mental-illness

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A random, walk-in blog post

It’s Monday again, despite popular demand, and I am here writing another blog post‒not necessarily against or by popular demand.  It’s really more or less orthogonal to such things.

I had a weekend full of little setbacks, and it was quite frustrating.  I had committed to riding my bike four times this weekend, and I started in good form.  I got out relatively early and went riding.  It felt pretty good, pretty comfortable, but I decided not to push too hard, only riding out about 3 miles.  Walking 3 miles is relatively far if it’s hot, but biking 3 miles is not bad at all.

Then, of course, just after I turned around, my rear tire lost pressure.  I don’t know where the puncture was, but I had to walk the bike back to the house.  And 3 miles walking a bike is much more unpleasant than riding or even walking without a bike.

I ordered some Slime brand tire repair stuff for same day delivery, but then it got delayed till Sunday (it actually arrived very late Saturday night).  Then, on Sunday, in between loads of laundry, I tried to repair the tire (so to speak) but at first I had trouble getting it to work, and it wouldn’t stay inflated.  Finally, though, it seemed to stabilize, at least without my fat ass on it.

I was going to go for a short ride to test it, but I couldn’t stand the idea that I might have to walk it back again.  So I went for about a 2 mile walk instead, which is really not very far, but then overnight and into now my back really flared up and is annoying the heck out of me.  Also, my right ankle is sore again.

So I’m frustrated in my attempt to develop better habits and health.  I also had some failures by Uber Eats that were annoying, but that’s a minor issue.  Then yesterday my internet went out and I had to deal with their customer service people to help get it going again, which took way longer than it should have taken.

I suppose all this is really minor stuff, so-called first world problems.  But things accumulate and interact with each other, especially when you don’t really have any outlet for anything and nothing to counteract them.  It might be better if I had someone with whom I could just hang out on a regular basis, but I feel like a different species than the people around me, and no one is offering, in any case.

This is all boring for all of you, I strongly suspect, so I apologize.  It’s bad enough for me to be unpleasant to myself, but I should try not to bring misery upon other people, especially people who are kind enough to read my blog.

Last week was certainly a miss with respect to getting anything done on any music or songs.  I didn’t so much as sing or play keyboard or play guitar at all last week, not once.  I did some reading, including finishing rereading The Chasm and the Collision, which is the book of which I am proudest.  If anyone out there knows people who enjoy fantasy/sci-fi adventures involving middle-schoolers, you should consider suggesting that they check it out.

I don’t know how this week is going to be.  I’m starting it in well-above-average pain, for me, and with worse sleep than usual (though that was the case most of last week as well).  I don’t think this guarantees that it will be a particularly bad week.  The world is complicated, and small things can make relatively large changes, and large things can sometimes be surprisingly ineffectual*.

Maybe I would get started writing fiction again and do it better if I did the first draft of a story by hand (as I did with CatC as well as Mark Red and the title story in Welcome to Paradox City).  As long-time readers will know, I go back and forth about this all the time, and I think I’m probably just chasing my tail.

I have all these dreams and ambitions, and I know I have the ability to carry them out, in some sense, but it’s very hard to keep the will, the motivation.

I’ve said before, I’m sure, that depression itself seems almost to be an illness of the will, a sort of muscular dystrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of the mind, though I think its causes and complications are much more intricate and multivariate than at least the first of those two comparisons.

I think for a fair amount of those who suffer badly from it, depression makes them want to kill themselves, but depression is also what keeps them from killing themselves; they cannot bring the effort to bear.  This is part of why the beginning of antidepressant therapy in a depressed person with suicidal ideation can be dangerous.  Such a person may begin to feel capable of getting things done, but not optimistic enough to avoid suicidal ideation, so they can sometimes use that new energy to act to kill themselves.

In any case, that’s not really the subject on which I was focused during this post.  I don’t think I’ve really been focused at all in writing this.  I don’t really know what subjects and topics I’ve raised.  I suppose you will know, more or less, having read this far.  And I guess, by the time I edit this, I will know.  But I don’t know right now.

