mental-illness

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“From childhood’s hour I have not been as others were…”

Well, it’s not just the start of a new “work week”, it’s also the start of a new month‒the last month of 2025.  That’s December, by the way, in case you didn’t remember or were confused by the month’s name, which indicates that it’s the tenth month, not the twelfth.

Don’t be confused by the fact that this month starts on a Monday, by the way; it’s when the first of a month falls on Sunday that the month will have a Friday the 13th.  This month will have a Friday the 12th.  I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s mildly disappointing.

It’s hard to be clear why I find that as disappointing as I do.  I mean, I like prime numbers and particularly the number 13, but every month has a 13th day.  I guess it’s because of the supposedly unlucky implications of Fridays the 13th that I want to embrace the day.  Is that sympathy (for something not alive) or is it perversity?

I suspect it’s a bit of both.  I tend to feel sympathy and affection for peculiar things, and literally to feel bad for some inanimate and even abstract entities when I think they have been unfairly maligned.

But I do also tend to have a sort of affection for things that others fear.  I don’t know if that’s a defense mechanism or what.  But, after all, I did make a brief (failed) series of blog posts called “My heroes have always been villains.“

Whatever.  It doesn’t really matter.  I’m just a weirdo*.  What else is new?

Not much, of course.  I mean, I’m on my way to work, because I am working today, though I don’t feel very well.  But then, I never really feel well.  I’ve been in pain literally for more than 20 years straight, so I never do feel “well” anymore.  Every time I get up from my chair in the office, such as when I need to use the bathroom, I feel a bit like the Tin Man, trying to kick painfully rusted limbs into motion.  That’s just one example.

Do I have a heart, unlike the Tin Man?  I don’t know about the metaphorical one, but the physical one is real, because I had surgery on it for a birth defect when I was 18**.  It’s probably true, though, that my metaphorical heart is also defective, perhaps more so than my literal heart.

Who am I kidding with “perhaps”?  Of course it’s more defective.  For one thing, there is no surgery to repair a metaphorical organ.  You’d think that something conceptual might be easier to alter or repair than something physical, but that would only be the case if we understood how the whole thing works well enough to be able to figure out how to make adjustments and‒more crucially‒which adjustments to make and when.  It’s at least as difficult, in its way, as trying to control the weather.

What am I going on about?  I don’t know.  More pointedly, one could ask why I am going on‒with this blog, with work, with my life, with anything.  I’m wasting your time and mine, I think.  Mostly I’m wasting yours I suppose, since my time is a waste from the start.

Well, no, actually, that’s not entirely true.  Everything that led up to the birth of my children was absolutely important.  I would not change anything up to that point.  Any negative experiences that happened to me until then were worth it.  After that, though, there are many things I would change if I could‒indeed, there are probably many things that I cannot even bring to mind that I would want to change.

I don’t know what they might be, and I don’t really try to dwell on such things‒that’s probably part of why I dislike, or at least don’t enjoy, the weird manga/anime/light novels in which someone gets (for instance) hit by a car and seems to die, but is sent back in time to an earlier stage in their life and gets to live it again, but with their old memories, so they can change their outcome.

Yes, there is a whole slew of such stories, just as there are oodles of related “isekai” stories, where someone dies and ends up reborn in some “magical” world.  I guess that’s a bit related to things like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, but he didn’t have to die to go to the Land, he was summoned.  And also, when Stephen R. Donaldson wrote those books, back in the 70s and 80s, the idea was relatively original, or at least not wildly overplayed.

Speaking of overplayed, I’ll call this blog post to a close now‒and by that criterion, I ought to call everything to a close.  I am badly overplayed.  I jumped the shark 13 years ago or more.  I don’t know why they keep renewing this show.  But I appear to be under contract to keep playing this stupid role as long as the show is renewed.  I wish I had an agent to whom I could talk about getting out of this with minimal fuss and mess.

Alas, that will probably just be up to me, and I’m not good at doing things with minimal mess, though the “fuss” part is at least something of a question.

Anyway, enough.  This is stupid.  I’ll just wish you all a very good day, and a good week, and a good month/rest of the year, and then a most excellent year next year.  And, what the heck, while I’m spitting into the ocean, I wish you a truly wonderful remainder of your lives.

Wishes have no power, maybe, but mine are at least sincere.

*And also a creep, no doubt.  What the hell am I doin’ here, indeed.  I really don’t belong here.  Not that I’m convinced that anyone does.

**The birth defect didn’t happen when I was 18, of course‒it was found when I was 18, and operated on within that same year.  But it had been there since at least the time I was born, more or less by definition.

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Black Friday Sun, won’t you come?

