesn’t work much, if at all.  It feels like what it is:  a scripted, fictional remark.

This may be part of the problem I have long had with self-affirmation, autosuggestion type things.  If I say good things to myself about myself, I don’t believe them.  in fact, I feel very squirmy and uncomfortable inside when I try to say good things about myself, or to tell myself that I like or love myself.  It’s as though I’m committing some grotesque violation of ordinary decency.

I don’t feel as though I’ve done something truly horrible mind you; I don’t feel as though I’ve harmed some helpless person or otherwise victimized the innocent.  It’s more akin to sticking one’s bare hands into a big bowl full of maggots.  I just feel that I’m disgusting and pathetic and that I make myself more so by saying things that sound as though I’m pretending I’m not disgusting and pathetic.

I recognize these as emotions that are not good guides to the empirical world; intellectually, I can handle them, assess them, recognize their irrationality, and call the judgment made.  But I have not yet been able to shake those feelings, and they are not fun.

I cannot convince myself, down to my bones, that 2 plus 2 equals 4…at least not when I’m doing the figuring.  I know I’m right in a logical sense.  I’ve perceived no reason to doubt my answer, other than the stupid fact that I am the one making it.  But I cannot seem to shake‒or I have not yet been able to do so‒the idea that I may very well have the whole thing fundamentally wrong, and that this is not just a remote, theoretical possibility.

It’s quite frustrating.  I might even say that it’s maddening, except that it seems to be the madness, itself.  It doesn’t matter how well I know and understand something intellectually, how much I know, empirically, that I’m right about something.  Somehow, I always just seem to feel that I, in and of myself, am wrong.  And so must be most of the things I do, unless I am ridiculously careful and check and recheck and triple check* everything.  And even then, I just reduce my anxiety about things a bit.

I have real sympathy for Hamlet, who didn’t want to take vengeance upon his uncle for the murder of his father without being able to convince himself beyond all reasonable doubt that he was not being misled by the apparent ghost of his father.  It makes sense to “have grounds more relative than this” when it comes to killing the king of Denmark, even if you’re the prince.  You don’t want to kill someone in the name of justice or revenge unless you’re really darned sure that they deserve it, otherwise you are committing an irrevocable crime.

Doing arithmetic, on the other hand, is rarely so consequential**.  Neither is failing to turn off a bedside lamp before leaving my room in the morning.  Nor is even the possibility of having failed to lock one of my locks when leaving the house.

But these things often lead me to feel that squirmy misgiving, almost a kind of deep formication.  It’s very annoying.

Oh, I’m also never quite sure‒emotionally‒that no one is going to push me off the platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train at the station***, so I’m always glancing around to make sure no one’s right behind me or coming too close, and if they are, I pay significant attention to them, preparing to dodge or fight back if attacked.

You’d think, given how often I think about the benefits of being dead, that I would be less worried about being randomly murdered at the train station.  But there’s something infuriating about the prospect that someone else could choose to kill me.  That would really tick me off (so to speak).

Anyway, it’s weird, and it’s quite frustrating.  It’s also exhausting.

They say there shall be no rest for the wicked.  I know that’s just part of a prophecy, and therefore bullshit, but in the real world, there shall often be no rest for those who feel that they are wicked.  The actual wicked, of course, probably often sleep the deep, deep sleep of the innocent (as Radiohead sang), because they do not see themselves as wicked.

They probably see themselves as perfectly fine, even great.  Some of them even seem to imagine that they are the greatest (whatever) of all time, and they often suffer no serious consequences for that intellectual failure.

Justice is not a natural force, unfortunately (despite all the bullshit, misguided, popular talk about “karma”); it’s something that has to be forced, if you will, that has to be constructed.  And the people who are most careful about trying to get things right are generally the sorts of people less likely to want to be “in charge” of things.

“And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their courses turn awry / And lose the name of Action.”

TTFN

*Not to be confused with Triple Sec or whatever that liqueur is.  I’ve often wondered if there was ever a Double Sec or even a Mono Sec/Uni Sec.  Probably not.  I suspect the true etymology is based on something that does not mean “threefold” in any sense.  But I could be wrong about this.

**Even the failure of that Climate Orbiter that famously broke up in the atmosphere of Mars was due not to an arithmetic error, but an error of units:  One group involved in the project was using metric units, the other was using so-called imperial units, and nobody seems to have checked.  I cannot imagine what I would have felt if I had made that error.  Seppuku would probably feel too generous.

***This occurred to me because, as I was writing, I was on the train platform getting ready to board the oncoming train and I experienced that minor paranoia, as I nearly always do.

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This is the blog this man’s soul tries

Well, in case some of you were starting to feel lighthearted and optimistic‒just a little more at ease with yourselves and the world after two whole days without reading my work‒here I am to write another blog post that will probably bring you down and make you inclined to wonder whether anything at all is really worth anything, or if you should just give it all up, especially the habit of reading this blog.

