mental-illness

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I don’t know what to title this post

Hi, y’all.

There, that’s me officially and in writing endorsing the contraction “y’all” as a very clear, useful, and effective term of address, a 2nd person plural pronoun, which the English language seems otherwise to lack.  I might have mentioned previously that I like the word, but I nevertheless rarely use it.  I rarely talk even to a single other person, let alone to a group, so it doesn’t come up much.

That’s it.  That’s about as positive a thought as I have right now, and I doubt it’s going to get that positive again.  I feel truly burnt out.  I mean, I’m still writing my stupid fucking blog, because I am more or less internally compelled to do so.  And I’m going to work, because it’s not as if I can rest when I’m back at the shit-hole of a house, and I can’t sleep without sedating myself‒not for long, anyway.  I don’t really know what to do.

The world is going to shit, but it doesn’t really matter to me‒or it shouldn’t‒because my life went to shit a long time ago, and since then I’ve just been trying to swim through an ocean of raw sewage, trying to keep my head above “water”, but there’s no shore or pool edge or whatever in sight, and frankly, I’m tired.  I’m very stubborn about not giving up in general, but look where that has gotten me.  To paraphrase Fiona Apple, I am steadily going nowhere.

So, fuck the world.  All you humans had such opportunities to build something better, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  That was an amazing series of events that I could barely believe, having grown up expecting global thermonuclear war to happen sometime.  Things seemed honestly on the verge of real progress.

But no, always after a defeat and a respite, the shadow takes a new shape and grows again.  And people allow it to grow, people encourage it, people water and fertilize it, and indeed, people are that shadow.  There’s no Sauron or Morgoth or Satan or Ahriman or whatever other incarnation of evil you might conjure.  It’s all just the weakness and mental softness of the human race*, and alas, despite those seeming signs of improvement (which happened in the very year that I got married, coincidentally‒and that ended up falling apart as well), it seems that humans overall have little capacity for growth.

The true improvements made in the world, in life, are the products of a tiny, tiny fraction of people, while the others just take and use the products of that progress without any real understanding.  Perhaps they see them as miracles provided by their fictional (and not very clever) deities.

Meanwhile, if it were up to most people, humans would still be figuratively living in caves.

I hate the world, as well as almost all of its people (as a general feeling, anyway).  I honestly would like to burn it all, to erase it, to delete it.  There are ways that could be accomplished, if one were to put one’s whole effort into it.  If I had Elon Musk’s resources, I could initiate several such processes at once (for all I know, he might be doing so).  I’ve spent a very disturbing fraction of my time of life thinking of ways civilization can be destroyed, but then again, I am a Destroyer by nature.  I think I always have been.

But I don’t really feel I have the right‒though “rights” are one of those things made up by the smartish humans, and which are underappreciated by the rest‒to wipe everyone else out, and also, there are a few people here and there whom I actually like.  And I don’t think there is zero chance that humans will save themselves and the world, I just think the chances are tiny.

Maybe the world looks disgusting to me because I can only see it through my own eyes, and I myself am disgusting.

But there is a way for me to make the rest of the universe go away from my point of view, and for myself to go away as well, and it’s much more efficient than the many schemes I have dreamt up for obliterating the world.

It’s a very alluring thought, to escape from internal and external sources of pain and horror.  Oblivion, obliterate‒related words, from the Latin for forgetting.  I want to rest, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for me, so I probably will just have to settle for erasure.

*I do not refer here to kindness or generosity or compassion as softness‒those traits are strong, and only those with real strength have the capacity to show them.  I mean softheadedness, that pathetic need to imagine oneself to be, for instance, the favorite species (or people) of some imaginary almighty deity, or to believe one is somehow superior simply because of one’s ethnicity or sex or skin color.  But of course, that “belief” is itself evidence of the most profound weakness, insecurity, and inferiority.  Such people are nevertheless worthy of compassion‒as is everyone really, given that no one made themselves or the world‒but they are frustratingly capable of doing tremendous harm.

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I am a detriment…goo goo ga choob

I’m feeling very grumpy this morning, which isn’t anything new; grumpiness is a common part of chronic depression (AKA dysthymia).

I have known some people who find anger/grumpiness preferable to being simply down and discouraged, but I really don’t like being angry.  I feel wrong and evil and ashamed when I get angry.