Well, it’s officially “Black Friday” here in the US at least‒an ironic name that referred to the fact that the day after Thanksgiving was, at least traditionally, the busiest shopping day of the year, so going holiday shopping (mainly for Christmas) was always considered an ordeal.  And therefore…well, therefore everyone went and did it.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you look at it that way.  But that’s the way humans are, isn’t it?  Think of the hoarding of toilet paper that led to self-fulfilling prophecies of shortages during early COVID-19 days.

So, anyway, I’m going to the office today, because we’re open.  We’re also planning to be open tomorrow.

I wish I were sick.  I mean, I’m sick in the head (ask just about anybody, if they’re being honest) and I have chronic pain and all the fun associated with that, but I am not acutely ill, let alone ill enough that I could mentally excuse myself from going to work.

I wonder what would happen if I just decided not to go.  I wonder what would happen if I just didn’t go to work, didn’t write my blog, shut my phone off or put it on airplane mode, and just vegetated until I wilted and became compost.  Not very much, I suspect.

I mean, people at work would try to figure out where I was, because it’s work, and if I’m not there, someone will have to pick up the slack.  And I think my sister would try to figure out what had happened to me.  But that’s most of it.

A few people would worry, but that would only be for a while, and then even all passing thought of me would taper down, asymptotically approaching zero, but in the fashion of a quantum event‒more episodic and sporadic in measurable character than a seemingly smooth decay, but nevertheless getting closer and closer to zero all the time.

I’m tired.  Also, frankly, I’m uninterested.  The two things may be related.

None of the things I do for entertainment‒for distraction really‒are working very well anymore.  I am particularly bored of being in pain, of course.  That gets old very quickly, especially when it’s chronic, and mine has been there for decades now.  It’s not a warning of some life-threatening process happening, it’s just a set of alarms that are broken so they’re stuck in the “on” position.

Of course, my main problem(s) is/are me.  I’m a piece of merchandise that’s defective in many ways and in more than one system.  Believe me, if you got me as a present, you would hope whoever bought me had kept the receipt.

Anyway, I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday if you celebrated the holiday.  I ate a bit of junk food at the house, but it wasn’t very good, and it seemed to give me some gastrointestinal trouble, so that wasn’t a lot of fun.  There was nothing good on TV, unfortunately; I started to watch the Lions game (American football), but got bored very quickly.

I watched some videos on YouTube, but I’m running out of things there that are interesting.  The best thing I saw was a couple reacting to Rogue One, but that’s still very much a simulated, twice removed illusion of watching a movie with friends, so it’s a bit lame.

Obviously‒I hope it’s obvious‒I’m giving you my viewpoint on these things, not claiming to have some definitive, objective take on them.  If people enjoy something and it does no harm, then it’s a positive and “good” thing, so I mean no disparagement.

I am not a good measure for how good things might be, because I tend to see things in a less than optimistic and upbeat fashion.

That’s enough for now.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, though it’s difficult to see why.  Maybe some catastrophe will befall me and become a blessing to you all (and to me) by finishing everything for me.  In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend.

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“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.

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Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday

Well, it’s Tuesday and I’m already exhausted after just one day of work for the week.  Mind you, it was a strange day at work, with people struck with family tragedies, people with personal catastrophes (such as a DUI), my coworker out sick, and all that sort of stuff.  The things that were/are not usual were manifold, and they are very unpleasant to me.

Also, I’ve had a dull, kind of pressure-like headache for the last perhaps 18 hours (with some lulls), and it feels almost like a “mini migraine”.  It certainly interferes with my mental acuity.  It may interfere with my writing; I can’t really tell.  If anyone notices anything regarding that, I would be grateful if you would let me know*.

I also feel a bit queasy, which goes along with the low-grade migraine notion.  I am going in to the office anyway, though.  First off, I don’t know if my coworker will still be out sick, and I don’t want to leave other people too much in the lurch.  In addition, if I get behind on things for one day, I’ll just have to catch up on things the next day, eliminating any potential benefit from resting for a day.

Also, let’s be real:  I don’t enjoy spending time at the house.  I need to rest there frequently‒longer than I actually do‒but it’s not pleasant for me.

Speaking of rest, I had a really bad sleep last night.  I mean, I didn’t sleep more than maybe half an hour before 3 this morning.  Then I dozed for a wee bit‒less than an hour.  But now I’m up, exhausted but not sleepy.

What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is the point?  Why do I bother going on?  Is it just fear of death that prevents me from dying?  Or is it also the fear of hurting people who matter to me?

But if they love me, why would they want me to suffer?  I understand that there is nothing they can do for me, of course.  But then they should accept things they cannot change, not wish for some other person to endure without reward or with no assistance.