Congratulations.  It’s Monday again, the start of another work week.  Also, Daylight Savings Time has ended (or is it “begun”?) over this last weekend, so for a bit, a lot of people’s circadian rhythms are going to be slightly off.  That will contribute to an increased number of accidents, both minor and major.  There will also be increased rates of illness (again, both major and minor), and I believe there is even some evidence that men at least will suffer more heart attacks after the time changes.

And what are the other advantages of Daylight Savings Time?  I’m not aware of any actual other benefits.

Of course, like most of you, I’m starting my own work week today, and it’s going to be a long one; the office is scheduled to be open this Saturday.  By then, the shifted time measure will be mostly adjusted in everyone’s heads.  I’m speaking of things here in the US, of course; I honestly don’t know off the top of my head whether other cultures have adopted this weird custom.

Whence did it originate?  I’ve heard explanations and excuses at various times in my life, but they are not very convincing.  If you know‒with reasonably good credence‒please share that information in the comments below.  And like and share it if you’re so inclined, especially if you have a strong sense of irony.  Heck, like and share the song itself if you want to immerse yourself in a kind of meta-level irony, or something like that:

I don’t know what to discuss today, even more so than usual.  I’ve committed to trying not to dwell on, or at least to share, my negative thoughts and emotions and so on, since I’m sure they do very little other than make other people feel depressed (yes, certain kinds of mental illness can be rather contagious, in a sense at least).

I won’t say I would never wish depression on anyone; that’s ridiculous.  For instance, I would feel much safer in the world if this Presidential administration, and indeed most of its equivalents around the globe, suffered from enough depression to make them second-guess themselves and doubt themselves from time to time.  It almost ought to be a requirement for office that someone be prone to dysthymia at the very least, so they would feel less confident that their shit doesn’t stink, so to speak.

And no, I am not suggesting that the people of the world ought to put me in charge for the best chance to make the world better.  I used to dream of such things, and I had a very Sauron-like wish to control events in the world for the greater good.  It might still not be too horrible a notion.

But my inclination over time has become more negative, more Melkor/Morgoth like.  So if anyone is inclined to encourage and engender acts of chaos and destruction on a hitherto unseen scale, by all means, give me immense power.  I make no warranties or guarantees or even assurances that I will use such power wisely.

I’ll try, of course.  No one can be expected (fairly) to do anything more than that, no matter what Yoda said.

Goodness knows I’ve tried a lot, in a lot of ways, all throughout my life, literally for as long as I can remember.  By which I mean, I’ve tried to do my best to do good things and to be a good person‒a good friend, a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good doctor, all that.  You can probably tell by my current state‒solitary, lonely, divorced, professionally ostracized, in bad physical health, in horrible mental health, alone*‒how well I’ve done at all those things.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve tried hard.  I’m not one to big myself up very much, but I have worked hard all my life, trying to be a good son, a good friend, a good brother, a good husband, a good doctor, a good father.  Yet despite my sincere efforts and my reasonably high intelligence, here I am.

I suppose a lot of the disappointing outcome(s) is/are related to my ASD, both the heart-based one and the brain-based one, as well as my tendency (probably related to the preceding) to depression and some degree of low-grade paranoia.

By “low-grade” there, I mean that I don’t literally suspect that there are malicious forces plotting against me or trying to control me; I honestly don’t think highly enough of humans (or any other beings) to expect them to be capable of such things.  It would almost be reassuring if they were.

No, I mean I just have a general, global sense‒not just intellectually, but in my bones as it were, in my deep intuitions‒that I cannot rely upon anyone or upon anything, other than the laws of nature themselves (whatever their final version might be).  I don’t “trust” anyone or anything, including (one might even say “especially”) myself.  Everything is a calculated risk.

This is of course literally true for everyone, but I think most people hide from that fact most of the time, usually (but definitely not always) without terrible consequences.  I don’t know if that’s worse or better.  It may be more pleasant, but I suspect it’s misleading, and has been responsible for, or at least it has contributed to, many ills the human race has brought upon itself and upon others.

Whataya gonna do?  I guess you’re gonna do whatever you must, as they say, since it’s not as though you can do anything other than what you do once you’ve done it, and so it was all along what you were going to do, and so it was what you must do (or must have done).

I hope you have a good day and a good week.  I’ve tried to withhold my depression and negativity, with at least some degree of success‒trust me, I’ve withheld‒and I will continue to do so, because sharing it is pointless, and asking for help is laughable.

*Now, that phrase had some redundant notions, didn’t it?

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Thoughts meander like a restless Melkor in the Outer Void…

It’s Friday, and this week I can be thankful therefor, because I do not work tomorrow.  The office will be closed (and locked) on Saturday.  Only those who have keys and the alarm code and some other reason for being there would be there (I suppose someone could break in, but there are cameras and alarms in place, and there is nothing of any significant net value, i.e., value worth risking the alarms and cameras to reach, inside).