My inherent instinct when angry is to want to act on my anger physically; I’m not a big verbal arguer.  At least, if I am arguing verbally, it’s generally not in anger, but entails me trying to explore the truth (or otherwise) of a particular topic and to spread or gain better understanding of it.  But when actually feeling anger, what I want to do is to destroy the object of my anger, literally, so that I don’t ever have to worry about it again, whatever it might be.

I guess I’ll just have to deal.  Or maybe I’ll finally just lose my temper and get into serious and severe trouble.  More likely, I’ll just take my anger out physically on myself, as I usually do.

I have excellent “self-denial subroutines” to keep me from hurting other people (though not so much to keep me from hurting myself).  As I’ve said before, I have an instinctive sense that I do not have any right to comfort or satisfaction with pretty much anything.  So, I don’t usually even try, because as often as not, at least when I notice, trying makes things blow up in my face.

This relates, at least tangentially, to an interaction I had yesterday on Threads.  Someone there had posted something along the lines of “my therapist told me she was proud of me today”.  I thought that seemed quite nice, and I answered, honestly but with a bit of self-deprecation, that I didn’t think I had ever had a therapist say they were proud of me.  I added a little ^_^ emoticon to make it clear that I wasn’t moaning about it, just trying to take a light-hearted approach and reinforce the fact that this person’s therapist’s words were positive and nice and unfortunately rare.

Then, a little while later, the original poster replied to my comment, saying she was proud of me that at least I was going.

That’s a little saddening and embarrassing, because I am not currently going to therapy.  I’ve gone to therapy quite a lot in the past; my comment was not a fictional one.  But I haven’t gone in a long while.  The last time I felt desperate enough and tried to do therapy through BetterHelp—which I chose because I could not find a way to go to a therapist’s office and work it into my schedule—I had just gotten started working with a therapist there and feeling relatively comfortable when she had to go on extended maternity leave.

I don’t hold that against her, obviously, but it was frustrating, verging on heartbreaking, if you don’t mind me seeming a bit melodramatic.  I had really needed to force myself to try to go through with that and to start with a therapist*; to have it suddenly vanish was both frustrating and deflating.

It’s a bit similar to my catastrophic interaction with the suicide hotline years ago, when morons from the PBSO came and got me and handcuffed me and took me to a shithole mental health place, where I was for all of twenty-four hours.  At least I got a brief referral through that place, but I didn’t really stick with it, and of course, I ended up going to FSP before too long, anyway.

Since then, I have been particularly nervous about using the hotline, though there have been many times when I’ve looked at it online, and even more times when my search engines have recommended it to me based on some web search I’ve been doing.  I did give up and use it once, a year or two ago, refusing to divulge my location to them.  But even with that, it’s very nerve-racking to seek help in a time of crisis and to have to worry about some Barney Fife type coming and taking you away.

If I wanted to be hospitalized for my mental illness**, I would go to a hospital.  I know how to do that.  I’m not afraid of hospitals.  I just don’t think they would actually do me any good.  I’m not convinced that anything will do me any good.

This is not mere pessimism (though that surely enters into my figuring).  It’s just that the human race has not understood the mind and brain well enough to have reliable treatments for certain things.  It’s a bit analogous to the plague, which is caused by infection with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, if memory serves, and which is easily treatable (nowadays) with simple, common antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin.  But if you got the plague before antibiotics were invented, going to a hospital for treatment would be pointless, useless, and probably counter-productive.

Anyway, I’m going on and on about nothing, and using more words than necessary to do so.  In case you couldn’t tell, I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, so the words flow more easily.  But it’s all just me flailing about like a paranoid, feral cat.  When you can’t know what you can trust or upon what or whom you can rely, the natural reaction can be just to keep your distance from everyone and everything, because some things that seem like they might be helpful will end up hurting you more—and yes, it seems always possible for one to suffer more than one already is.

So, though I’m chagrined to have been told by someone that they were proud of me for doing something I’m no longer doing, I don’t necessarily think I’m wrong not to do it—though I recognize that I may be fooling myself or even that my thinking may be frankly distorted.  Maybe I would do better with therapy now that I know I have ASD (the brain kind, not the heart kind).  I don’t know.

Sorry for this post going nowhere.  I apologize for wasting your time, and for wasting the time of everyone else who’s ever had to interact with me.  I’m sure all my former therapists could have used their time better by seeing someone else during the hours they saw me.

There’s little doubt in my mind that if I had actually killed myself in the past, on one of the occasions on which I almost did so, the world would probably be at least a slightly less miserable place where I currently sit.  And while all possibilities of happiness would have been foreclosed for me, at least I would no longer be lonely and in pain and overflowing with self-loathing.