It’s not important.  But one thing that is important is that I hope you all do your best to have a good day.

 *In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel says to Frodo that even the smallest person can change the course of the future, espousing a sort of rudimentary Chaos Theory.  But what does it mean to “change the course of the future”?  If the future has a course, it is defined and determined by the laws of physics, and any seeming “changes” were part of that process, so the course of the future is not “changed”, it is merely instantiated in whatever way it always is.

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O, that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth! Then with a passion would I blog the world;

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and if I were still writing fiction, this would be the only day of the week on which I would write a blog post.  On every other workday, I would be either writing or editing my fiction.

I haven’t been doing that for a while.

Part of the issue is that I don’t think very many people had any interest in it.  Apart from my sister, I hardly got any feedback on my books, and very few “ratings” on Amazon.  I know of two people who have given reviews of my books on Amazon, and one of those people subsequently died.

I don’t know that liking my stories had anything to do with that, but I do have a weird history of a surprising number of people dying after expressing the fact that they really liked something I did‒in most prior cases, specifically, my singing.  No fewer than three people who expressed enthusiastic appreciation of my singing died shortly afterward.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to think that people suffered and/or died because they liked something creative that I had done.  It’s not just unscientific, it’s actually verging on frank delusion.  People just die, I know that.  It happens to us all at some point.  Sometimes, by chance, it coincides with certain other things, and that can seem spooky.

But what if…?

As a matter of principle, I cannot rule out with mathematical certainty the possibility that liking my books or my singing or my music or my other creative stuff might be dangerous.  It’s a pretty freaking low probability*.  But is it worth the risk?

I mean, sure, if I thought I had that power and it was reliable, there are certain political (and otherwise) figures I would try to get exposed to my music or writing in hopes that they would love it and so seal their doom.  But that’s a fantasy that’s not even good enough for one of my stories.

Coming back to that topic, even the stories I’ve started (or completed) and shared here** have gotten almost no feedback, and I doubt that anyone other than my sister has read any, let alone all, of them.  If I’m forgetting anyone’s feedback, I do apologize; I did not mean to insult you or dismiss your input.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, here today.  Obviously, I wish more people had read and responded to my stories and/or my songs‒though I no longer sing as well as I used to sing, I think.  But, as you may know, I am not good at promoting myself.  I don’t really like myself, and I certainly don’t love myself.

Anyway, this is all nonsense.  I don’t know what I would do even if I were an international best-selling author or beloved star musician or whatever.  I would probably still hate myself.  Nothing really brings me any durable joy or well-being, let alone anything deeper.  Even the foods that I like seem uninteresting, as do most of the books I could read or programs and videos I could watch.  I can’t sleep (much), and I’m always in pain.

Also, right now, I have a bruise on the inner surface of my right upper arm that looks horrific‒it’s about two inches across‒that just appeared yesterday morning (at least that’s when I noticed it), but I don’t know how it happened.  At least it doesn’t hurt much.  I think I’ve had bruises there before, so perhaps I’m in the habit of slamming things I pick up into that area from time to time.  Or, perhaps I have an AV*** malformation in that region that occasionally bleeds.

It’s almost certainly not a sign of any impending life-threatening illness, unfortunately.

Oh, I also haven’t worked any on either the new song or the last song (Native Alien) so far this week.  I haven’t played any music at all, nor have I listened to any.  And I certainly haven’t been singing.  I haven’t been doing any significant walking, and I haven’t been able to whip myself into a bike-riding habit.

Part of that latter fact is because it’s summer in south Florida, so it’s very hot and very humid.  It’s discouraging, though.

Anyway, sorry about being such a bummer and a downer and all that.  It’s not you; it’s definitely me.  I’ll let you all go and have a hopefully better day for now, I guess.  Meanwhile I’ll go play in traffic or something.