Actually, all these things, these wishes from other people, are in my head.  Very few people have said they want me not to die.

I don’t think that’s because all the other people do want me to die.  Most people are probably pretty much indifferent.  Most people don’t worry about other people much because they’re too busy imagining that other people are “worrying about” them.

But they aren’t.  It’s just not workable.  People think about other people, of course, and especially about their family and friends.  But they cannot think about them much.  I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s hard enough trying to pay attention to oneself and one’s actions, to try to manage one’s days and nights, one’s work, one’s meals, one’s rest.

The percentage of time spent dwelling on other people instead of oneself cannot be very high in the double digits, if that.  This is not an indictment or a judgment.  I think it is literally just about all that people can do.

This is surely why narcissists are always so unhappy.  They can never get as much attention as they wish and imagine they deserve from other people.

We should all probably let go of our sense of entitlement.  The universe “promises” us all one thing and one thing only:  that everything, all this that exists around us, like ourselves, will end.  It may then begin again in some sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it ended.  Just because there’s another sausage after the link, doesn’t mean the preceding sausage isn’t nevertheless gone.

Wow, that’s a weird analogy or metaphor:  The universe as one sausage in an endless chain of sausage links.

I guess it makes as much sense as many such metaphors, and more sense than some.  I don’t really know what point I was trying to make, if there was one, but at least it ought to be somewhat memorable.  That’s worth something, right?

I’m too tired to contemplate any more at the moment.  I’m going to finish this off now and call it good enough.  I hope you all have a good day (or rather, that each of you has a good day).

But in closing, a thought just occurred to me.  Remember, mushrooms are not vegetables.  As fungi, they are more closely related to your fish and your chicken and your beef (and you) than they are to corn and carrots and peas and potatoes.

Okay, that’s enough.  Please have a good day.

*My gratitude is probably utterly worthless, of course, like my sorrow and regret and disappointment, not to mention my love and my joy and my dreams.

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“…like a ghastly rapid river, through the pale door…”

It’s Monday again.  It keeps doing this, starting a new work week, despite the demonstrated futility of everything.  You’d think that our culture had all read The Myth of Sisyphus as one and had decided to embrace that futility.

But, of course, embracing the absurd and working endlessly and finding happiness in that meaningless repetition is just what the exploiters‒whoever they may be‒would want you to do.  So maybe

But if so, it’s almost certainly an accidental one.

Even true “conspiracies” in the world (which are less common than you’d think) are, I suspect, rarely planned out ahead of time; they simply happen.  Some course or tendency exists that a few alert people, or just lucky people, recognize as something they can exploit for their own gain, and they do, and the process becomes self-reinforcing.  But no one thought it up.  It’s like the nonrandom survival of randomly varying replicators.  Reality is too complex for even very bright minds to create highly complicated and intricate conspiracies ahead of time.

I’ve written about all of this before, and frankly, I’m tired of discussing it right now.  If you’re interested, go find my earlier discussions, here and/or on Iterations of Zero.

Today, I’m not sure what to write about, though.  Nevertheless, I am writing.  I guess the Sisyphus reference comes all too naturally in such situations, doesn’t it?

I don’t really have much to discuss, now that I think about it.  I had a nice evening Friday, albeit too short of one, but otherwise, there’s nothing really going on.  At least, there’s nothing I know of in the world right now that’s of particular interest to me.

Despite the fact that I am coming off a full-length weekend, on which I had a nice Friday evening watching a few Doctor Who episodes with my youngest, I already feel very tired.  I think that’s probably not too related to broad corporeal processes‒though my chronic pain makes even stationary existence exhausting‒but probably has at least something to do with the waning length of daylight as we approach the Winter Solstice (still more than a month away).

I’m definitely a bit susceptible to seasonal affective effects, on top of my tendency toward difficult to treat dysthymia, which I now suspect has always been so difficult to treat because it’s related to my ASD.

Coincidentally‒but not surprisingly‒my first big and particularly recalcitrant depression happened not long after my ASD repair*.  It’s fairly common for patients to suffer from depressive syndromes after having had open heart surgery.  I didn’t know this at the time (I was only 18) but I experienced it firsthand, and I learned all about it later.

I even wrote a review paper about the neurologic side-effects of surgeries that involve heart-lung bypass.

Again, I’ve written about all this crap before; I’m sorry to rehash it.  Please feel free to go hunt down the various mentions of all this in my prior writing here and on IoZ.  If anyone finds any particularly interesting tidbits, feel free to share them and/or the links in the comments, so others might be able to find them more quickly than you did.