*I tried to get in touch with the therapist I had seen most recently (before my whole debacle).  Actually, “try” is misleading; I did get in touch with her, but she was no longer seeing patients, and in any case, she didn’t have any offices that would have been reachable from where I now live and work without a car.  I asked for recommendations in the area, which she provided, but that still would have required driving, so I had to resort to online help.

**I hate that people euphemistically refer to psychological/psychiatric troubles as “mental health” as in the rather absurd statement “suffering from or dealing with mental health”.  That’s like saying someone is troubled by physical fitness.  No, I suffer from mental illness.  It’s not mental health.  It’s the opposite of mental health.  I wouldn’t even know what it would mean to suffer from mental health, but it doesn’t matter, because mental health is something with which I am not burdened.  Likewise, I do not bear the burden of physical comfort, I suffer from chronic pain.  These pathetic, touchy-feelie euphemisms seem counter-productive to me.

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No April foolishness in this post

I am not making any jokes or or otherwise messing about in an “April Fools” sense here today.  I despise “pranks” of the sort that people tend to pull on April Fools’ Day, and think people who do them should be castrated/spayed/neutered immediately.  No, I’m not kidding.  Maybe I wouldn’t ever actually carry out that sort of penalty‒I am a bit of a softy sometimes‒but that is my urge when even merely contemplating such deliberate, quasi-malicious trickery.  Actually, that’s my restrained, milder response.  Most of the time I feel murderous at pranks, even when I’m not the target.

It’s the start of a new month, and I am not enthusiastic about it.  Still, it’s not as though I can do much to avoid it.  It’s one of those stupid, inexorable things in the world that make it so often so repugnant.

I think I’m going to try to avoid discussing updates about my ongoing “plan” from now on.  It just seems to make other people upset or sad or concerned, but it doesn’t actually motivate any kind of active response of any kind.  It’s like the memes say, when someone’s mental illness‒especially suicidal thoughts‒is made open and discussed, such people are avoided, they are called “attention-seeking”, they are told to toughen up or stop complaining, to smile, to get out and exercise, to seek support of friends and those who love you‒as if those weren’t the very people you want to avoid burdening or inconveniencing.

It’s only after someone actually commits suicide that people start saying things like “I wish I could have done something,” or saying that they didn’t know, that they didn’t see it coming and so on.  But of course, they had warning, they had information, if not awareness, and they could have done something.  But they figured it was up to the person having the trouble to seek help.  As if someone whose brain is not functioning properly has the wherewithal to help themselves, especially when they are on their own and have no local support system whatsoever, and other issues including chronic pain, insomnia, and neurodevelopmental issues.

They might as well tell someone with liver failure to just buck up and for crying out loud get back to using that liver to cleanse the various toxins from their blood and to process their food and maintain the biliary system and all that goes with the liver, when it’s the liver that is failing.

I’m not saying that all people are like that, of course.  There are people who definitely try to do what they can.  They are few and far between, however.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing does.  And I am certainly no one’s idea of a worthy cause, to be honest.  So I guess I shouldn’t feel snippy about the fact that there’s no way for me to be rescued.

I don’t know what else to write about, otherwise.  Maybe I shouldn’t write about anything.  Maybe I should just quit writing.  Maybe I should quit trying to pretend that anything I say or do is of any importance or even interest.  It’s a bit pathetic.

I’m just tired.  I’m tired of trying to “fit in”, tired of trying to pretend to be positive, tired of trying to pretend to be healthy so that I don’t inconvenience other people too much.  It’s all bullshit.  I’m not healthy, I’m not happy, and I haven’t been in years.  I see no positive future for me.  There is only an ongoing stretch of years, decades, who knows how long, alone, depressed, in pain, an outsider, an alien, a stranger, who will die alone in the end.

I have often been the one providing support for others throughout my life.  I always tried to be there for people.  I volunteered in various places, tutored and helped out first other kids and then younger people, and of course, I went to medical school and became a doctor.  Even in prison I worked in education, trying to help other prisoners get their GEDs.  Maybe some part of me was thinking that was an investment‒that if I tried to be and do good, to help others, when it was my time to need help, I would be worthy of getting it, worthy of rescue.