TTFN

*Though I think I would not give it as low an estimated likelihood as I gave the possibility of the Earth and Moon abruptly quantum tunneling to the Andromeda Galaxy.

**Outlaw’s Mind, The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and of course Extra Body.

***Arterio-venous.

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Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).

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“You’d say I’m puttin’ you on, but it’s no joke…”

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, a more or less deliberate choice, as much as anything we do is truly deliberate.  I was already very tired when I left work yesterday, but now it’s even worse, because I got very little sleep last night, even for me.  I’m quite worn out in general.  By rights, I ought to stay at the house, but Wednesday is payroll day, and anyway, I’m more comfortable at the office than I am in my room.  Or, at least, being at work is as good as my days get.

I may or may not go to work tomorrow depending on how I’m feeling.  Even if I go to work, I may or may not write a blog post.  I honestly barely have the gumption to write what I’m writing now.

I haven’t written any of the “Earth” song lyrics for my weekly (or whatever) song yet*, but I have been thinking about them and what approach to take.  I considered doing something that references the idea from Ann Rice’s vampire stories of going into the Earth to rest or escape, but I did a quick Google search and there are already several songs with the title Into the Earth (though I have no idea what the songs are about) which I guess isn’t surprising.  They were very popular books, and the notion of a vampire going “into the Earth” is evocative.

So, I’ll take another approach, perhaps discussing coming up from the Earth or some such.  We’ll see.  I guess I don’t really have to take it too seriously.

Boy, am I tired.  I was already worn out and stressed and tense at the end of the workday yesterday (there were reasons, but I won’t go into them), and now I feel worse.  A person really ought to feel better after having spent the evening and night in their private place in the house, but it’s not so with me in this case.  Honestly, I considered sending for an Uber and just going into the office at about 1:30 in the morning or so, but I decided that would seem too weird; I think the boss gets notifications when the alarm is turned on and when it is turned off.

I’ve been thinking back to when I had my kidney stone‒it’s only been two months‒and about how I sometimes wish it had been some more deadly affliction, or perhaps even that when they did the CT scan they might have found some lesion somewhere in my abdomen or pelvis that indicated some untreatable illness‒cancer or something similar.  Then everything would be taken out of my hands.  I could just find some doctor from whom I could get palliative care when necessary and then wait for the end.  I mean, in a way, that’s what I’m doing anyway‒it’s what everyone is doing‒but it’s vague and indefinite right now.

I’m sorry to be so morbid.  I know most people don’t like to think about death and dying, let alone to “speak” about it.  Then again, the Tao te Ching counsels us to embrace death with our whole being.  It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean that we should worship or love death, à la “we love death more than you love life”.  Quite the contrary.  I read it as saying that you will only be able to enjoy life fully and wisely if you internalize and accept the fact that you are going to die someday.

Once again, we find that Tyler Durden captured at least some ancient wisdom in his “teachings”.

Anyway, my own fanciful yearning for a terminal diagnosis has nothing to do with a healthy and wise attitude toward my own mortality.  No, my yearning is born of simple mental exhaustion, of chronic pain for more than two decades, of chronic insomnia for even longer than that, and of depression/dysthymia with concurrent “anxiety” that is only superseded in length by my recently diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder, which is congenital.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence that any of these things is likely to go away‒especially the latter one‒and I’m just puttering around here in south Florida, accompanied by various arthropods and reptiles and fungi and humidity and rain and heat and one of the most idiotic state governments the nation has ever seen.  And I am just so very tired.

So, anyway, that’s that.  If I write a post tomorrow, it will be here, of course.  If I don’t, it won’t.  If that’s not clear to anyone, please let me know in the comments (I’m kidding, I know you all understand, though you should certainly feel free to leave comments).  If I make any progress on writing a song, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.

I hope you have a good day.

*Addendum:  Between rounds of editing this post, I came up with a possible first verse of a song.  I won’t share it right now, but it’s a start.

