mental-illness

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.

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By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death will blog the doctor too.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so—as I mentioned yesterday that I would—I’m writing a standard blog post.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber right now, but I’m using my laptop, and that combination is a first for me, I think.  I know that taking Ubers is probably an unjustifiable expense, and I mean to cut back on them, but this week I’ve had very little useful energy*, and anyway, I’m only too happy just to burn through the quite small amount of money that I have, since I have no reason to save for the future.

I was briefly puzzled as I did the initial “save” for this document, since I save my blogs by date and day of the week, when I saw that last year the 23rd of May fell on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday.  Each year generally shifts the day (of the week) of any given date one day later than the previous year, since a standard year is one day longer than a multiple of 7: [52 x 7 = 364].  I think that the official mathematical term is “modulo” when you’re just looking at the remainder.  And I vaguely recall noting, earlier this year, that the dates this year were one day later.

But, of course, this is a leap year, in which we “add” a day to the year, specifically on February 29th.  So it makes sense:  early in the year, this year’s dates are one weekday later than they were last year, but after the end of February, they are two days later.  I suppose that means that next January and February will be two days later than they were this year, but after that things will revert to one day later.

Hold on to your hats, folks!  If the whole blog post is this exciting, goodness knows how you’re going to be able to stand it.

It’s a bit tricky writing in the back seat here, because my laptop computer doesn’t have illuminated keys.  When the bouncing around of the car throws me off too much, I have to re-find my typing location by trial and error.  Once I do, I don’t really need to be able to see; I know my way around the keyboard pretty much by proprioception.  After all, I’ve been typing at least since I was eleven.

Not to say that I don’t make plenty of typos.  My coordination isn’t all that great, and I often get ahead of myself.  But at least with modern word processors, it’s so easy to correct for errors that it’s not a big deal.

Actually, I suspect that if I’d been forced to keep using my grandmother’s typewriter, which is what I used to start my typing career, and on which I needed to use correction film to erase mistakes, I would probably be a better, or at least cleaner, typist than I am now.  Once word processing programs came into play, there was no longer as much of a price to pay for minor errors, and so there was less pressure to be more accurate.  As I’ve noted many times, everything responds to local pressures and incentives and disincentives.

I warned you that this might be exciting, didn’t I?

I almost didn’t go in to work today.  That was why I let myself get the Uber:  to help me to clear that activation energy barrier.  I am not particularly physically sick, though I feel a bit of a tickle in the back of my throat.  I just didn’t want to go in.  Yesterday, all day, I was extremely tense and stressed out, and the noise was particularly irksome, and I had payroll to do, and I was always just sliding along what felt like the razor edge of a true breakdown or explosion.  Yet no one seems to have noticed.

I banged my head on the wall quite hard at one point, and did several other things to cause myself pain throughout the day.  I don’t want to go into specifics too much; I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo or something.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Anyway, I’ve actually just arrived at the office.  I hope my hands and thumbs won’t feel too sore, today.  Yesterday, my thumb bases were painfully tight, and most of the rest of my finger joints were sore and stiff, albeit to a lesser degree than the thumbs.  It made it quite difficult to try to play guitar, so I didn’t do much of that.

Actually, because of the trouble with my hands, and my shoulders, and of course, the ongoing issues with my back and hips and knees and ankles—especially with my back—I decided to buy a huge bottle of Ibuprofen, and I’ve taken some of them starting yesterday afternoon.

I have been “off” Ibuprofen for quite some time, now, though it was my go-to anti-inflammatory for many years.  I started to avoid it when its use was associated on two or three occasions—possibly just by coincidence—with a relatively high occurrence of what I presume were premature atrial contractions, with associated palpitations.  It was nothing terribly severe, of course, but at the time, I wanted to live, so I switched mainly to naproxen.

I also use some aspirin, as well as acetaminophen for headaches and other things that don’t benefit from any suppression of cyclooxygenase.  But, despite its longer action, naproxen has never worked quite as well as ibuprofen seemed to work, though perhaps that’s been confounded by other variables.  It’s hard to do a double-blind test on oneself.

In any case, at this point, I don’t much care if I get palpitations, although if they happen, maybe I’ll find them unpleasant enough that I’ll change my mind.  Frankly, I don’t mind if I have a full-fledged arrhythmia.  Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation, for instance, is probably one of the best ways to die.  You basically just faint, since your brain is no longer getting blood flow, and that’s that.  If no one defibrillates you, and if the arrhythmia doesn’t spontaneously resolve, you’re done.