Of course, that’s not how the universe works.  If anything, when left to its own devices, the universe rewards selfish assholes, at least in the short term.  In the long term, everyone dies anyway, good or bad, and how much a person suffers in the meantime is in no way dependent upon how good or evil a person is.  And there is no credible reason I have ever encountered to suspect that matters will be set right in some form of afterlife.  It’s all just futile and maddening.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  Obviously I’m very grumpy, and I’m still sick (though maybe slightly less so than yesterday), and I don’t want to deal with anything!  I want to rest.  I want to escape.  There’s nothing for me here.  “I don’t want to spoil the party, so I’ll go.”  Or at least, I ought to go.

I don’t know.  I am at a loss.

I hope you all are doing and feeling far better than I am and do.  Please try to have a good day and a good month.

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No links to famous people’s works here. They don’t link to ME, after all.

I thought for a moment that someone had been listening to me, because when I started this new Word file from the last blog post I wrote on my mini-laptop computer, it was in Calibri font right from the beginning!  Then I went and closed the earlier file/blog post, and when I had returned to this one, the base font had reverted to Aptos (which I like to call “craptos” because I don’t think it merits a more sophisticated insult).

So, it turns out that no one was listening to me, of course.

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer as indicated above.  This will probably make it faster to write, but whether it’s any better written than yesterday’s post, I cannot say.  I felt that yesterday’s writing was fairly erratic and disjointed and borderline incoherent, but I often have a difficult time judging how my writing will be perceived by other people.

If it’s fiction, I can only care up to a certain point, because I write fiction that I want to read, so I cannot try to adjust it for others too much.  I can only guess that somewhere out there exists at least one other person whose reading taste is similar to mine, and who might enjoy my stories.  So far, not counting my sister*, I don’t know of more than three people who have read any of my fiction, so it’s hard to tell.

But, of course, though my tastes have been esoteric at times—especially when it comes to my love of relatively deep scientific and mathematical and philosophical reading—I have also enjoyed some massively popular books of certain kinds.  For instance, my very favorite book of all time is The Lord of the Rings (taking it as one large book, as it was initially written), and that’s hardly a rare choice.  Similarly, I’m a great fan of Shakespeare, and it’s not as though no one else ever reads or otherwise enjoys his plays.

There have also been popular series of books for which I waited eagerly and excitedly as each volume came out, including The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Belgariad, the various Dragonlance books**, and of course the Harry Potter books.  I’m sure I’ve written here somewhere about how I read Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince seven times while waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to come out.  All of these books have been quite popular, and I enjoyed them, too.

Then again, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Twilight books, though I have written about vampires (and a demi-vampire) in one of my own books.  Likewise, I had no interest in Fifty Shades of Grey or the various Dan Brown books, and I haven’t read any new science fiction or fantasy in years, not counting Japanese light novels.

Speaking of that, I am very much impatient for some new volumes in a few light novel series I have read so far, but being light novels, they are much quicker to read than they are to publish.

In any case, I mean to say that just because I write to my own taste doesn’t mean that my stories are particularly esoteric in their nature and character.  I may be an alien in disguise, even to myself, but that doesn’t mean that stories that are bad are going to interest me.  Good stories have at least some degree of universality.  Even the Klingons love Shakespeare!***

My point is that, though I know I am a peculiar bean, I also think there are probably a lot of people (maybe not a majority, but a lot) who would enjoy at least some of my books and short stories.  But I am not good at promoting myself and making other people aware of my work.  This is probably related to my ASD and the related social anxiety, but also to my general self-hatred.  I tried to do a little promoting of my stuff at first, but it quickly became too stressful and irritating for me to tolerate.

So, if anyone out there has it in them—and so desires—to promote my stuff, even if just by sharing links and references in your own social media, that would be appreciated very much.  And while we’re at it, if anyone out there has a quick and easy cure for chronic pain*****, let me know.  Also, I want a unicorn.  (Actually, I want a dragon, but that might be harder to keep safely.)

Well, this post has probably been just as goofy and incoherent as yesterday’s.  My apologies.  That is, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case:  enjoy.  And try to have a good day.

*Not to imply that she doesn’t “count” in some important sense—she most certainly does—but just that it’s difficult to tease out the family relation from the other variables in the mix, so I cannot draw too many conclusions too easily.

**The ones that involved Raistlin, at least.  I didn’t have much interest in stories involving only the other characters of the stories.  Those of you who know those books can probably understand why this is so.

***Indeed, as the Klingon ambassador said in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country****, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

****The title itself is a Shakespearean reference, though in the movie, the undiscovered country is peace, whereas when Hamlet said it, he explicitly referred to death as the undiscovered country, one from whose bourn no traveler returns.