Next Friday won’t be as good from a strictly work/not work point of view, but at least it will be Friday the 13th again, for the second month in a row.  Then we will have to wait an average* of 7 years for it to happen that way again.

***

Okay, I guess I’ve always known that I’m weird, but I just wrote a series of footnotes about Friday the 13th and year lengths and lengths of weekly cycle recurrences that dwarfed what I had yet written in the main body of this post.  I think I’m probably the only being in the universe that would write about such things and imagine that anyone else would be interested.

Yeah, definitely weird.

Still, I guess that sort of thing just happens when you talk to yourself in print and share it with any interested parties who might stumble upon it.  Also, when one is without companions or interactions one can, like Melkor, develop thoughts and thought patterns that are unlike those of one’s brethren.

I suppose that can sometimes be a good thing, though it can also sometimes be a very bad thing (rarely as bad as in the fictional Melkor case).  Though all improvement is change, most change is not an improvement‒at least not if it’s not deliberate and directed change.  So if one develops thoughts that are significantly divergent from those of all of one’s peers, odds are that they will not be a net improvement over most of the peer-born thoughts.

I have, of course, mitigated against this somewhat by reading a lot (and consuming other media that deal with science and mathematics and philosophy and such, as well as comedy panel shows).  That’s not randomly chosen reading, either; it’s carefully chosen reading.  I think this has helped improve the general content and tendencies of my thought, because I’ve influenced myself with the carefully thought-out thoughts of very bright people.

I suppose, though, that if one can read what one wants and does so, one is not really isolated from all other thoughts, so one’s own cannot be too very different, or at least are not very likely to be.  That’s good, I think.  Simply developing new thoughts without much input from others would be most likely to lead to some sort of feral state or something akin to schizophrenia.  

So, I guess it can be good to take tangents in one’s thinking, as long as they are not too many and too extreme.  But even given that, it’s clearly useful to have someone to rein one in, if one can, when one goes too far off the rails (yes, that’s a bad metaphor, since a train going off the rails at all is in huge trouble, rails representing a near-binary situation‒if one is a train and one is not on the rails completely, one has experienced a failure of locomotion).

Well, I guess that’s that for this week.  Actually, I suppose that is always that, by some principle of identity or self-reflection or something; I’m sure there’s an “official” name.  “It is what it is” as they say.  What I mean, though, is that I am drawing this post, and this week of posts, to a close now.

I hope you have a very good weekend.

After that I don’t give a shit.

(I’m kidding.)

*I know, I know, we won’t have to wait an average number of anything.  There is a specific and exact number of years before the next time February and March have Fridays the 13th, but I cannot be arsed to work it out just now**.

**Okay, well, since I am unable to keep myself from thinking about it at least a little, I think it’s going to be 6 years from now.  That’s because each regular year is 1 day longer than a multiple of a week:  365/7 is 52 with a remainder of 1, so one day longer than an even number of weekdays.  So next February should have the 13th on a Saturday, then a Sunday the following year, but then on a Tuesday the year after that because of the leap year (366/7 is 52 with remainder 2).  Then it will be Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday.  So 6 years, if my figuring is correct***.

***If it seems counterintuitive that it’s 6 years when the average should be 7, remember that while in this case the leap year makes the next instance come faster, there will be occasional years when Thursday the 13th falls on a leap year and the following year will go straight to Saturday the 13th, the first of another six years (I think) that will be needed for the subsequent Friday the 13th in February.  In any case, 6 plus (6 x ⅙) equals 7, as does 6 + (a x 1/a) no matter what a is****.

****This doesn’t factor in those leap years in which February has a Friday the 13th, but March will not.  That may change the overall calculations somewhat regarding the average time between dual Fridays the 13th, but not the calculations about when the next one will be.

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A notification of whatever

I expect this post to be brief today, though I’ve been known to be wrong about that sort of thing.  I had sort of “intended” to make my headline “Oh, well, whatever…” and then make the entire body of the post “…never mind.”  Thus I would be quoting the last verse-line of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.  The subsequent words in the song are just the chorus and then a refrain of “A denial” repeated nine times (if memory serves).

I wasn’t sure I hadn’t already done this before, though.  I could have checked, but I didn’t have the mental energy.

Still, using that last line from a Kurt Cobain song carries a certain subtext which would have served my purposes well.

Or, well, actually, given past history, it probably wouldn’t have served my purposes at all.  None of this sort of thing seems to serve my purpose, no matter what I do.  As far as I can tell, only one person actually read my (admittedly somewhat long) post yesterday, but though I was borderline explicit about my meaning, I don’t think it did any good whatsoever.  That’s not unusual, of course; much if not all that I do never ends up doing me much good.