I know, I know‒no one is interested in any of that shit, no one is going to look it up, and no one is going to share it.  I’m being patently ridiculous.  But I feel that I must write something, since I’m writing at all.  Thankfully, I’m nearly at the target number of 701 words, so soon I’ll be able to draw this tediousness to a close, at least for today.  It’s too much to hope‒for you, for me, for everybody‒for this to be the last such post for anything other than tragic reasons.

Life is almost always disappointing, though if you don’t expect things‒as the Tao recommends‒you will not be disappointed.

Speaking of expectations not playing out, on the way toward the office this morning, I waited at an intersection where there is a right turn arrow that crosses what would be my route.  Before the walk signal turned, a car turned in front of me, as was appropriate.  Then the signal changed and I had the right of way, so I went.

As I half-expected, a car on its way in went to turn right and had to stop short to avoid plowing straight through me.  I took no evasive action, just muttered to myself, “Hit me, hit me, hit me…” as I walked along.  Alas, the driver did no such thing, so as I continued through the intersection, I looked back at the car and muttered, “Pussy.”

Of course, it was not the car’s fault.  Though capable of motion, it was a fundamentally inanimate object, with no arguable or even fanciful sense of agency.  Its shape made it clear that it was well over a decade old, and it certainly predated any AI drivership, even if it had been the right make and model for such things, which it was not.

It was the driver who was not willing to kill (or even just injure) a random pedestrian who was obeying traffic laws and signals.  I guess that’s actually commendable.

All right, that’s enough of this idiocy for now.  I hope you all had a good weekend and that you will have a truly exceptionally wonderful week‒and then that the exceptional wonderfulness becomes the norm, and all your future weeks become brilliant, but you never become complacent about it; you are always grateful and happy.

I would also like a unicorn pony.

*The heart one, not the neurodevelopmental disorder.  Acronyms really are a potentially treacherous form of data compression, aren’t they?

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“Vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow…”

Well, it’s Friday at last, and the day I mentioned earlier this week—you know, 11-14-25.  I’m sure you all “got” the slight fun I found in this date, and I’m not going to go into it any farther.  If you’re interested, you could go back and look at that earlier post.

I’m writing this on my lapcom today, for the first time since last week.  It will—or should—be the last post before Monday, because I don’t think we’re going to be working tomorrow.  At least one of our best closers who comes in on weekends when we’re open has a family crisis, and it’s a serious one, so he won’t be coming in, and that means the rest probably wouldn’t find it worthwhile.  If that situation changes, I might write a post, but I doubt it.  The boss himself suggested we won’t be working tomorrow, so there’s a pretty strong inclination in that direction.

I hope to be doing something rather enjoyable at the office after work this evening, but I won’t get into it now.  It’s nothing most of you would probably care about, and many of you might not find it interesting, but I’m looking forward to it.  Hopefully it all goes well.

I did not read any Principles of Neural Science yesterday, nor indeed any of my other science books.  I’m afraid my stomach (or, really, my whole GI tract) was giving me quite a bit of trouble during the day, and so I didn’t really do anything that required any significant focus or imagination.  I hope to read something today—my GI tract appears to be responding to my attempts at remediation—but we shall see.

The GI tract has its own, dedicated sub-nervous system, which by some measures is reputedly at least as sophisticated as a cat’s brain, and mine is pretty clearly about as stubborn and willful as any cat.  I guess I don’t have much right to complain, since I am also rather stubborn and willful, and in some senses catlike*; I’ve got little leg to stand on for complaining.

Let’s see, let’s see, what else should I write about…or, rather, about what else should I write?  I’m really not sure.  I’m trying very hard not to share too many too negative thoughts here, but it’s hard, since that’s a lot of my thoughts.  It also hasn’t seemed to do anything to improve the circulation of this blog.  I have returned to the old numbers of typical daily readers—roughly a few dozen—and if anything the number seems to have shrunk slightly.  I don’t really know what to make of it.

It would be nice to have a wider audience, and especially one that was widening, but I am not good at self-promotion.  It makes me feel very uncomfortable.  That’s largely because of poor self-esteem, I guess.  Or maybe it’s just social anxiety/awkwardness, or just a general sense of rudeness, or ASD, I don’t know for sure.

It would be nice if more people read my blog, though, or listened to my music, or read my books.  I would really love to have people enjoy my creations, and maybe even have a few of them tell me so and tell me what they liked about them—especially the books, of course.

Maybe my work will become popular after I die.  I guess I’ll never know whether that happens, but it’s something onto which I can hold to console myself when next to no one reads anything I write, especially fiction, or listens to my music, or whatever.