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“Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.  Thursday night, your stockings needed mending*.”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I’m feeling a bit better than I have so far this week.  Perhaps I really did have a virus of some type that my body has been fighting.  If so, it triggered/worsened symptoms of already existing pathologies in my body—in my back and hips and shoulders and other joints, and so on—in addition to making me feel achy and feverish, though without the actual fever.

I can’t really blame my psychopathology on a virus, unless it’s some form of mental virus**, or more likely some lifelong accumulation thereof.  Such “viruses” are rarely acute and self-limited, though they could be, I suppose.  What, after all, is a momentary fad or brief obsession, perhaps with a song, or the spread of a particularly funny new joke, that goes away before long?

I don’t really think my mental issues are primarily caused by acute memetic infection, if you will.  They started a long time ago.  In any case, my brain is apparently of an atypical type, at least based on my autism diagnosis, and that creates a substrate on which supervening inputs can become prone to cause certain forms of pathology.  Depression and anxiety are two of those things that are very common in those with ASD—significantly more so than in the general population***.  The statistics on autism indicate that suicidal ideation and attempted and successful**** suicide are much more common in people with ASD than in so-called neurotypicals.

I often think of depression—at least in some of its forms—as a sort of weather-pattern in the mind that becomes self-sustaining in the right circumstances, rather like a hurricane or other massive storm system.  One doesn’t find hurricanes in environments that are not conducive to them—Siberia and the like, for instance—but in minds that are the metaphorical equivalent of the tropics, such mental storm systems may be much more common, and sometimes very destructive.

Who knows, maybe ECT treatment for severe and recalcitrant depression is something akin to the (ill-advised) notion of dropping large nukes in the middle of a hurricane to disrupt its pattern.  If hurricanes occasionally had the tendency to obliterate all or even most life on Earth, we might be willing to try something as extreme as dropping nuclear weapons in a developing tropical storm system to disrupt it, if we could find no other solution.

I wonder if even the large storm cells that occur over places like the great plains of North America could be considered something like episodes of depression (the fact that some weather systems are called “depressions” relates to the barometric pressure, and should not be construed as in any way related to psychiatric depression, other than etymologically).  To what would a “super cell” that produces massive tornados be analogous?

Of course, there need be no actual analogy, because the weather concept is a metaphor, really.  But it is not completely a metaphor, so I don’t think it’s too frivolous to push the notion further in order to trigger some thoughts.  Complex systems like the brain and the weather, with internal feedbacks and feedforwards and “feedsidewayses” that can lead to vicious and/or virtuous cycles can have actual attributes in common if looked at in the right way.

It’s a bit akin to how the motion of a pendulum and the oscillation of a circuit and the “probability waves” of quantum mechanics can be described by very similar mathematics.  Also, the relations between pressure, flow, and friction in fluid dynamics with voltage, current, and resistance in electric circuits are almost spookily alike.

This probably demonstrates something rather fundamental in the nature of reality.  Perhaps it’s distantly related to the fact that geometry seems to have a deeper influence on the workings of reality than one might at first think, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Pythagorean relations and the appearance of Pi (π) in often surprising places.

This is all speculative stuff, and I’m not being very rigorous in my thoughts, though I’m trying not to be too frivolous.  But I think this is a good place to wrap up this post for today.  I hope you all are doing well and that you continue to do well, and even better, that you improve at least a little bit, in at least some way, every day.  You might as well.

*Has anyone reading ever actually mended their stockings (or darned their socks, as in another Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby)?  I have mended a sock at least once in my life, and probably more than once, but nowadays socks are so readily available that I tend just to throw them away when a hole develops.  I guess that’s a testament to how “spoiled” we are in the modern world.  Incidentally, I added the Thursday part of Lady Madonna to this quote-based title because I realized that I’m never likely to use it on an actual Thursday blog post, because for those I use mutated quotes from Shakespeare.