It’s probably not quite as quick a death as being at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion, and it’s certainly not as quick as being obliterated when the vacuum energy of the universe quantum tunnels down to a lower level**, since that process would spread throughout the cosmos at the speed of light, and no information within spacetime can exceed the speed of light, so it’s fundamentally impossible to know such an event is happening before it arrives.  It’s also impossible to know about it once it arrives, since everything currently existing in our universe, right down to fundamental particles, would by obliterated by the vacuum state decay—again, at the speed of light, which is far faster than the rate at which the nervous system can experience anything.

Unfortunately, even more than the thermonuclear explosion possibility, vacuum decay would involve taking other, “innocent” people along with me, at least some of whom both wish and deserve to continue living.  That seems a bit unethical—or at least rude, which I sometimes think is worse—and anyway, it’s not as though anyone knows how to make it happen.

It’s better to keep things confined to my person.

I guess even a hemorrhagic stroke wouldn’t be too bad, to be honest, and given my tendency to bang my head against the wall when I get too frazzled and stressed, it seems immensely more likely than vacuum state collapse.  I suppose I could even tolerate death by bleeding ulcer, though I really don’t like nausea***.

Probably, though, in the end, I’m going to have to take a more active and deliberate hand in things.  I suppose we’ll see.  It’s hard to work up the courage to face the discomfort and even frank pain associated with most such interventions, but practice makes better, and I already have a fair amount of experience deliberately causing myself pain, as noted above.

That’s enough blog post for now.  I’ve already droned on and on.  My tentative plan is to do some fiction writing tomorrow morning, and if I do (or even if I don’t) I plan to leave a little report about it here.  I am off work this weekend, so I won’t be writing anything on Saturday (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I truly, honestly, and fervently hope that each and every one of you feels better than I do right now, and I mean substantially better.  You probably do; it seems likely that, in the phase space of physical and emotional states, there are many more possibilities in that direction than in the other.  But I could be wrong.

TTFN

Addendum:  While editing, I found that MS Word had underlined a sentence in the draft above, in which I wrote, “I think that the official mathematical term is….”  The editor gave the comment that “expressing opinions with certainty adds formality”.  I don’t think I could possibly disagree more than I do with that sentence. 

Bad advice in editor marked up

 PLEASE DON’T DO THAT, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  Opinions are opinions.  Expressing them with certainty when you are not certain is tantamount to outright lying, and is a huge problem with human discourse!  I’m ashamed of MS Word for making that suggestion.  What a horrible, horrible recommendation!  What a nightmarish thing to say!

*And yet, my level of tension has been exceptionally high.  That’s a frustrating bit of irony, as I probably don’t need to tell you.

**This is purely a hypothetical possibility.  The vacuum energy of the universe may well be at its lowest/ground state, though it is patently not quite zero.  If it were, cosmic expansion would not be accelerating.  Indeed, I often say that cosmic inflation is happening now, based on all the data we have.  That’s what “dark energy” is doing, albeit at a slower rate than what is proposed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago.

***Weird, right?  I don’t like nausea?  How unusual!

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Mishegas from a misanthropic, moribund, misbegotten former Michigander

It’s very early on Tuesday morning, and I’m already at the office.  I’m not going to be writing any fiction today, unless you count any pretense I make at coherence here in this blog post.

I had a very bad sleep last night, despite taking some diphenhydramine*.  I felt relatively optimistic at the beginning of the week (yesterday), with thoughts of reading some science and/or mathematics and/or other books when there was occasional downtime.  But then, of course, people arrived at the office and started talking and making other noise, and then the “music” was started, and I could not concentrate.

And, back at the house, the air conditioning and fan were, perforce, churning, since it’s quite hot and humid around here.  That’s better than the office noise, because at least it’s steady and sort of “white noise”, but it’s still physically irritating in the small, confined space of my room, especially accompanying, as it does, my now-bilateral tinnitus.

“‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’ spake then the apostate angel, ‘this the site, that we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom for that eternal light?'”

Nah, I’ll pass.

I’m trying to be optimistic, or at least to be upbeat.  I’m trying very hard to act as if I’m doing better–playing guitar, writing fiction–in hopes that it will become real.  “Dream that what is dreamed will be.”  I know that I can physically endure, if necessary…but for what purpose, to what end?  It’s just a cycle from dreary to noisy to lonely to turbulent to idiotic to angry to absurd back to dreary and so on, all set against a landscape of chronic pain and self-loathing, accompanied by a constant, high-pitched whine (and no, I don’t mean the fact that I’m whining about it, though I am).

I know, I know:  “Shut up, no one wants to hear about it, everyone has their own issues, just suck it up and walk it off and lather, rinse, repeat.  Everyone suffers, everyone has problems, everybody hurts, yada yada yada.”  This is supposed to, what…make a person want to stick around in the world?  Or is it a somewhat subtle way of encouraging someone just to get gone already, to leave the world to the vapid troglodytes?