Sometimes I have to be subtle because I cannot force myself to be open about my internal states after a lifetime of fighting to appear “normal”, to the degree I can achieve that, and to avoid being too much trouble for other people, since I don’t think I have the right to trouble them, and in fact I think (or feel) that I’m fundamentally reprehensible.

I shouldn’t worry, though.  The times I am more open and obvious‒even when I am borderline explicit‒don’t appear to be any more successful than when I am at my most cryptic.  Possibly, I am just not able to communicate my feelings effectively with humans.

At the very least, my success rate must be below one percent.  It’s not quite as bad as playing the lottery, but it’s pretty pathetic.  Then again, so am I.

Whatever.  Never mind.  Ha ha.

But really, though, I don’t have much to say.  Quoting iconic songs may be the extent of my capacity to convey myself.

Ironically, I don’t feel the urge to share quotes from my own songs (or my fiction).  You would think they would be the best choice for conveying my inner thoughts.  That’s not always the case, though.

In fact, though I like my songs well enough, and Breaking Me Down is meant to be fairly explicitly about depression (at least my species thereof), none of them have enough oomph, as it were.  Or maybe it’s just that they are not well known*, so no one recognizes and identifies with the words.

I think I have some pretty good lines in Come Back Again, including what’s probably my favorite:

“Only meeting strangers

always losing friends.

Every new beginning

always ends.”

It may seem a bit bleak, but it’s also true more or less by definition.  If you’re meeting someone for the first time, they had been a stranger until that point.  And friends do become “lost”.  And the next two lines are rather obviously true.

Of course, a very good signing (singing?) off quote would be from Pink Floyd’s Time:  “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.”

I’ve always been annoyed that they added the little reprise of Breathe after that and made it officially part of the song, because those other two lines constitute a perfect song ending.  I always figured they didn’t want to make the song end on too much of a downer, so they threw in the reprise as part of that song instead of as a separate one.  Maybe they were unwittingly invoking a version of the peak-end rule I mentioned the other day.

Anyway, I have a locked and loaded draft of a blog post that already applies that couplet from Time, with the headline being the first half, continuing into the post which consists only of the second half of that quote, followed by the embedded “video” of the final song on the first album of The Wall.

That, of course, is still a draft, and has been waiting there for a while, because if I use it, it’s meant to be my final blog post, and practically my final anything.  So I wasn’t going to use it today.  Not quite.  But I’m close.  The Nirvana quote isn’t quite as final, but it is a warning, especially given the fate of the guy who wrote it.

Anyway, consider yourselves on notice.  On notice of what?

Figure it out.

*That’s an understatement, eh?

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Man overboard

As the real weekends go, it was better than most, to paraphrase The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  By this, I’m referring to this last weekend, the two days before this day, of course.

I did not work on Saturday, which is good, because that would have been the third time in a row.  I also got to hang out with my youngest on Saturday, and we watched about four episodes of Doctor Who together, which was good, good fun.  I cannot complain about that in any way.

I have though a weird, disquieting, sinking sort of feeling that it may have been the last time I will see my youngest, or maybe anyone else that I love.  It’s is not one of those reliable sorts of feelings, like those that lead one to new insights in science or mathematics or what have you.  It’s probably more a product of depression and anxiety, the feeling that anything good in my life is sure not to last, if it happens at all, because I do not and cannot possibly be worthy of anything good happening to me.

Is that irrational?  Of course it is irrational.  It cannot be expressed in any sense as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how many digits they may have.

Wait, wait, let me think about that.  My thought, my feeling, was expressed above finitely.  That is, of course, a shorthand for what is really happening, but even if one were to codify those processes down to the level of each molecular interaction that affects any neural/hormonal process that contributes to my feeling, we know that must be a finite description (though it could, in principle, be quite large).

Even if we’re taking the full spectrum of quantum mechanics into account when describing my mental state, we know that quantum mechanics demands a minimum resolvable distance and time (the Planck length and the Planck time) below which any differentiation is physically meaningless.

A finite amount of information can describe the events and structures and processes in any given finite region of spacetime.  In fact, the maximum amount of information in any given region of spacetime is measured by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of an event horizon that would span exactly that region, as seen from the outside*.

Any finite amount of information can be encoded as a finite number of bits, which can of course be “translated” to any other equivalent code or number system.  So, really, though the contents of my mind are, in principle, from a certain point of view, unlimited, they are finite in their actual, instantiated content, and can therefore certainly be expressed as an integer, and thus also as a ratio (since any integer could be considered a ratio of itself over one, or twice itself over two, etc.).

So, in that sense, my thoughts are not irrational.  Neener, neener, neener.

In many other senses—maybe not the literal, original sense, but in the horrified, cannot accept that not all numbers can be expressed as ratios of integers because that makes the universe too inconceivable, sense, among others—I can be quite irrational.