I’m at least still trying to keep my posts somewhat short, setting my target now for 701 words as I have for the last week or so.  Indeed, I’m getting pretty close to that number now, already.  I don’t know whether my readers are grateful for the slightly shorter posts, or if they dislike them, or if they are thoroughly indifferent.

I frequently wrestle with just giving up the whole process as a bad bet.  Writing this blog never did seem to improve the sales of my books, which was the whole reason I first started doing it.  It certainly hasn’t helped my mental illnesses; or if it has, I don’t even want to consider what they would have been like without it.

And it certainly hasn’t made my life into anything anyone sane would want to have.  I don’t think even Hill House would want it, and it’s not sane**.  Hell, I’m not entirely sane, myself—whatever that means—and I don’t really want my life, either.

Oh, well, there’s probably nothing I can do.  Maybe I should just stop trying.  I wish I were able simply to give up and let go.  Maybe someday soon I will be so able.  That would be a relief, certainly for me, and maybe for all of you.

I guess it doesn’t really much matter to anyone but me, though, certainly in the relatively long term.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day and a very good weekend and a very good week after that, and so on and on.

*Not my agility, though.  That’s not horrible, but it’s far from catlike.  And my dexterity leaves even more to be desired, unless I’m paying close attention.  My default state seems to leave me rather disconnected from my body in certain senses, and that tends to lead to a bit of clumsiness.

**So said Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, and she has authority.

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For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-blog boil and bubble

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  It’s also “Devil’s Night” as it was called back where and when I grew up.  I don’t know if anyone still calls it that.  Nor do I know whether it’s still a night on which some people set fire to things in “celebration”.

I never did quite understand that tendency.  Well, no, actually I completely understand the urge to burn things, but I don’t understand giving oneself license to burn things that belong to other people, just because it’s the day before Halloween.

Of course, one could just call today Halloween Eve, but when you break down the etymology that doesn’t quite work.  Halloween is already “short” for “All Hallows’ Eve”, the day before what I think is called The Feast of All Saints, or just All Saints’ Day.  I guess that must be celebrated on November 1st, since Halloween is October 31st, but I have no idea how it’s traditionally celebrated by those who celebrate it.

Are there people who actually celebrate it?  There probably are such people.

I guess I get the progression:  on Halloween, the ghosts and goblins and vampires and werewolves parade around, before the ascendancy of “good” the next day in the form of all the nutbars who have been declared “saints”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were some fine people who have been made saints, but most of the ones of whom I’ve heard were pretty clearly just people who were mentally ill.  However, their society was not prepared actually to help them in any way, so they called them holy people.  I guess it’s (usually) better than what happened to the people who were mentally ill but were seen to be possessed or to be witches or warlocks or what have you.

Mind you, they’re all dead now, and they would have been dead pretty much no matter what, so I guess it doesn’t matter to them what sorts of nonsense people have imagined about them.

Getting back to the holiday progression, I think the addition of Devil’s Night on the night before Halloween makes some sense and improves the mythology.  By that reading, on October 30th, the Devil is truly ascendant, and there is no flouncing about in silly costumes (well, there is, but not “officially”) just acts of destruction.  Then, on the 31st, regular people dress up as creatures of the night, to turn the tables on beings that live by causing fear (much as Batman is said to do!) and run them out of town—to Hell, presumably*.  And then, once the ordinary people have done the work of driving off evil, the saints can come marching in and pretend to be the source of the goodness, when it’s really just that bad things have been driven off (by ordinary people choosing not to be afraid of them).

That’s my highly editorialized take on things, anyway.  But, whatever.

This is usually my favorite time of year, and Halloween is certainly my favorite big general holiday.  I don’t really have any plans to celebrate it this year, though.  I’m not going to be giving out candy—I live in the rear room of the house, anyway—and I don’t mean to dress up or do anything celebratory otherwise tonight or tomorrow (alas, I plan to set no fires).  Like the rest of the landscape of time before me, this patch is dreary and boggy and gray and a bit smelly.  And there’s just dull mist ahead.

By the way, I think I’m going to do the same thing today that I did yesterday and set my initial goal for this post as 701 words, which I’ve almost reached already as I write this.  I will almost surely pass it, but not by too much.  I think it worked well, yesterday, though not as well as whatever I did the day before, when for unknown reasons I saw a huge spike in the number of people who came and saw my blog.  Perhaps that was because I not only invited people to like it and share it, but actually bolstered that by sharing my song Like and Share**.

What would happen if I shared by song Breaking Me Down?  Let’s see.  I’ll embed it below, and we’ll see how successfully I’ll be digested or otherwise broken down today.

In the meantime, please have a good Devil’s Day or whatever.

TTFN

*As Dave Barry pointed out, that’s in concourse D at O’Hare International Airport, which frequent travelers will know.