I’m so tired.  I don’t have anything to which to look forward.  The only advantage of weekends, even, is that I don’t have to deal with the foolishness and the overhead noise in the office…but then I don’t really do anything on the weekends, either.  I can’t even seem to read, now.  My brain is frazzled and fried and other words beginning with “f”.

Hmm…let’s see…

Fudge’s face froze, feeling forsaken from fair freedom’s fiefdom, foundering forlornly, foully fettered, finding few facts, fearing fundamental farragoes, fleeting facets fabricated from Facebook**.

Oh, for fuck’s fake***!  I need to stop.  Is it any wonder I don’t have people with whom to hang out?  Is it any wonder that eventually even people who love me find it better to do so from a distance?  I, at least, don’t find it surprising.  I don’t even like my own company, honestly, and I’m often driven to punish myself in various ways when I get too wound up…that way, at least, I don’t go off on other people.

I don’t have any idea what I’m trying to accomplish here today, other than perhaps to convey the message, “Look, I wrote a blog post today, even though I didn’t write any fiction!”  Also, I suppose, to try to let people know that I’m slowly, and perhaps subtly, crashing.  It’s a bit (I imagine) like trying to stay above the surface of a vast body of a very viscous liquid that nevertheless has a specific gravity much lower than water.  One cannot float on it, anymore than one could float on the surface of gasoline, but the process of sinking is a slow one (because of the viscosity), so one can “swim” or “tread liquid” to stay on the surface, but it requires constant effort, and the stickiness makes it harder, and there’s no land in sight.

Oh, well.  Life doesn’t promise anyone a rose garden.  Even if one gets a rose garden, there are always thorns (or, technically, according to botanists, “prickles”, but “Every rose has its prickle” doesn’t work as well as a lyric).

A hemlock garden would be better.  If the umbels are tall and fair, one might even encounter Tinúviel dancing among them to a pipe unseen.  And I hear the plant can be used to make an interesting tea, though no man (or plucked chicken) tends to drink it more than once.

All right, all right, that’s enough nonsense.  Sorry.  Have a good day.

*I originally wrote that as “diphenhydrazine”, which is a peculiar typo to make–would that be rocket fuel with a benzyl ring attached at each end of every molecule?

**Sorry.  The ending of the previous comment made me want to see if I could write an entire long sentence in which every word begins with “f” and that nevertheless at least makes some form of sense, grammatically if in no other way.

***Use this last “f” as an archaically written “s”, such as one can sometimes see in old English documents, e.g., “feveral”.

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Tuesday report: May 14, 2024 AD (or CE)

Well, I’ve written 1,419 words of fiction this morning already, having decided again that I would write at least one full page and then going beyond that.  I could’ve written even more, but I didn’t want to bother, and I figured I’d write a quick blog post/report for the day during the rest of my commute.  I’m not even going to change the base font to Calibri for this, since it’s just going to be converted on WordPress, anyway.

Extra Body is getting ever closer to its first-draft completion, though I doubt it will be finished this week.  Still, it shouldn’t be much later than that.  It’s rather absurd and pathetic that my “short story” is now over 38,000 words long.  This is despite me having missed quite a few days’ writing on and off.

I really don’t feel well, though.  I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me—though perhaps I should no longer think of such nights as bad “for me”, since they seem to happen so very often.  Anyway, I got significantly fewer than two hours of sleep, and I had to force myself not just to get up when my brief slumber had already started to fade, nearly an hour earlier than I eventually did (and less than an hour after I finally dropped off).

It’s maddening, and I was already mad enough when I started out—in the old-school sense of “mad”, meaning insane, not angry.  Though I really think of myself more as “unsane”, since I don’t think my mental health or my mental state has ever been what most people would consider normal.

I’m severely tired of all this.  Even despite now writing new fiction, I feel a constant, varying mixture of despair and apathy, seasoned with pain and tension, accompanied by the high-pitched whines of tinnitus.  I know, there are many worse situations for someone to need to endure, and many people endure them and have endured them.  But I have no purpose, no reason, no value, and no desire to endure or to find an answer.  I’ve spent so much time and effort already trying and failing to do those things; it doesn’t work.

So, like Extra Body, I think I’m nearing the end of my own story.  I don’t expect it to end before the first draft of Extra Body is completed, and maybe not even before the story is published.  But I don’t think it will be much longer than that, and I don’t expect to do anything significant with HELIOS.  I’m too tired.  I’m too discouraged.  I have no hope for a future that’s any better than my present, and I certainly don’t think I deserve one.