*****I don’t want to hear anyone saying “death” because that doesn’t count as a cure.  It makes the problem go away; it doesn’t solve it.  There is a difference.  And, don’t worry, as readers of my plan know, that is my own intended course of action if I cannot reduce my pain enough.

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I’m sorry, I don’t have the energy for a Shakespeare based title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and though I don’t particularly feel like it, I’m writing a blog post because it’s Thursday.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to write one tomorrow or Saturday (assuming we* are open, which we probably will be, since it’s rare to be closed two weekends in a row).  As far as I know, I will not.

I don’t really have any energy or impetus to write much.  I’m trying.  I’ve been rereading my fiction to try to stimulate myself, but so far it’s obviously not doing the trick.  I reread first The Chasm and the Collision, then Son of Man, then The Vagabond, and just yesterday finished rereading Mark Red.  I’ve also reread a few of my short stories.  But, though I’ve enjoyed rereading my stuff as far as it goes, it’s not really doing anything as far as catalyzing any desire to write, whether fiction or nonfiction.

I think things would be much more positive if I were able to get a good sleep (at least one night) and especially if I weren’t in daily, increasing pain.  I’d be tempted even to try ketamine if I thought it would really help, though there are some cautionary examples in the mainstream media that would give me pause.  Heck, I’d practically be willing to try full-on PCP if I had good reason to think it would provide lasting relief without causing worse problems.

Of course, there’s the rub.  All of these things that can provide even temporary, real relief have a range of side-effects that would make my situation even worse than it is.  Yes, I freely admit that my life could get worse.  It’s almost always true that things could be worse than they actually are.  But that doesn’t mean they’re good.

I’m just so weary, so tired of every day being dominated by both physical and psychological pain.

Actually, I feel that the last adjective there should be “psychical” not “psychological”, since the latter term refers to the study of the psyche, and I don’t have pain or suffering that involves the study of my psyche, just pain in my psyche itself.  Still, the common usage, for what it’s worth, seems to lean toward “psychological”.  Then again, current common parlance refers to psychological problems as “mental health”, as in “Are you suffering from mental health?” which makes little sense.

I wish I could wrap myself in some kind of life-support cocoon and undergo some form of metamorphosis, like Adam Warlock in the comic books.  Hell, just being able to sleep for a while seems like it’s a ridiculous, superstitiously foolish notion, on a par with the expectations of the Heaven’s Gate cultists, who thought a space ship was coming to gather their souls (and was supposedly hiding in, I think, the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet).

I want to rest.  I want to stop being in constant pain.  It’s been going on for more than twenty years, and it’s tainted every aspect my existence.  It has contributed to everything from the breakup of my marriage, to my arrest and incarceration, and to my inability to sustain or create any kind of close relationship of any kind.

The people “closest” to me are hundreds to thousands of miles away, and I have no doubt that if they were physically closer, a kind of Uncertainty Principle-like process would occur, such as what makes the momentum/energy of, say, an electron greater and greater the more tightly you try to pin it down, until more and more of its wave function leaks out and the probability of it being elsewhere‒even on the other side of the universe, so to speak‒dominates over any local presence.

I’m probably not explaining that very well, I’m sorry.  But I don’t even have any will to watch science videos or to read science books or what have you, let alone to go into any rigorous discussions thereof.  I’m just making the point that I’m much better for other people from a distance than from up close, with the function approaching a singularity (of negative infinity) as the distance from me shrinks toward zero, rather like some logarithmic function.  This graph (of log base 2) demonstrates why, from a certain distance, it can start even to be pleasant to interact with me, though with diminishing returns…but woe betide anyone who drops below one unit of distance.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  It’s probably much more than enough.  I’m sorry to be so tedious; believe me, no one gets more tired of me than I do of myself.  At least all of you can just go read something else by someone else, or do something else entirely.  Not I.  I am stuck with being and enduring the miserable git that I am every waking moment.  And waking moments make up far too great a proportion of the times of my life.

Have a good day, if you can.

TT…FN, I guess.

*By we, I mean the office at which I work.  While I have no problem joining with you, my readers, into a collective, first person plural pronoun, I simply have no idea what y’all’s work schedules are.

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Well, here we go again

It’s Monday morning, again, and I’m starting another week writing a blog post in the morning instead of doing something productive or creative or whatever.  Or, I suppose one could also say I am doing this instead of sleeping, though it’s not as though I really had a choice about that.

Oh, and the reason I didn’t post on Saturday was because the office didn’t open on Saturday, since everyone kind of needed a break.  It wasn’t because I died sometime after my Friday morning post, unfortunately.