**Maybe it was sharing the Ricochet Racers that did it, triggering nostalgia in members of Generation X.  It’s possible.

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“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”

Well, isn’t this a surprise?

I’m writing a blog post on a Saturday for the first time in quite a while, because at the last minute, the boss sprang on us the notion that he needs us to start coming in on Saturdays again.  Things have been a bit slow the last few weeks, and a company with whom we had made a recent contract has apparently stiffed us a bit.  This is hardly our fault, of course—we had no input in the decision-making process—but we are going to be bearing the brunt of it.

Unfortunately, the coworker with whom I used to alternate Saturdays has already been picking up some shifts at his bartending job on Saturdays, so he cannot work, at least for the foreseeable relatively near future.  So, I’m going to be coming in on Saturdays, it seems.  Because, of course, he has a wife and young daughter to care for and with whom to spend time, whereas I have absolutely no one, so I am expendable.

I admit that I don’t do very much on weekends at the house, but if there was one good thing, it was that on Friday nights I could at least take some Benadryl and force myself to sleep in a little bit on Saturdays.  It’s not ideal rest, of course, if it’s achieved via well-known side-effects of antihistamines.  But it was the best I’ve been able to do, and that extra rest, however far from ideal, did me some good.

I can’t sleep in on Sundays, because I need to do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I don’t want to have to go traipsing through the other parts of the house while the other renters are up and about.  That’s more stressful than getting up early.

I swear, there are times when I suspect that my boss wants me to kill myself.  If so, I wish he would just say so.  I’m amenable to the idea, especially if I could get some help to make it go easier.

This has not been a very good birthday week for me.  In fact, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying that the birthdays that passed while I was in PRISON were better than this week.  At least then, I could hold on to the delusional idea that, once I got out, life would be better.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!

I think more and more often—or, well, it feels as though that’s the case—that I ought just to embrace my innate nature as a destroyer and commit myself to the destruction of the entire human race.  We have no business contaminating the rest of the universe with our presence, or with the presence of our emissaries, if we create some AI-based self-replicating robots or whatever to send out.  We can’t even manage the minor issues of our current “civilization”; what business have we trying to colonize the galaxy, let alone the universe?

We could wipe out everyone—and probably lots of other species—with another mass extinction, and then nature has plenty of time to develop another technological civilization if it’s so inclined before the sun goes red giant.  Of course, whatever they might be could be no better than humans are.  There’s no reason, for instance, to imagine that any kind of animal currently alive on Earth would manage things better if they were suddenly granted the capacity to have a technological civilization.  But at least it would be out of our hands.  We would be laid to sleep like the children in the nursery rhyme prayer, dying before we wake.

We certainly are not awake now.  Look around you.  The most powerful nations (ever) on Earth are in the hands of collections of moral imbeciles.  As always, as Yeats pointed out, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  There are logical, causal reasons for this fact, but they do not make it easier to stomach.

I hate this fucking planet.  I hate this fucking species.  In fact, I’m not fond of the universe overall, at the moment.  If I could imagine a way to trigger a vacuum collapse that would wipe out everything, I would consider doing it.  But that’s at best a hypothetical possibility.

I guess I have to start somewhat smaller.

Contrary to popular imagining, there is no danger in creating, for instance, a small black hole in a particle accelerator, even if we had an accelerator with that capability.  Small black holes disappear almost instantly, vanishing in flashes of Hawking radiation.  Even if they didn’t, a miniature black hole would almost certainly just sink to the center of gravity of the Earth and perhaps do a bit of extra heating of the core.

Black holes don’t magically suck things into themselves, they merely gravitate just like anything else of equivalent mass (which would be tiny indeed for one produced from a particle accelerator).  Yes, anything that passes the event horizon cannot escape, but for a subatomic black hole, that horizon would be unimaginably tiny.  Even a black hole with the mass of the whole Earth would only be the (outer) size of a pea.

One could and can, of course, create thermonuclear reactions without requiring a fission explosion (which requires rarer materials) to trigger it.  A network of lasers triggering local fusion in appropriately placed samples could direct that energy toward a lithium deuteride* core and generate enough heat to trigger a growing chain of explosions.  But such a “bomb” would need to be large and stationary.

Still, one could set up a dummy corporation with branches in numerous large cities throughout the world and build those bombs, maybe also setting them up in “research outposts” in Antarctica and/or the Arctic, to melt the polar ice caps.  Possibly putting some similar “research facilities” near the thin-points of various volcanoes and super volcanoes would also enhance the outcome.