I suppose there will be further bulletins as events warrant, but I doubt anyone will care.  It really doesn’t matter whether I live or die, and I’m not sure that even “regular” readers will notice when I stop doing this.  Oh, well.

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No fiction again today

It’s only Wednesday morning, not Thursday, but again I’m writing a blog post.  I’m on my way into the office even earlier than yesterday, since my sleep and my tension level has been exceptionally bad, even for me.

I was going to work on Extra Body while riding in, but though I opened it in the Word app and started reading through what I wrote Monday, it was too difficult to follow and felt awkward on the phone.  Anyway, I should get to the office in plenty of time to work on it on the mini-laptop computer, which I did not bring with me from the office last night.  I left the quite late, yesterday, because we had things happen right at the end of the day, and I took an Uber back to the house, just as I’m taking an Uber in this morning 

I’m burning a fair amount of money on these Ubers, but it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement or anything.  I don’t expect to live long enough to retire, even if that were an option.

Another thing that added to my tension yesterday (and today) is that my coworker had to get some medical testing done yesterday, and so he was out after lunch and will probably be out at least this morning if not the entire day.  I don’t begrudge him his healthcare, of course.  I want him to be healthy, for his own sake and that of his family.  But it does make me more stressed out, especially on Wednesday (today), when I have to do payroll.  That’s a big part of why I’m going in so early, apart from the fact that I was awake anyway and just felt confined and disgusted in my room.  It’s much easier to do work that requires concentration when I’m the only one in the office.

It’s a strange thing, and it’s pretty contemptible, but I know a few people with serious health issues and several with moderate ones, and of course, as a doctor, I saw many people with serious and even terminal health problems‒and I sometimes envy these people.  I know, they suffer and/or suffered, obviously, and I don’t think that is enviable in and of itself.  But if I could take their illness into me, curing them and sickening myself, I think that would be a real multiple boon.  They could get their health back and decrease their expenses.  I in turn would be able to let myself stop trying; I would not be a big burden on society, because I would only want palliative care, just enough to control the pain as much as possible and bide the end.

It would be nice to be able to do some good by taking someone else’s illness, especially if that someone has close friends and family who would miss them.

Of course, that’s very silly and fanciful, and of course, it’s contemptible, but then I hold myself in contempt, anyway.  And I don’t think much better of the world at large, so it’s not like there’s much motivation to stay in it.  On an individual level, or a few at a time, people can be interesting and quite admirable, but when they come together in very large numbers, they rapidly reduce to the lowest level present in each aspect‒a higher-dimensional chain that is only as strong as its weakest link in each dimension of character, so to speak.  And there are so many people in the world that the lowest level on any given axis is very low indeed.

Anyway, I’m tired of the world, and of being tired, and of being in pain, and of not being able to rest.  It would be nice to see my kids again and be part of their lives, but I don’t believe that’s going to happen.  Maybe if I did have some terminal illness, that might trigger something, some final meeting or other, I don’t know.  But that’s a stupid and contemptible thought, as I said, and though I do find myself contemptible, I don’t like it.

***

I’m at the office now, but I don’t feel like writing any fiction.  I guess I should make sure to take home my laptop computer tonight, if I really plan to do any fiction writing tomorrow‒although, come to think of it, tomorrow is Thursday, so I should probably write my traditional blog post.  I guess I’ll do that.  But I can write it on the laptop computer, anyway.  That’s what I always used to do.

I was thinking of ordering some of those smaller spiral-bound notebooks, the six by nine ones, or whatever their specific measurements might be.  I have two of the bigger five-star notebooks, but I found that those were unwieldy, especially for the commute.  However, I did write Solitaire originally in a smaller spiral-bound notebook, and though it’s quite a dark tale, I think it’s one of my best-written stories.

Also, my thumb bases are hurting a lot even though I’m trying not to use the phone to write too much; they’re even hurting when using the regular computer keyboard to some degree, and my left thumb, hand, arm, and shoulder are particularly stiff and sore.  So maybe writing some things by (right) hand in a smaller spiral-bound notebook would be good.  I don’t know.

Sorry, I know this is all exceptionally lame and boring.  What I really ought to do is just stop writing anything at all, and stop doing anything at all, and just give up.  I make even myself sick; goodness knows how other people can tolerate me.

Anyway, I don’t think there’s much else to say today, though that doesn’t usually stop me.  If I do end up writing any fiction today, maybe I’ll make an addendum, but I don’t think I will.  I did doodle an anime style face yesterday, so I accomplished something at least mildly creative.  Huzzah for me, right?