Anyone who thinks that dying would be the unfortunate thing clearly hasn’t wrestled with and internalized the fact that everyone is going to die anyway, and that chronic pain makes the process of being alive a form of slow torture.  And as some famous person from the time of the inquisition said, if anyone has not confessed themselves a witch or a heretic, it is merely because they have not been subject to torture.

He was commenting on the fact that, unless there is truly some greater purpose motivating someone, torture works on essentially everyone, eventually.  Now, I don’t know if it’s melodramatic of me or if I exaggerate in calling 20+ years of chronic pain (while still trying to live a gainfully employed, productive life) a form of torture.  Maybe I’m just a wimp.  I do know that I do not have that greater purpose, that goal on which to keep my gaze fixed.

I used to have something or some things like that.  One of the thoughts that helped me get through prison was that I could look forward to seeing my kids again when I got out.  The whole point of accepting a plea bargain, even though I consider myself innocent, was that I didn’t want to take the chance of being in prison any longer than I had to, because I wanted to see my children again as soon as I could.

Of course, that turned out not to happen, because they didn’t actually want to see me.  It turned out that their lives were at least simpler when I wasn’t around, just like their mother’s was, just like pretty much everyone else’s life is simpler when I’m not around.

That was about 10 years ago, and I still haven’t seen either of them since.  I ask you, what’s the point of enduring anything in that situation?

I have a lot of endurance, I think‒mentally, anyway.  I can put up with a surprising amount of stuff just out of general pig-headedness.  But after a while it all gets annoying.

And lest anyone be under the mistaken impression that I am someone who has not sought help or not allowed people to help me when they tried:  I have gone through years of therapy at various times and of various kinds, I have taken various types and brands of antidepressants and related medications, I have called the suicide crisis line more than once and have very briefly been hospitalized because of it.  I have taken various kinds of medications and have tried numerous interventions including surgery to address my chronic pain.  I don’t easily let problems go.  I don’t tend to give up easily, at least not at things that matter to me.

But I am tired and I am in pain and I am alone.  Also, it turns out I am autistic.  That would, of course, be nothing new, just newly discovered, but it does make it very hard to make new friends or new connections with people, especially now that I am no longer in an environment where there are people around who are interested in at least some of the things in which I am truly interested or who have shared backgrounds.

I would like to do good in and for the world in some fashion.  I would at least like to bring original creations into the world that make some people happy, at least for a little while.

I know we’re all just animals, muddling our way from the womb to the tomb, acting in ways shaped by natural selection’s effects on our ancestors.  There need be no deeper point to life than that to keep everything rolling.  But it’s not very interesting after a while.

I don’t know.  Everything is getting boring.  It’s hard to bother keeping oneself alive when everything is either dull or irritating or painful.  There is such a thing as learned helplessness, even for the very stubborn.  All creatures have their limits.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say or do here.  I don’t know what the point is.  Probably there is no point.  I know that I am pointless, at the very least.  So I’ll draw this to a close again, and start yet another pointless, unpleasant, idiotic day.  I’m stupid that way.  But maybe I’ll get smarter someday.

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The blog of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course, which is why I’ve greeted you as I have.

I slept worse than usual even for me last night, and yet I’m wired and tense, not at all sleepy.  I cannot go on this way.

I’m once again writing this on my phone.  I got at least a few days’ rest for my thumbs, and it has seemed to help.  But mostly, I just didn’t want to carry my mini laptop back with me yesterday, because I’ve been having a rather severe exacerbation of my chronic pain, worse than usual, and it’s just a lot of work to deal with it and with extra weight.

I suspect that the various little things I’m trying to do to improve my strength and health are actually backfiring and making my pain worse rather than better.  It’s frustrating.  I really don’t like to give up on things and I am terribly stubborn, but it’s getting to be just too much.  Every day veers between tedium and stress and exhaustion and pain, and there is no evidence of any light or even rest anywhere along this tunnel.  There certainly doesn’t appear to be any exit other than the obvious one.

I’m still waiting for the results of my autism assessment, which is not any surprise; it’s not technically “due” until tomorrow, so I’m just being overanxious in hoping for it sooner.  Still, I’m not sure what difference it’s going to make, one way or another.  It’s not as though I’ll be able to avail myself of any services for adults with ASD or anything.  This is Florida, America’s limp and syphilitic penis, and there are no real such health services of which I’m aware.  Also, I have no insurance; I cannot seem to manage to keep track of and maintain such things.