Alternatively, one could use a particle accelerator to generate anti-matter and store it.  Now this would be quite a technical challenge, since one cannot store neutral antimatter easily—it annihilates if it touches any normal matter, and so it is generally stored in electrically charged forms such as positrons and antiprotons, in evacuated chambers, contained by powerful magnetic fields.  It’s not an efficient way to do things, but one could, possibly, store enough of it that, once one released the magnetic containment, one could unleash an explosion that would make the Tsar Bomba look like one of those little paper poppers we used to play with when we were kids.

There are other ways, of course, to do things.  I’ve mentioned before that it wouldn’t be all that hard to use rockets to redirect the orbits of large asteroids so they were more likely to collide with the Earth.  Or one could genetically engineer and mass-produce a more hardy and virulent form of anthrax (for instance) and disperse it aerially over major cities.

I guess the point is I’m not in a good mood, and it would probably be better for all of humanity, as well as for me, if I were to cease to exist.  I’m so tired of everything.

I hope you’re having a nice weekend.

*Although, for the lithium to be converted to tritium most efficiently, on needs a source of neutrons, which are handily provided by primary fission explosions in usual thermonuclear weapons.  I suspect one could arrange alternate sources with only minimal effort.

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Decoherence–but nothing overtly quantum mechanical

You might be interested to know that I am not writing this blog post on my smartphone on the way to the office.  Neither am I writing it on the mini lapcom on the way to the office.  I am actually writing this while already at the office, because I did not go back to the house last night.

The trains were running late, and when they run late, they also run crowded, because of the pileup of people for what would have been later trains, at least until you get to the first on-time train after all the late ones.  That one tends to be nice and light.  But goodness knows when that train would have come, and it occurred to me that…well, no one was waiting for me at the house (no one ever is), and there was no point in getting there late only to have to get up and come in to the office today.

So, I walked back to the office and just stayed here.  I ordered a mildly “celebratory” dinner from Outback to mark the day.  It was okay‒not great, not bad.  It certainly beat, say, a bag of chips or something along those lines.  It almost certainly was not worth what it cost, but I could have ordered something from Morton’s, which has steaks starting at over $70.  And that was not the most expensive place available on Uber Eats for steak!!

Anyway, I watched some music videos and reaction videos and sat around and‒well, I won’t get into my thought processes and whatnot.  There are some things that are negative enough and worrisome enough for people that I don’t really want to share them.  I’m sure people who read this regularly probably would find that difficult to believe, but it’s true; I have thoughts that are dark enough or weird enough or negative enough that I don’t talk about them, here or pretty much anywhere else.

I feel very beat up* overall, as I’m sure is not a surprise.  That’s not because I slept on the floor; that actually tends to be beneficial for my back, at least a little**.  But I certainly didn’t sleep as much as I might have, especially considering the fact that I spared myself the time of my commute.  But my insomnia has never been particularly well-attuned to usefulness, though at times it has been useful.  It certainly was handy during residency, in its way.

It is quite unpleasant, though, even when it is useful.  I haven’t felt well-rested in a very, very, very long time.

As for anything else, well, I certainly didn’t write any fiction yesterday, to no one’s real surprise.  I did feel the urge to play my guitar and sing a bit very late at night, but I decided that would be a little weird‒even for me‒and just in case anyone was near enough to hear and be disturbed***, I decided not to do it.

I worried most of yesterday about some trouble that I suddenly started having with my right shoulder, which is usually not a source of difficulty for me.  My right forearm and elbow have been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and maybe that’s working its way up the arm, who knows?  But I don’t mean to imply literally that I think it’s some form of creeping arm malaise that’s working its way up.  Rather, something that affects distal joints can create atypical tensions that hurt the body more proximally; think of how, when your ankle is acting up, it can affect your knee and hip and even back, triggering them also to have exacerbations.

Maybe that doesn’t happen to you.  But I assure you, it happens to me, and I think something like it has probably caused this new irritation and feeling of decreased mobility and new soreness and weakness (from tenderness, not actual loss of strength) in my right shoulder.

That’s about it, really.  There’s nothing else going on, not in my “life” anyway.  This is as good as it gets, and I doubt it will get this good again.  I’m very tired.  I wish I were sick with something more acute, something that would kill me or at least knock me out of commission for a while.  Unfortunately, one of the detrifits of being so socially uncomfortable is that I don’t get exposed to as many communicable pathogens as I otherwise might.

Oh, well, you know what they say:  If you want something done right…

Enough.  It’s been a blog post.  I hope you’ve found at least a moment’s interest in reading it, if you’ve read it.  I know people like to rubber-neck at roadside traffic accidents, so maybe my absurdity and distaste can at least engender some prurient interest.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.

*It’s slightly amusing that “beat up” has such a different meaning from “upbeat”.