I’m very tired.  But I’m not sleepy.  It’s a frustrating conundrum, and there’s no good reason to expect that nature is so arranged as to provide any solution to the problem.  Just ask the dinosaurs.

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Won’t you spring into silence with me?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of my old, traditional blog posts.  It’s also my second and the planned last blog post for this week.

In the morning, I entertained trying to write a post in the afternoon yesterday, and I even thought about it in the afternoon for a bit.  But there was just too much noise and irritation, and I couldn’t summon the concentration.  This is a bit similar to what often happens with my thoughts about studying during slow time at the office.  I consider it often, and in the morning, while I’m walking, if I’m listening to some science-oriented book, I think with truly eager anticipation about cracking open one of the texts I have at the office.

But the overhead noise and the people being late and saying silly things and all that just wears down my concentration.  I have to use all my energy just not to go berserk and/or leave the office.  Even when I am the one who chooses the overhead music playlist, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday, it’s not enough.  The only playlist I want is the original sound of silence, and I don’t mean the song by Simon and Garfunkel.  I mean silence, like that abyss between the stars I mentioned a few days ago.

There’s a reason Sailor Saturn is my favorite Sailor Senshi.  She’s the sailor of silence, the bringer of total destruction (and also rebirth, but no one’s perfect).

Anyway…

I walked to the train yesterday.  It was a good day for it, since it was relatively cool down here.  I also wrote a little over a thousand words on Extra Body, and that’s also good, of course.  I really find it tempting to want to write some on it every day, but I fear that I would lose my motivation if I did.  Also, as I’ve said before, this blog is my only frequent contact with the “outside world”, and my only personal “cry for help”, though that last part isn’t doing so well at its purpose‒which makes it pretty typical for things that I try, come to think of it.

The whole thing highlights one of the big problems with the various forms of serious mental illness:  The very nature of the problem significantly hinders the ability of the sufferer to seek or ask for, let alone to obtain, help.  If no outside person actually does anything, no assistance arrives, except perhaps after some true catastrophe, by which time it is often too late.

I suppose part of my problem in using this blog for that purpose is that I leave readers subject to the bystander effect.  Read about it.  It’s quite disheartening, and is yet another way the world sucks.  Basically, a person is more likely to help someone in need if he or she is the only one who can help.  When there are more people around, not only is each individual less likely to provide assistance, but the overall chance of anyone helping the person in need is less than if there was just one person to help.  At least, that’s if I recall the overall data about the effect well.

The most famous case of it turns out not to have been as clear-cut an instance as is often believed, so I won’t describe or link it here.  But there is some data demonstrating that people are less likely to offer aid to those in immediate need if there are other people around.

There’s at least a fair chance that someone will catch any events surrounding someone crashing and burning on their smartphone, though, and will share the video to social media.  If anyone ever wonders why I often express the sentiment that the human race ought to be destroyed, it’s these sorts of things that engender such a sentiment.

I don’t really know what else to write about today.  I’d love to discuss psychology and physics and math and economics and biology and philosophy, not to mention writing, but I’m frankly just exhausted.  I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel less well-rested after getting up than I did when I went to bed.  This is not unusual.

Also, the arthrosis in the base of my thumbs is getting worse, and I have not yet figured out any adequate therapeutic intervention.   Even doing the small amount of note-taking by hand that is required by my job is quite uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not horrific pain or anything like that.  I’ve had and continue to have far worse.  It’s just yet another straw laid across the dromedary’s hump, which would be fine if there were a good reason to keep carrying the load, but I have no such reason; I merely have the habit.

Life, for me, may be merely that:  a bad habit that I need to break.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week, and so on.  I hope you’re having a good first few days of Spring in the northern hemisphere; I hadn’t realized on Tuesday that the equinox was that day, slightly earlier (from a Gregorian calendrical point of view) than is typical, and by the time I did, the post had already been published.  Oh, well.  I’m probably the only one who cares, anyway.

TTFN

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

It’s Friday, and presumably I’m not working tomorrow.  I don’t think I will work even if it turns out I am working, if you take my meaning.  I’m too tired.  My coworker was out sick yesterday, and so were some other people.  Unfortunately, I’m not sick, apart from the chronic, sick-in-the-head sort of sickness with which you all are no doubt familiar.

I’m writing this on my phone, though I brought my laptop computer with me yesterday.  I had thought to whip out a draft of a blog post on it then write a page of Extra Body before editing the blog post, but now I’m having to wait so long for an Uber that I decided just to take one into the office, anyway.