**In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a replicator of the mind, and it has become a useful scientific term, in addition to being a slightly imprecise shorthand for usually humorous pictures of various kinds shared online.  Such memes can become highly potent self-replicators in various senses, and they can combine in ways that make them more prone to spread, in “meme-plexes” of various kinds.  Some are useful for the organism, and so could be considered beneficial viruses (memetic rather than genetic) while others can become terribly destructive, at least in certain circumstances.  Certainly the mind-virus(es) associated with the Jim Jones cult was/were lethal to most of those who were infected.  Likewise with the Heaven’s Gate viruses.  Some of such comparisons can be a bit glib, but others are robust and can be subject to rigorous study.

***I’m not referring to a prison-based “general population”, though at times the metaphor of modern society as a prison is truly warranted, especially for those of us with atypical brains.

****There are times when I would think of a completed suicide as indeed a thoroughgoing success, i.e., a positive thing overall, but here I’m just using the term “successful” to mean “having completed what was intended, as intended”.

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Tuesdays too many

I want to begin with a minor caveat (added here after the first draft):  I don’t feel that I’m writing very well, today.  I apologize for this, and I will try not to make it a habit.

It’s now Tuesday morning, and today I am writing this on my mini laptop computer.  Even though I felt pretty crappy all day yesterday—recall that I was sore all over, and it was particularly bad in my “usual suspect” joints and such—I decided I still didn’t want to write anything on my smartphone today again, so I brought the computer back to the house with me.

The bases of my thumbs continued (and continue) to be sore, and the process of writing on the stupidphone doesn’t get any more pleasant as I go along.  Anyway, today I feel a little less achy all over than yesterday, probably thanks to fairly high doses of three different OTC analgesics/anti-inflammatories.

I still feel vaguely as if I am fighting some flu-like syndrome, except I have no fever that I can detect and no other localizing symptoms.  I just feel blah and bleagh, as though all sorts of cytokines are flowing through my body, all those interleukins and interferons and prostaglandins and the like, making me feel as though I am beset by some infection.

As for everything else—well, the world at large continues to be comically tragic and tragically comical, more so of both than usual, and that’s stressful as well.  And there is no more apparent point to participating in any of it, or indeed in anything at all, today than there was yesterday.

But, nevertheless* I am going to the office.  What would I do otherwise?  Lie about back at the house, in my little room, and just…I don’t know, try to pass my time somehow?  It’s not as though I can readily sleep when there; I slept quite a bit less than three hours total last night, and it was not all in a row.  So, if I’m grumpy, I hope you’ll forgive me.  If you won’t, well…I don’t really give too much of a shit.

As for what to write today, well, I guess you’re reading it, whatever it is.  I have no specific topic, or subject, other than the general notion that I’m writing and sharing my thoughts, such as they are, as they stream through my consciousness in response to my obsessive-compulsive urge to write this blog every workday, even though I have no overarching subject about which to write.

I would love to be able to discuss some interesting subject in physics or mathematics or biology—or even medicine, which technically is part of biology—but though there are surely many interesting things being explored and discovered and discussed, they all seem pointless to me.  My state of mind is definitely not good if even my favorite sciences (and science-adjacent subjects) are incapable of grabbing my interest.

So, all I have to discuss, if that’s the right term, is that my chronic pain continues, and my dysthymia/depression continues, and my social anxiety continues, as does my general free-floating hostility.  All these latter things are at least partly triggered and/or exacerbated by my ASD, which is something that is never going to stop for as long as I’m alive—which has already been too long.

I’ve done pretty much all the good I’m ever going to do in the world, probably.  And I did do some good here and there.  Of course, the best thing I ever did was to father my children, so that’s one thing.  But I also contributed to scientific advancement in my own tiny little way, and I did a pretty good job of relieving suffering in my patients, and saving people’s lives**.  And I wrote my books, which very few people will ever read, but which I nevertheless think are pretty decent, and I wrote and recorded some songs, which very few people will ever hear, but which I nevertheless think are also pretty decent.