**In any case, I always sleep on the floor, though at the house I have a modest futon.

***Or any other relatively high-end heavy metal band.

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I can’t think of an appropriate Shakespeare-based title I haven’t already used

Hello and good morning.

Actually, though, I’m at least starting this blog post on Wednesday evening as I wait for my train.  I will have edited it Thursday morning, however.  I know this for a definitive fact, because this very sentence, and the immediately preceding one, is being/has been written on Thursday morning, while I’m editing.

Right now, though—that being Wednesday evening—I feel like I won’t have the energy for anything tomorrow.  I don’t think I would have the energy to breathe if it were not an automatic process.

All of this is getting too tedious; everything is getting tedious.  It’s the same old stupid thing after the previous same old stupid thing before the next same old stupid thing, and there’s no point and no joy in almost any of it.  It’s just compulsion; it’s just habit.  It’s just the fear that, if I stop doing this, I don’t think I’ll do anything else.

But why should I do anything else?  Why not just stop everything?

It would have no significant impact on anyone or anything.  It’s certainly unlikely to make things worse overall.  The world is as shitty as it’s ever yet been in my lifetime.  Humans have become ever more disappointing—not all of them mind you, but so many have become so disappointing that the good ones seem fewer and further between.

Of course, I’m pretty disappointing myself, albeit for somewhat different reasons than most.  So I don’t really have much right to complain.  It’s not as though I’m not a loser, after all.

Yeah, I think maybe I’m pretty much close to done—with everything.  I certainly don’t have any desire to celebrate having lived yet another pointless year in which I produce nothing of value and just wallow in the fact that biological existence has a tendency to continue—at least up to a point—if it’s not actively curtailed.

I’m so tired all the time, and I’m in pain all the time.

Just earlier today (Wednesday), it occurred to me—though I’ve probably said this before—that I feel as though I’ve already been embalmed, because just moving around in any way, just kicking any of my joints into flexion or extension, is difficult and often painful.  I feel stiff and sore; I also feel like my limbs are somewhat out of place, though it may be hard to convey that sense adequately.

I’m uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable in my mind.  There are very few compensations.

I’m not saying there are none, and they are definitely nice when they happen, but they are few and far between, like tiny oases in a desert.  They are also bits of relief that I certainly do not deserve.

I’m also tired of complaining all the time.  I feel that it has to get really old for the people who read this blog.  But I don’t have much that’s more upbeat or uplifting to say.  I certainly don’t have much positive to say about myself.  I’ve failed at everything that actually matters to me, and at quite a few things that don’t, despite my supposed gifts and abilities.

It’s enough.  I really just ought to die soon.  My birthday is coming up; it would be appropriate for that to be the day I died.  At least it would have a nice faux symmetry.  It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I like symbols and symmetries and timing and so forth.  I just feel…well, I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t feel like putting in any more effort.  It’s useless and pointless and irritating.

Maybe I’ll feel different in the morning.  Maybe I’ll feel worse*.  Maybe I’ll develop enough resolve to take final action of some kind—I certainly have plenty of methods and means available.  I’ve been collecting and preparing such means of egress for a long time—I have nooses, and blades, and flammable liquids, and nonrebreather masks and tubing and regulator valves that could be used to deliver inert gases, and I have rat poison and various other potential toxins, for instance.

Or maybe I’ll develop enough energy to continue for a bit longer, however pointless it may be.

But I don’t know what to do.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  The only thing I have to which to look forward is occasionally seeing my youngest child, which started recently.  That’s always very nice, of course; that’s wonderful beyond easy explication.  But I feel—I must admit this may just be my mental illness speaking—that it’s an unkind obligation I’m putting on them, though I do not want to denigrate them or cast aspersions on their character.  That would be most unjust.

So it’s probably in my mind.  Nevertheless, I feel that I am causing undue trouble for them, and that I am not worth that trouble, not in the slightest.

I don’t know what to do.  I am so exhausted by everything, and I feel that I am nothing but pathetic.  I just want to exit, to escape, to be able to stop trying, even if it’s not truly what one could call “rest”.  I just need to let go—or something.

Whatever.  We’ll see.  I may not even post this post tomorrow morning.  I may just write something else**.  I don’t know.

TTFN

*This is a morning footnote, and it’s hard to say whether I feel different.  I feel slightly more rested, of course; I’m probably not rested enough, since my body doesn’t seem to like to indulge itself in getting enough rest.  I’m certainly still stiff and in pain, but I also nevertheless did my pull-ups this morning, so I have a bit more energy.  Also, I am a creature of habit, but I am not a nun, though I am worth none.

**I have not.  This is just the edited version of the post I wrote yesterday evening.