I hate how Uber always tries to get you to do the “share a ride” thing.  I wish they would stop suggesting it to me, or that there was some setting in the app that would let me tell them never to offer me a shared ride.  In the unlikely event that I want to share a ride, I’ll select that option from the start.  Stop “nudging” me.  It’s unpleasant enough for me to have to deal with the fact of the driver; I don’t want to share the back seat with some other stranger.

Actually, if I’m going to “share a ride” I’ll just take the flipping bus and pay pennies on the dollar, as the saying goes.  I really should just do that, anyway.  Uber and Lyft are bad habits, and not cheap ones.  In fact, I ought just to be walking to and from the train in the mornings, since riding the bike makes my back and hips absolutely scream with pain afterwards (which is very disheartening).

I took half a Benadryl again to try to help me sleep last night.  I don’t think it actually helped me rest, but I do feel groggy and incoherent this morning, so it’s had some effect, subjectively speaking.  I don’t know if you readers can tell, though.  It may well be that, from your point of view, I’m always more or less equally incoherent.

I feel that I’m becoming more and more decoherent with every day.  I wonder if my wave function is collapsing.  Can the Born Rule be applied to a human…or to whatever I am, for that matter?

I’m being silly, I know.

In a sense I suppose the Born Rule could apply to an individual if that individual makes a decision based on a quantum measurement.  There is, apparently, an app that allows you to do just that; it’s connected to a beam splitter in some lab somewhere, through which one photon at a time is being sent, and it tells you which direction a given photon ends up being measured.  Thus, you can make a truly random decision if you so desire‒as far as physics can currently tell, a fundamentally random decision.

A coin flip or a die roll is not fundamentally random, though for practical purposes it may as well be.  We don’t have access to enough information to predict a given outcome on a fair coin or die, but in principle it is possible.  Whereas with a photon going through a beam splitter, we have a completely, in-principle, unpredictable process.  The Nobel Prize was recently awarded to Aspect et al for their experiments that tested and confirmed the Bell inequalities, thus disproving anything but the most esoteric forms of “hidden variables” descriptions of quantum mechanics.

Sorry.  That was one of my weird tangents.  I’m a bit too mentally fatigued to restrain myself very well.

This sort of thing happens in real life, too.  Yesterday, I was talking about something to do with some song that came on the playlist to my boss, and I went off on some esoteric tangents about music and stuff, and I could finally just see his eyes start glazing over, so I pulled up short.  Then I caught myself looking up to see if I could find someone else in the office with whom to share some of my trivia and my thoughts about songs and various other things.

I caught myself in time, though, and retreated to my desk.  Then someone asked to change the music playlist to some pathetic new artist and related crap that wasn’t nearly as interesting.  I briefly put in my earphones and listened to some of the Feynman lectures on physics to block out the noise.  That didn’t work for long, though, because I kept having to do office stuff that required interaction with living humans.  And then, of course, I had to work through lunch, because three people got sales all at once, just as lunch arrived.

I hate my life.  I really do.  It’s not just work that I hate‒at least that involves some purpose, however unfulfilling.  I also hate my time “off”, my lack of friends, my apparent inability to be a friend, and my inability to be able to fucking sleep, along with many other things.

I’m so tired of it all.  I’m tired of writing this blog, but I feel stressed at the prospect of not writing it.  I don’t get tired of writing fiction so much as feel it’s an exercise in futility, and so I generally don’t get started anymore.

Then again, everything in the universe, ever, is just an exercise in futility.  As Charles Halloway said*, “Where do you come from?  The dust.  Where do you go to?  The grave.”  The same could be said of every planet and star and cluster and galaxy and every bit of the observable universe and everything else that may be beyond it‒metaphorically speaking, anyway.  Dust is something within the universe, as are graves, so it seems unlikely that the universe could come from dust.  But I think you get my point.

It’s that there is no point.

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I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”

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My poisonous (or poisoned) thoughts

I’m disappointed to have to tell you all that I did not write any fiction yesterday.  I didn’t write any in the morning, having written a longish blog post.  Then, by relatively early in the workday, I had become mentally exhausted.

The “music” in the office doesn’t help, since it’s loud and basically unrelated to anything about what we do‒it’s just there for background noise, to dampen the sounds of other people on their phones, or to camouflage it, to break up its signature.  But also, it was just maddening to see again how slipshod and unreliable people are, how little they care about how what they do affects other people (or themselves).

Early in the day, a few minutes after our official starting time, I looked out at the office‒as the person who keeps track of who’s there and who isn’t and when people arrive and leave‒and could see that perhaps only half of the people in the office were there yet.  I noted this to my coworker, who grimly nodded with obvious resigned disapproval.  I told him, as if realizing it for the first time, that it really bothered me.  And it really does.  It’s both contemptuous and contemptible.