It would be nice if I felt able to write fiction again, I guess, but even the process of trying seems terribly daunting.  There is little expected reward, since probably no one but my sister will end up reading anything I write in the future (fiction-wise, anyway), if there is such writing, which seems unlikely.  And it’s almost laughable to think that I might write and record any new songs.

Also, in the end, I have always failed at everything that really matters to me.

So, I’m pretty much just coasting along, waiting for my momentum to be used up.  It’s annoyingly persistent, but I guess I can only blame some metaphorical translational symmetry for that conservation of metaphorical momentum.  I’m probably pushing the metaphor too far (a process that is itself metaphorical), but that’s what I tend to do.

I’m sorry to be such a downer.  Even worse, I’m sorry to be so boring.  It’s not personal; though it’s also not strictly business, either.  I don’t know what it is.  I’m at a loss.  But that too seems just to be my usual state.  Perhaps I’ve never been otherwise.

I hope all of you feel better than I feel today, and every day.  I hope that, even on days when I feel good—if there ever are such days again in my life, which feels pretty unlikely—that you all still feel better than I do.  Why not?  The bar is set pretty low, but at least that means there’s plenty of room for you to be boosted up.

*Is it redundant to say “but, nevertheless”?  I suspect that it is.

**Though I dislike that expression somewhat; “saving lives” is always just saving them for later, since everyone dies eventually.

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“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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Stupidity make me angry–especially my own

Once again, I am writing this on my smartphone.  Yesterday I didn’t even bother to take the laptop computer back to the house with me.  I was pretty much fed up with everything.  Though we had a successful day at work, there were multiple cases of people not paying attention to our guidelines and rules; but whenever I would bring them up, there was (and is) always an excuse to go around them‒sound familiar to anyone?‒and I repeatedly got overridden, leaving me to wonder why I bother.

I also hit the top of my head hard on the corner of my metal filing cabinet early yesterday, while reaching down to pick up a dropped pen.  It really hurt, and it left a cut, and I had a headache and a sore neck for pretty much the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have developed a subarachnoid hemorrhage, so I have to keep moving.  It sucks.

And, of course, there’s all the idiocy that is actively occurring in America and the rest of the world.  There might be some who would characterize certain things that happen and that people do as “sick” and/or even “insane”, but I don’t like to use such terms to describe the various moronic and submoronic things humans do that are not only detrimental but cause spreading suffering to others.

First of all, it denigrates people who are actually sick/have mental illness and other related disorders.  Such people (of which I guess I am one) rarely do much harm to anyone but themselves‒though sometimes, some of us wish to do harm to certain carefully chosen other people.

But also, it dignifies the idiots.  After all, insanity is a legal term that indicates someone does not know right from wrong or lacks the capacity to control their own actions.  Now, at a deep level, it is almost certain that none of us has free will, at least not in anything but the vaguest, most hand-wavy, compatibilist sense.  But there is a real difference between someone who has OCD and cannot help but wash his or her hands until they bleed and a person who selfishly and arrogantly assumes that they have the right and the power and the competence to try to run other people’s lives but who then don’t accept responsibility for the horrific messes they make.

Stupidity can be defined as doing something in such a way that it is worse than just random action‒like trying to get to the airport by driving around one’s residential block over and over again ad infinitum*, or to try to solve a Rubik’s Cube by just spinning one side over and over (again, ad infinitum).  And this is so often the distillation of so many things that humans do, especially when they group together in significant numbers.

It reminds me of a post I saw on Threads or X or Bluesky or one of those.  The person said that people are selfish when isolated, but that such selfishness doesn’t really work, that we only survive and thrive by drawing together and supporting each other, working together, caring for each other.  This is true, as far as it goes‒humans are the most social of the social primates, and their greatest power comes from their ability to work together, to cooperate, to communicate.  This is why written language is the wellspring and lifeblood of civilization.  And yet, I am also reminded of the line from the original Men In Black, which I will only paraphrase here:  a person can be smart, but people together are stupid, reactionary, panicky, dangerous animals.