It’s very difficult to fight one’s irrationality from the inside, alone.  Even John Nash didn’t really beat his schizophrenia from within as shown in the movie version of A Beautiful Mind.  Also, his delusions in real life were far more extravagant and bizarre than those which appear in the sanitized version that made a good Hollywood story.

If one escapes from mental illness from within, one has to consider it largely a matter of luck, like a young child who doesn’t know anything about math getting a right answer on a graduate level, high order differential equation problem.  It’s physically possible; heck, if it were a multiple choice question, it might even be relatively common***.  But it’s not a matter of being able to choose to do it right and to know how it was done.

Severe mental health issues are going to need to receive assistance from outside, almost always.  This is not an indictment of them or of the need for help.

Surely, someone who has been swept off the deck of a ship by a rogue wave cannot be faulted for needing help from those still on the ship of they are to survive.  It would certainly seem foolish and almost inevitably fruitless if such a person tried to claw his way up the side of the ship to get back on board when there is no ladder and no handholds.  He should certainly not be ashamed that he cannot swim hard enough to launch himself bodily from the water and back onto the surface of the vessel.

One cannot reasonably fault such a person for trying to do the superhuman.  A person might try to do practically anything rather than drown or be eaten alive by some marine predator.  But, of course, barring an astonishing concatenation of events such as the time-reverse of the splashing entry into the ocean happening and sending the person out of the sea just as it was entered, such efforts will not succeed.

And though it might be heartening or at least positive for one to receive encouragement from those still on the deck—don’t drown, keep treading water, you can do it, you’ll make people sad if you drown, you deserve to stay afloat, I’m proud of you for treading water yet another day, it’ll get better, this won’t last forever, you’ve made it this far so you know you can keep going, you don’t want the people who know you to feel sad because you drowned, etc.—in the end it might as well come from the seagulls waiting to pick at one’s floating corpse.

Mind you, certain kinds of words can be more useful than others.  Words like, “Hey, around the other side of the ship there’s a built-in ladder; if you can get over there and time things right, you might be able to grab the lowest rung when the waves lift you, and then climb up,” might be useful because they are directions for using real, tangible resources that we know can make a difference.  Also, words like, “Hang on just a bit longer, we’re throwing down a life preserver on a rope so we can haul you up” would be useful, obviously, unless they were mere “comforting” lies.

Alas, though one could reasonably expect such literal assistance if one were washed overboard—the “laws” of the sea are deeply rooted in the hearts of those who work there, and they include a general tendency to help anyone adrift to the best of one’s abilities—when it comes to mental illness, the distress and the problems are difficult for others to discern and easy to ignore.  Calls of distress are often experienced as annoyances, and even treated with contempt, since those hearing them cannot readily perceive that they themselves might be similarly washed overboard at any time.

But, of course, they might be.

I don’t know how I got on this tangent, but I guess I never really do.  I just go where my mind takes me, and my mind is not a reliable driver.  It is, though, a reliable narrator.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  Nothing does.

Anyway, here we go again into another work week, because that was what we did last week.  I wish I could offer you better reasons, but I’m really only good at breaking things down, destroying things, not at lifting anyone or anything up.  That comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers.

*From within an event horizon, the volume could be much larger than the spacetime that seems to be enclosed from the outside, because spacetime inside the horizon is massively curved and stretched.  It’s conceivable (at least to me) that there could be infinite space** within, at least along the dimension(s) of maximum stretch, just as there is infinite surface area to a Gabriel’s Horn, but only finite volume.

**See, mathematically, one can stuff infinite space inside a nutshell.  Hamlet was right.  He often was.

***Perhaps this explains why certain types of mental health problems can respond well to relatively straightforward interventions, and even to more than one kind of intervention with roughly comparable success, e.g., CBT and/or basic antidepressants and such.  These relatively tractable forms of depression are the “multiple choice problem” versions of mental illness.  This does not make them any less important.

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“Like”, “comment”, and “share” (if you feel like it)

I’m very tired this morning.  By which I mean I’m more tired even than usual.  My head is a bit foggy—more so than usual, again—and I feel like I just belong lying down inert, perhaps in an open-topped coffin.  I’ve occasionally thought that they looked like good places to sleep.  It seems a shame to waste them on people who are already dead.

It’s Wednesday today, and I don’t think I’m going to have anything nearly as thoughtful to say as what I wrote yesterday, which was at least rather “deep” if not particularly useful or helpful or interesting to any of my readers.  I did get an interested comment on my take on one of the reasons mindfulness is useful, and that’s always nice.  I’d love to encourage greater feedback from more of my readers, here on the site in the comments, but I don’t know what to do to encourage them [I decided just to do a little cajoling in the headline, in case that works].

Probably there is just some percentage of people who tend to comment, no matter the situation.  It’s a bit like the long-known “fact” (which may or may not be a true fact) that every advertisement, from flyers/mailings to commercials, actually elicit a response in only about two percent of people who interact with it.  I suspect it’s probably similar with things related to blogging and social media and the like.