We long ago moved our starting time back an hour, nominally to make sure people could get to work on time more easily, since traffic in south Florida really can be terrible.  However, that did not change people’s lateness at all.  It made no discernible difference.

Unfortunately, people suffer no consequences for being late, so there is no incentive for anyone to do otherwise.  They are also not penalized for working over into lunchtime or past the official end of the day (it is often the people who arrive late who also stay late).  So, basically, I never get an adequate break time, since there’s no sensible way for me to go anywhere outside the office during lunch, and those who started break on time restart work on time, and so need support people to be available.

Anyway, it’s appalling that already, by Tuesday, I was simply mentally (and emotionally) exhausted.  And I know it’s not just the specifics of this job that wear me out.  If I were to do any job I’ve ever had in the past, I think I would be similarly worn out; the exact time until it happens might vary slightly, but I don’t think it would do so by all that much.

Even as early as high school, I used to get into these states in which I felt just completely empty, and would have been “happy” to stop, to end right there.  They didn’t happen as often, and I lasted longer between them‒that’s redundant, isn’t it‒and I think I recovered more quickly and easily.  But it went on into college and med school and residency and practice and all that has come after.

The medical work, though harder, was somewhat less enervating, because there were intellectual challenges and the ability to make a real difference for people, and there was a degree of respect.  Also, one was working with professionals at all levels, and that’s reassuring.

I was labeled with depression (then later also, and more generally, with dysthymia) fairly early, and certainly started having these feelings of wanting to die, and more specifically wanting to kill myself, at a young age.  Obviously, there’s some inherent degree of “typical” depression here, but I wonder how much of it might be due to undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder‒assuming that even applies to me, which I think it probably does.

I have no real capacity to seek out diagnosis or help for it or for anything else, frankly, so it’s hard to get any kind of “official” feedback.  Between a kind of learned helplessness from chronic internalized stress (and chronic pain), and my own social dysfunction and my ever-present self-hatred and self-destructive urges, it’s hard even to begin to take care of myself.

Actually, I don’t know if it’s the case that, fundamentally, I hate myself so much as that I hate my experience, my moment to moment interaction with reality.  It’s so often so very unpleasant.  At the very least, there is no single day that I can recall that didn’t include some significant moments of what one might call “spiritual revulsion”, a kind of nausea and stress about how unrational and unsane the world is, at least from my point of view‒and ultimately I have no other viewpoint from which to gaze upon reality.

I think my self hatred is a kind of rationalized conclusion combined with a sort of “halo effect”*.  If the world is so anathema to me, so much of the time, then I must just not be suited for this world.  So, I’m defective, or at least, I’m not the right organism for the job.

Also, since so much of life is persistently unpleasant, and since the single common variable in all aspects of that unpleasantness is me, then I cannot help but have residual disgust and hatred stain my image of myself; it accumulates over time until it’s thicker than a rhino’s hide and as disgusting as the slime of a hagfish.

I don’t know what I can do about it, unfortunately, other than either declare myself the enemy of the world and act accordingly or destroy myself.  Or, I suppose, I could do both.  No matter what, I don’t think I can go on much longer.  Then again, I’ve felt that way off and on for quite a long time.  But it’s becoming more frequent and more persistent‒the pulses are longer and closer together.

My reserves may be deeper than I would ever have expected them to be, but they cannot be infinite.  Certainly on the scale of the duration of the world, I must either lose my mind or destroy myself (or both) before much longer.

In the meantime, I’m going to have to do my fiction writing in some other way, if I do it.  I’ll need to do it earlier in the day, before the troglodytes start arriving and making their noise.  I may give up and use the laptop computer, because the handwriting is really exacerbating the soreness at the base of my thumb.  Maybe I’ll do it in the mornings after my blog post, or instead of it on some days.

I did fiddle with my guitar a little yesterday, so to speak, but that’s far less fruitful than writing, so maybe I’ll just give up on that.

Ultimately, I should probably just give up…period.  Until I do, I guess I’ll keep poisoning the Internet with these, my gloomy thoughts.  Enjoy!

*Perhaps “horns effect” might be a better term in this case.

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Digression within a discussion of digressions, and an ending about depression

I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t end up writing anything on my short story yesterday, because there were many distractions and frustrations.  I started the day in an unusually clear-headed and optimistic mood.  I even read a bit of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible in the morning, and that was nice.  But as the day went on and the chaos persisted‒especially the noise‒my optimism dwindled.

Then, in that latter part of the afternoon, I decided to force myself.  It’s just a single page, I thought, so it shouldn’t take long even if I do it between work tasks.  So, I got out the notebook and started up.  I used two different pens over the course of the approximate one and a half pages that I wrote, but write I did.