I really don’t feel any hope for my future.  I’m just tired and sore and tense and adrift, and I don’t fit with anyone or anything else in the world.  You sometimes hear someone talking about trying to find one’s “people” as it were‒the people who share similar interests and characteristics‒but I don’t think I have a “people”.  I’m pretty sure that anywhere I go I will be a weird outsider who never really fits in.

To be fair, when it comes to most groups I don’t particularly want to fit in.  Many things that other people find interesting don’t grab my attention at all.  I don’t begrudge people their interests, of course, as long as they’re not harming anyone else.  The more joy in the world the better, I would say, ceteris paribus.

But I can’t seem to form joy.  I am at best capable of momentary distraction.  Okay, new science knowledge can sometimes make me feel actual joy, albeit transient.  But that’s about it.  Even that is losing its charm, especially since there’s no back and forth with anyone about it.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I feel that I’m barely making it through to the end of each day.

I’m sure this is really getting old for all of you, and I’m very sorry about that.  Believe me, I know I’m a miserable person with whom to interact.  I try not to be.  I’ve been trying to be a positive presence, a useful, productive, and positive force in the world, because at least then I can justify my existence.

But it’s exhausting to try to act upbeat and funny and energetic and clever and enthusiastic when you’re just trying to make yourself stop feeling horrible, even if for only a brief time.  I know there exists the famous saying‒admired by many because it rhymes, as if that were a legitimate measure of intellectual quality‒that one should “fake it ’til you make it”.  But I’ve been “faking” it, or trying to do so, for as long as I can remember, and it has not brought about any significant change.

It’s no more effective than was my long experiment in which I applied autosuggestion to myself, repeating the mantra “I love my life and I love myself” (in my head) any time I was walking anywhere or when I was idle.

I almost always have some such message on repeat, trying to accomplish something.

But as far as I can tell, all I’ve accomplished is maybe slowing my descent and degeneration.  I don’t see any way to turn this around‒and I’m pretty smart, and I have been trying to find answers for almost my entire life so far.  Trust me, the obvious ones that tend to spring to mind have not succeeded.

The good news is that, if I were suddenly to disappear‒say, for instance, if after I post this blog entry, no one ever hears from me again in any way‒no one would really be affected.  It would not change anyone’s day-to-day life (other than perhaps a few of my coworkers).

Not to say that no one will mourn me in principle, much as Adam Smith recognized that a European person of learning would feel a rather abstract sense of mourning if all of China were wiped out by some massive earthquake.  I would certainly not be a loss for which any sensible person would be willing even to risk losing their little finger.

Frankly, I doubt that I’m worth someone stubbing their toe.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I work tomorrow, so I expect I’ll write a post then, but I am off this weekend.

TTFN

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This is my brain, on.

I’ll bet you wish it could be turned off sometimes.  I know I do.

I’m writing this post on my laptop computer today, and at the very least, it’s going to be easier on my thumbs.

I was just about to sing the praises of MS Word, because it looked as though this new page on Word was going to start with the Calibri font instead of that new, Craptos font they’ve made their default because someone somewhere fellated just the right person.  Unfortunately, that was just the program catching up with itself, and the font changed to the new default, and I had to change it back manually.

Honestly, if anyone out there invents time travel to the past and figures out that it can change our timeline (I doubt it), then please, go back in time and interfere with the parents of each and every person involved in the decision to change the base font and in the design of the new font, so that all those people are never even conceived.

You see, I’m being generous.  I just want those people never to have been.  I don’t want them to suffer.

Actually, I do want them to suffer.  I want to torture and burn each and every one of them, to break their bodies with baseball bats and steel pipes and to wash their faces with broken glass.  But I know that’s a bit excessive, so I’m willing to settle for erasing their existence completely.

Such are the better angels of my nature.  This is me being kind.  Thanos was a pussy.

Okay, well, now that I’ve gotten a little bit of the madness out of my system, and all without hurting any actual people, I hope I can go on and write a somewhat sensible blog post.

I’ve already had some frustrations this morning, not least of which was waking up by about 2 am after less than four hours of sleep*.  Other things have happened as well, to do with transportation and so on, but I won’t get into it all.  I would come across as a truly disgruntled curmudgeon and/or just an asshole.  I’m not saying those would not be accurate descriptions of me, and sometimes even comparatively kind ones, but I would rather not come across that way if I can help it.