Both of these things are true, at least within certain contexts.  This probably explains at least part of the appeal of Ayn Rand’s** focus on rational self interest‒which, in a large society, is going to, in its limit, come to be the same thing as rational altruism.  But it is strange to have those seemingly at least partly contradictory facts both be true, at least in a highly simplified outline of the social nature of naked house apes***.

It is terribly frustrating.  Even the most well-intentioned people, like the person who made that point about humans being social and needing each other (or at least many of those who agree with those sentiments) will often virulently demonize those who are on the opposite side of a given political spectrum or argument, not even trying to show compassion or empathy or understanding for those who disagree with them.

Likewise, those on the “other side” who seem to wallow in self-righteousness and yearn for authoritarianism will nevertheless seemingly believe that, for instance, they follow the teachings of a very socialistic, compassion-loving rabbi from 1st century, Roman-controlled Judea.

These are some of the things that make me angry, not just the persistent headache and my other, never-ending body pains and mental divergences.  And although anger can be energizing, it is also unpleasant and, as Radiohead said, “it wears me out”.

I can endure a lot, it seems, whether out of stubbornness or willpower or just my own form of stupidity, but there’s no clear reason to keep enduring when there’s no evidence of any available relief or any joy that lasts more than a few hours at a time before leaving me alone to stew in my own, solitary, odious juices again.

I really do hate the whole universe a lot of the time, and that time proportion appears to be growing as that time goes by, like the product of some perverse Dark Energy in my own psyche.  I don’t know what to do about it in my almost entirely empty life.

I say almost entirely, because there are just enough little rays of light to keep me fooling myself that I might one day return to a satisfying, mutual daily existence with people I love, only to have those hopes draw away like a will-o-the-wisp, keeping me eager and even desperate to follow them, but leaving me lost and stranded in the marshland of my mind instead of just escaping into oblivion.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  No shit, Sherlock, what else is new?  Further clichés as thoughts warrant.

I hope you lot are in better mental states than I am, and that you each and all have a good day.

*To borrow an example, though I cannot right now recall from where.

**Do you think Ayn Rand might have been an undiagnosed autistic person?  Discuss.

***It reminds me of the “Riddle of Steel” as described in the movie Conan the Barbarian.  Early in the movie, Conan’s father tells him that you cannot rely on men or gods, but that you can trust steel.  But then, later, Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones) reveals the punchline of the riddle:  Steel is not strong, flesh (i.e., a person) is stronger.  These contradictory truths engender and represent the vortex of seeming paradox through which people must try to navigate, to find the eye of the storm, the balance point at which effective action is possible.

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Monday morning, wearing down

Well, it’s Monday again.  Time keeps marching on without respite, as it is apparently wont to do, “progressing” in the direction of increasing entropy, whether time is a fundamental aspect of the universe or an emergent phenomenon.  In either case, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of time stream or time vortex like in Doctor Who, but rather a process that simply is a linear dimension with some “entanglement” (not to be confused with quantum entanglement) with the dimensions of space, such that motion and acceleration in space changes one’s “motion” in time, in an updated version of the Pythagorean Theorem.

For those of you who like to share the joke about “Yet another day when I didn’t use a2 + b2 = c2” you’re really depriving yourself of a deep understanding of something that turns up in and governs a ridiculous number of the things and processes in the physical reality in which you live.  Consciousness—despite clever but tortured sophistry (in my opinion) by some prominent philosophers of mind—in no way appears fundamental to the universe*.  On the other hand, the Pythagorean Theorem, which was neither invented nor discovered by Pythagoras, applies in all levels of dimensions, however many you might conjure, and with the modification to make it reflect velocities, it applies to spacetime as well.

There can be no readily conceivable brains** in two spatial dimensions, but Pythagoras nevertheless applies.  In one dimension, it doesn’t really apply, but in one dimension there are no triangles of any kind, so it doesn’t make much difference.  It’s difficult to imagine how consciousness could possibly occur in one dimension (notwithstanding the seemingly one-dimensional paucity of ideas held by so many people, especially in politics).