As I wrote, I could see again my tendency to digress into details perhaps just a bit much; I need to keep a weather eye on that tendency.

Don’t get me wrong‒I like getting into details, and into the minds of my characters.  Reading fiction and getting those insights into other people’s thought processes, even if they were fictional, really helped me in dealing with people as I grew up.  That’s a potentially useful hint: if you’re a replicant among humans, read a lot of fiction.  You can get whole lifetimes worth of insight into the their minds by doing so.  Indeed, you can get more than lifetimes worth of such insight, since in “real life” one never gets to see people’s thoughts unfiltered.

I’m not saying that fictional depictions are perfectly reliable and fully accurate representations of how humans think.  It’s fiction, after all.  But across genres and works, across authors living at widely disparate times, there are commonalities that one can pick up.

There may be selection bias at work as well, of course, since all works of fiction have been produced by fiction writers, and they may have common attributes not necessarily shared by those who do not write fiction.  But when findings from fiction correlate well with, and explain well, the behaviors and speech of people who are most assuredly not fiction writers, one can begin to assign higher credence to such things.

How on earth did I get into that train of subjects?  Oh, right, I was talking about my tendency to digress a bit in my fiction.  How very “meta” of me to digress even as I was writing about digression.

If I keep writing fiction‒assuming I don’t just die soon, which would also be tolerable‒I think I may adjust my guidelines during editing.

In my published works so far‒not counting this blog‒I made a rule that I needed to cut the final word count by at least 10% relative to the first draft.  That’s right:  Unanimity was one ninth again longer when I first wrote it!  Anyway, I may decide to set my target at a more draconian 15% level in the future.  20% seems as though it might entail too much cutting, but maybe 10% is too little.

I guess we’ll see.  Maybe I shouldn’t combine the effects of handwriting the first draft (which should encourage at least some brevity) and an increase in my culling target.  I guess I have time to ponder this matter and let my subconscious mind digest it.

In other news, I did play guitar a bit yesterday‒just those two songs I mentioned in yesterday’s post‒and I guess that was a bit of fun.  It seems my long breaks at least haven’t made me too rusty in my playing; I even feel that my intuitive feel for shifting between versions of  a chord while playing has improved.  I guess it’s possible.

I also walked most of the way back from the train station last night.  I didn’t make it quite all the way before summoning a ride, since I decided I didn’t want to push things too much, but it was a good walk of more than three miles.  I hope to increase it and add a walk to my mornings as well.  This will eat into my time, of course, and I worry about it discouraging my fiction writing.  I may go back to doing this blog less often in the future if I continue to feel able to write fiction and do get my walking going again.

I still have several moments during every day in which I think I just want to walk away from reality and existence, figuratively speaking.  The world can be horrifyingly frustrating and painful for me, and since I can’t convince myself that it would be okay to destroy the world, there’s always the option of destroying the universe (from my point of view) by destroying myself.

They call it “unaliving”* on YouTube, nowadays, apparently, because the YouTube algorithms are prone to block or interfere with videos that include the word “suicide”.  How stupid are these social media companies?  It’s ultramoronic to impair the use of a word simply because it refers to a real subject that is not necessarily comfortable.  The word “suicide” never magically induced anyone to kill him- or herself.  If anything, bringing it up can help take the taboo off and allow people who are suffering to feel that it may just be okay for them to talk about it.

Ha ha. Just kidding.  Nobody really wants you to talk about it, believe me, other than professionals who deal with the issues as part of their jobs, and rare volunteers, who are alas strangers, and who I suspect go into the work because of familiarity‒directly or indirectly‒with the problems of depression and suicide.  Most people just don’t want to deal with it.  I suspect that, secretly, many of them would prefer you to kill yourself rather than harsh their mellow.

Maybe destroying the world really would be morally appropriate.  At least I can do it in fiction if I want‒and I have done so, and have failed to do so, in more than one work.

Anyway, sorry about the regression to the mean (or at least to the unkind) there near the end.  I hope you all have a good day.

*”Unalive” sounds like it should be the opposite of “undead”.  So, if the undead are, in one sense or another, walking corpses, then the unalive should be inert living beings.  This sounds more like a description of those with major depression or chronic depression (dysthymia) than someone who has killed themselves, though the outcome of the former may certainly be the latter.  The euphemism is confusing and misleading, if you ask me.  The suppression of videos and the like that use the term “suicide” does not seem likely to decrease the rate of actual suicide, but may make a person contemplating it or troubled by thoughts of it feel even more alienated than they already do.  I know of at least one case where this is so.