One sees it most readily on places like YouTube.  The number of views of a video is almost always something like an order of magnitude greater than the number of likes (and often it’s larger than the number of subscribers), and that’s still larger, though by a ratio that’s not as clear to me, than the number of people who comment (let alone share).

My own YouTube videos (and those of my published songs) are poor examples, or perhaps one might say “poor samples”, not representative of the phenomenon as a whole.  I have a number of “views” on my music videos that is generally a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of “likes”, but I know why that is.

Almost all of those views are from me, because I put my songs in my YouTube music playlist, and so I have listened to them often, back when I used to ride my scooter to work and back.  I had a lovely Bluetooth enabled helmet.  I like to listen to songs and sing along in a car, or similar, when I’m on my way places*.  So I’ve listened to my own songs probably orders of magnitude more times than everyone else put together has listened to any of my songs.

It’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?  I’m also the one who has bought more copies of my books—because I gave copies to the people in the office—than everyone else put together, I’m fairly sure.

As for this blog, well, I get a higher number of likes relative to number of readers than I do with anything else, and I even recently have been getting a comment or so most days, which is very nice.  There’s at least some interaction.  It would be nice if I could reach a larger audience, but I’m not terribly good at self-promotion.  I am pretty good at self-denigration, though.  In fact, I’m one of the best there is at it!

Ha ha.

Well, like the song says, it’s all just a drop of water in an endless sea.  Or, it’s all just spit in the ocean** as more people probably say.  My spit may be more purulent than average, but it’s all still just spit.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to discuss today.  I’m very tired and worn out and I’m in ongoing pain that only responds somewhat to all the mitigating things I try to do, at least so far.  I’ve been through a quarter of a century of trying, and I have not been passive nor uncreative nor ignorant in my attempts.  As those reading might notice, I’ve thought about this matter a lot.  You probably would also if you were in chronic pain for nearly half of your life (so far).  It has a way of garnering your attention.  It’s built that way.

It’s interesting to note that shortly after I’m sixty, if I’m still alive***, I will have been in essentially constant pain for half my life.  After that it will become a majority (unless I’m cured at some point along the way, of course).

I occasionally (not often, though, because it’s too disheartening) wonder what my life would be like, what I would be like, if not for my chronic pain.

Things would almost certainly be vastly different.  I cannot be certain that they would be better—there are probably at least a few things that would be worse.  But it seems likely that my life would be much better overall, if only because I wouldn’t have a huge chunk of my will and energy stolen by being in pain all the time.  That constant pain really does make everything else harder.

But no matter the state of the rest of my life, at least one thing would be true (by “definition” in this case), and that is that I would not be in pain every fucking day of my stupid useless life.

Surely that must be worth something.  It would not be worth not having my children exist, but almost everything else would be worth trading.  I sometimes think of it as parallel to a line from Me and Bobby McGee:  “I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”  It’s nice poetry, albeit a bit weird to think about temporally.  But in my case, I think of it as basically saying I would gladly give up some significant fraction of what would otherwise have been my future if I could be out of pain.

But, of course, my future is less valuable to me now at least partly because I am in pain.  If I were not in pain, ironically, the future would be much more valuable, since it would be at least somewhat less uncomfortable.  If I could be free of depression, and the tendency thereto, that would make things better still.  That might even constitute a future worth having.

Yeah, yeah, I know, wishes, horses, manure, beggars riding, dogs and cats living together, watermelon, cantaloupe, rutabaga, yada, yada, yada.  I’m wasting my time and yours.  And I’m writing too much, because I’m using the lapcom, and I’m not saying or doing (or being) anything at all worth saying or doing or being.  This is all just stupid.

I hope you all at least have a good day.  I would not mind if this were my last one.

*I can’t do it anymore because I don’t ride or drive anywhere anymore, so I am not “alone” when commuting anymore.  I’m also not alone at the house.  It’s really quite disappointing.  I like to sing.

**This is a bit amusing:  I made a typo when I first wrote that phrase, and it was rendered as “spit is the ocean”, which seems almost like some vaguely deep thought about how oceans are lived in, swum in, excreted in, and bled in by numerous living creatures.

***Right now that seems a horrifying prospect.

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May the slope of your pain function always be negative

I’ve been thinking about something I wrote in my blog post yesterday.  I had thrown out the thought, in passing, about how it seemed as though all the things in my life that I still do are not things I necessarily do for joy or out of desire to achieve some goal, but rather they are things which are more painful not to do than to do, and so I do them.

There isn’t really a positive motivation—not the pursuit of happiness or improvement or fulfillment or enrichment.  It’s just that the feeling of stress and tension and anxiety (or whatever) regarding the prospect of, for instance, not going to work rapidly becomes worse than the equivalent feelings about going to work.