Anyway, enough of this nonsense.  Well, it’s not nonsense, but it is rather pointless meandering of random thoughts that interest no one but me, and will probably lose me readers.  Weirdly enough, people seem to come and read more often when I write about my depression and self-hatred and anxiety and ASD and how there’s absolutely nothing going on in my life that makes it worth living.

Well, rest assured, all those things are still present and active and driving me toward an early grave, which in some senses will be a release, or at least an escape of sorts.

I keep trying to think of things to engage myself and my interests, but so far to no avail.  I think about asking my boss to give me back my black Strat to play at the office, or I consider bringing in another guitar, or maybe even getting a portable keyboard or something, but when I think of any of them, I cannot even imagine doing anything but sort of staring at them as if I don’t even know what their purpose is.  I don’t play my guitars or my keyboard at the house, either.

It’s likewise with even fiction, other than silly Japanese light novels that take a day or so to read (not continuous time).  I think I like them mainly because of the social interactions of the characters, many of the main ones of whom are somewhat socially awkward.  It can feel, however briefly, that I have a social group of some sort, as I read the stories.  Of course, that means that once I’m done reading there is a comparative let down, which sometimes makes me feel worse than I did before.

I tried to read some of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, but I lost interest almost immediately, though he was a brilliant and engaging teacher.  I also tried to read some of Anthony Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, which is also very good and fun; if you’re interested in who he is, you can check out the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols, and sometimes Numberphile.  He shows up in both places fairly often.  But in any case, though I like his book (I’ve read it before) it has not been able to grip me.

I’ve also tried to start reading Stephen King’s novella The Life of Chuck, since it’s now a movie and is getting positive reviews.  At least Stephen King is almost always an engaging read.  But I’m not sure I’m getting into the story.  Quite a while ago, I started the first story in If It Bleeds, the collection in which the above novella appears, but I couldn’t get into it at all.  When I can’t even get into reading Stephen King***, things are looking bleak.

I did watch the rest of the latest series of Doctor Who, and it was pretty good, and quite surprising at the end, but Batman only knows when the next series is going to happen, and there will only be a handful of episodes if it keeps up as it has been.  That’s too little too late for me to use as motivation for continued existence.

I don’t know what to do.  I really don’t know.  I feel very lost and, more importantly, very much without any internal impetus.  I can’t even listen to songs I like, let alone try to sing along (or play) without feeling like I’m going to cry, though I don’t understand why.  I’m at the end of my rope (I have two, and both are tied into nooses, just for “fun”).

Anyway, that’s enough.  Sorry to bother you with my crap again, but in my mind, you asked for it by complaining about my tedious math and science stuff.  I hope you have a good day.  Unless you’re lucky (or I am) I’m sure to be back again tomorrow with another blog post.

*The only reason I can discern why some people think consciousness is fundamental to the universe is that consciousness is fundamental to human experience—indeed, one could say that it is human experience—and of course, such people seem tacitly or implicitly to think humans are the measure of all things simply because that is what they are.

**The degree of interconnectivity is just too low.  Connections between 2D neurons would be terribly limited, as would room for such things.  I suppose that, since we can always map anything three-dimensional onto some two-dimensional surface, à la Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy and the holographic principle, we could construct a sort of brain in 2D, but that’s a tortuous process, and seems quite unlikely.  Of course, 4D would give us even more available connectivity than 3D—also there are no knots or tangles in 4 spatial dimensions—but there are other issues with 4 (macroscopic) spatial dimensions that would seem to get in the way of life as we know it, such as the nature of gravity (and other forces) and the rate of such forces’ diminishment.  For instance, the force of gravity (and electromagnetism, etc.) in four dimensions would fall off at a rate proportional to r3 rather than r2, and there are apparently no stable orbits in such situations.

***What’s worse, I cannot even get into reading Tolkien.  I’ve tried.  When neither Stephen King nor Tolkien, nor even well-written science books, can engage me, something indeed has happened.