That’s not a great state of affairs.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s entirely natural.  I’ve written about this many times, this recognition of the fact that the negative experiences—fear, pain, revulsion, disgust, and so on—are the biologically most important ones.  Creatures that don’t run from danger, that don’t avoid injury, that don’t shy away from potential infection and poison, are far less likely to survive to reproduce than creatures that do those things.

We see clinical examples of people lacking some of these faculties—such as those with congenital insensitivity to pain—and while we might envy them a life without agony, it tends to be quite a short life.  Also, they tend to become immobile and deformed due to damage they do to their joints by not shifting position to improve blood flow.

In case you didn’t know, that’s one of the reasons you can’t stand completely still for very long; it’s not good for you.

But many of us, especially in the modern world, have some things that we do for positive experience.  Some of them are dubious, but food, sex, companionship/conversation, singing, dancing, all that stuff, are positive things.  Unfortunately, positive experience cannot be allowed—by biology—to last too long.

As Yuval Harari noted, a squirrel that got truly lasting satisfaction from eating a nut would be a squirrel that lived a very short—albeit fairly happy—life, and would be unlikely to leave too many offspring.

Maybe this is what happens to some drug addicts.  Maybe they really do get satisfaction or at least pleasure from drugs—and maybe that is what ends up destroying them.  At some level, that’s not truly in question, is it?  People who are addicted to drugs forego other pleasures and other positive things, but perhaps more importantly, they fail to avoid many sources of pain and fear and injury.

The reality is probably a bit of an amalgam, I suppose.  I would not say it’s a quantum superposition, though, except in the sense that everything is a quantum superposition (or, rather, a whole bunch of them).

This is one situation in which I think I’m right and Roger Penrose is wrong—a bold claim, but I think a fair one—in that I see no reason to suspect that the nature of consciousness either requires or even allows quantum processes, other than in the trivial sense that everything* involves quantum processes.  But there’s no reason seriously to think that (for instance) neurotubules can even sustain a quantum superposition internally, let alone that such a process can somehow affect the other processes of the neuron, many of which are well understood and show no sign of input from weird states of neurotubules, which act mainly structurally in neurons.

If deep learning systems—LLMs and the like—have demonstrated anything, it’s that intuitive thought** does not require anything magical, but rather can be a product of carefully curated, pruned, and adjusted networks of individual data processing units, feeding backward and forward and sideways in specific (but not necessarily preplanned or even well understood) ways.  No quantum magic or neurological voodoo need be involved.

I think too many people, even really smart people like Penrose, really want human intelligence to be something “special”, to be something that cannot be achieved except within human heads, and maybe in the heads of similar creatures.  Surely (they seem to believe) the human mind must have some pseudo-divine spark.  Otherwise, we oh-so-clever humans are just…just creatures in the world, evolved organisms, mortal and evanescent like everyone and everything else.

Which, of course, all the evidence and reasoning seems to suggest is the case.

Maybe, deep down, there isn’t much more to life than trying to choose the path from moment to moment that steers you toward the least “painful” thing you can find.

Please note, I’m not speaking here about some metaphorical continuum, some number line that points toward pleasure in one direction and pain in the other.  That’s at best a toy model.  In the actual body, in the actual nervous system, pain and fear and pleasure and motivation are literally separate systems, though clearly they interact.  Pleasure is not merely the absence of pain, nor is pain merely the absence of pleasure.  Even peripherally, the nerves that carry painful sensations (which include itching, as I noted yesterday!) use different paths and different neurotransmitters than the ones that deal in pleasure and positive sensation.

Within the brain, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (for instances) are separate structures—and more importantly, they perform different functions.  There’s nothing magical about their locations in the brain or the particular neurotransmitters they use.  Those things are accidents of evolutionary past.

There’s nothing inherently stimulating about epinephrine, and there’s nothing inherently soothing about endorphins or oxytocin, and there’s nothing inherently motivating or joyful about dopamine and serotonin.  They are all just molecular keys that have been forged to open specific “locks” or activate (or inactivate) specific processes in parts of other nerve cells (and some other types of cells).  It’s the process that does the work, Neo, not the neurotransmitter.

This brings up a slight pet peeve I have about people discussing “dopamine seeking” (often when talking about ADHD).  I know, the professionals probably use this as a mere shorthand, but that can be misleading to the relatively numerous nonprofessionals in the world.  The brain is not just a chemical vat.  Depression and the like are not just “chemical imbalances” in some ongoing multi-level redux reaction or something, they are malfunctions of complicated processes.  Improving them should be at least as involved as training an AI to recognize cat faces, wouldn’t you think?

But one can do the latter without really knowing the specifics of what is going on in the system.  It’s just sometimes difficult, and the things you think you need to train toward or with often end up giving you what you didn’t really want, or at least what you didn’t expect.

Maybe this is part of why mindfulness is useful (it’s not the only part).  With mindfulness, one actually engages in internal monitoring, not so much of the mechanical processes happening—no amount of mere meditation can reveal the structure of a neuron—but of the higher-scale, “emergent” processes happening, and one can learn from them and be better aware.  This can be an end in and of itself, of course.  But it can also at least sometimes help people decrease the amount of suffering they experience in their lives.

Speaking of that, I hope that reading this post has been at least slightly less painful for you than not reading it would have been.  Writing it has been less painful than I imagine not writing it would have been.  That doesn’t help my other chronic pain, of course, which continues to act up.

*With the possible exception of gravity.

**I.e., nonlinear processing and pattern recognition, the kind many people including Penrose think cannot be explained by ordinary computation, a la Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, etc.

 

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Happy Valentine’s Day, you filthy animals.

Well, guess what.  It’s Saturday now, and I’m writing a blog post, which can only mean that I am working today.  At the last minute, the schedule of the office was changed and now we’re working.  And we’re supposedly going to be doing this now every other (meaning alternating ones) Saturday.  But, of course, I worked last Saturday.  And who knows how things will change in the future?  I’m pretty sure not even the boss knows, because he changes the specifics somewhat irregularly, though there are always colorably reasonable purposes behind such changes.

I suppose I could merely have said, “No, I’m not coming in this weekend.  I worked last weekend, I had to walk to the bank after work and I caused my knees and my pain in general to flare up badly, and that problem continues.  I need a fucking break.”  But, of course, I’m not really built quite that way.  I have been too strongly trained to operate on the approach that to shirk going to work is to be a jerk*.

So, here I am, at the office, and it’s the middle of the night.  That’s right, when it got to be time to leave, I was in too much pain to want to ride the train‒it’s not comfortable to sit in, and I usually have to go to the upper levels to find a seat, which is a little exacerbating and occasionally exasperating‒and I didn’t want to pay to Uber back to the house like I did on Monday and then Thursday for the above reasons, so…I stayed here in the office overnight.

I’m tired of being in pain, I can tell you that.  I wish it were the sort of thing one could simply “get used to”, but biology does not tend to select for creatures that can get used to and ignore pain.  That would defeat the whole usefulness of pain.  Make no mistake:  like fire alarms, pain was and is (and probably always will be) terribly useful.  And “terribly” has more than one legitimate meaning here.

The trouble is that in the modern world, we suffer from and yet survive injuries and disorders that would almost never have been survived by our ancestors, and we can live on with the consequences of these injuries and illnesses for decades, but our nervous systems don’t have any clear function that suppresses or diminishes pain after a while.  There’s no selection pressure favoring such a thing.  Even for our ancestors who might have survived to have chronic pain, that problem tended to develop after peak reproductive years had already passed, and so evolution literally could not and cannot detect the issue.

Indeed, it’s just barely conceivable, though by no means demonstrated, that it might be good for male humans who have injuries that hamper them to feel the pain worsen, to have it lead to them removing themselves from the population in one way or another.  When they can no longer be physical providers, in order to increase the share of resources for their offspring and their other kin, they can kill themselves, directly or indirectly, giving the genes they share with close relatives that harbor that tendency a selective advantage.  This is hypothetical, bordering on speculative, but it might make some sense.

This could also be related to female humans being better suited to endure long-term pain than males, since matrilineal support among human tribes is common***, but that’s getting ever more speculative.

Don’t get me wrong; the ideas are plausible.  But it’s just when one’s ideas are strongly plausible‒but not specifically tested or backed by clear and specific evidence‒that one must be especially harsh and strict with oneself.  It’s comparatively simple, and psychologically rewarding, to come up with plausible and logical hypotheses, but even if one is very smart, most of one’s hypotheses are going to be incorrect.  Whether you’re more Popperian or more Bayesian, the crucial usefulness of testing a hypothesis to try to refute it or to see how your credences shift is inescapable.

This mildly interesting digression doesn’t change the fact that I am in searing pain lately, and it doesn’t seem to diminish much for long.  I’m already prone to dysthymia/chronic depression (veering into the acute stage frequently) and anxiety with at least some obsessive compulsive patterns, all of it occurring in a nervous system that is…atypical from the start.

I hate the world.  I hate my body.  I hate the twisted mockery my life has become.  I hate large parts of my mind (but not all of it).  I hate being around people.  I hate being alone.  I really just ought to stop the whole fucking ride and get off.  I just need to work up the nerve and the commitment.  I’m getting there, believe me.

Anyway, I hope you’re having just a lovely Valentine’s Day.

*And to rhyme all the time is to act like a slime and be covered with grime**.

**I know, none of that makes sense.  It’s not really meant to make sense.  I just accidentally did some internal rhyming in a sentence and that stimulated me to do more of it.

***There are good biological reasons for this as well.  Mothers, and therefore maternal grandmothers, all know whether a child is their child or not, so it’s easier to know that it’s a good idea to spend effort and resources on those descendants.  Males, in general, can not be as certain.