I haven’t received my report from my autism assessment yet, of course.  Well, not “of course”.  If something is supposed to arrive within a week, that means it could take less than a week, which this would be, if it had already arrived.  Be that as it may, it has not arrived.  There are three more days in that week (and in this month, it turns out), but I would of course rather it arrive sooner than later.  That’s not something about which I have a choice, however.  I put the ball in their court and they are the ones to return it.

Is that a tennis metaphor, the whole “ball in your court” cliché?  I suppose it could refer to volleyball or other “court” sports (but not badminton, since they do not use balls, they use shuttlecocks—why do these terms lend themselves so well to sophomoric jokes?).  I guess it could even have something to do with jurisprudence, but I don’t know what one would be doing with a ball in a court of law.  Maybe it originally referred to a masked ball, or even a formal ball, for all the lawyers and judges, and we’ve all been misunderstanding the metaphor as referring to a physical object, a ball, such as are used in many sports.

I doubt it.

Try not to be too bothered by my nonsense and gibberish.  I’ve always been mad, and I think I’m probably going madder.  That feels like it should be “more mad” but I think “madder” is more proper.  I don’t know for sure.  It doesn’t really madder much, though.  Ha ha.

Anyway, I’ve already reached my target word count for this bouncing bullshit, so I’ll call it quits.  I know I’m joking about it, but my mind really is falling apart.  Or, rather, I guess it’s more that it’s decaying, it’s rotting from within, it’s rusting, it’s crumbling, it’s finally succumbing to all of its design and manufacturing flaws.

I guess I was just a lemon, after all.  Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of lemon with which you can make lemonade.  Sorry about that.

*It’s proper to use “less than” here instead of “fewer than” even though hours are, in a sense, discrete, countable units, because I am referring to an overall measure of continuous time—an integral amount of sleep if you will—and I am giving an estimate, rounded up to what is perhaps the nearest whole hour.  It’s rather akin to saying you have drawn less than three buckets of water from a well; though buckets are discrete, water is continuous, so to speak.  On the other hand, it’s not sensible to say “there were less than ten people in the room,” for instance.  People are not a continuous variable.  They come in quanta, if you will, in indivisible** chunks.

**Well…you can divide people into smaller bits—much as I would like to do to the people behind the Aptos font in Microsoft Office apps—but then they cease to be people pretty quickly.

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“…my mind is on the blink.”

It’s Monday.  I almost don’t know what more needs to be said.

I’m probably going to make this relatively short, because I’m having quite a bit of pain in the bases of my thumbs as I write this on my smartphone.  I took three aspirin* already this morning, but it certainly hasn’t kicked in.  If it’s not going to help my pain, I wish at least the anti-platelet action would make me have a massive GI bleed or something.  I know, it’s kind of gross, but it’s one of those things where no one can claim you’re malingering or lazy or whatever.  If you’re vomiting blood, only a fool could say, “It’s all in your head.”

Speaking of it being all in your head, though, it’s of course a worry that aspirin could cause a hemorrhagic stroke instead of a GI bleed.  Obviously, since my brain is my greatest strength, I would prefer not to have that happen.

On the other hand, it’s not as though my brain is my friend or anything.  It’s where my greatest difficulties lie, as well as my strengths, and those difficulties dominate most of my days and‒to say the least‒my nights.  I’m depressed and “anxious” and angry and pessimistic, and I cannot sleep properly, and I am in constant pain, and I also have all these attributes that led me to have my assessment done last Friday to try to determine if I have the second kind of ASD or not.  So I can’t exactly feel too worried about my brain.  I don’t even wear a helmet when I ride my bicycle.  If I get brain damaged, it seems like the least my brain deserves.

I’m tired.  I’m so tired.

I know there are people out there who are able to try to put the best possible spin on events, and who can honestly say that they love themselves, and that’s great.  I envy and admire that.  And I have tried very hard to develop those habits, through self-hypnosis and autosuggestion and meditation and even pharmacology, but I have not been able to alter my programming so far.  Maybe I need a factory reset or something.

Anyway, I’m supposed to receive my report about my autism assessment within a week, so I should have it by this Friday at the latest.  I can’t say I’m not nervous about it.

Well, I can say it, I guess.  “I’m not nervous about it.”  See?  But saying it doesn’t make it so, no matter how loudly you say it, or how often you repeat it, or what oaths you proclaim, or what authority you cite.  It doesn’t even matter if you really believe it, even if you believe it so fervently that you’re willing to die for the belief.

If that were any measure of truth, then suicide bombers would be more likely to be right than Nobel Prize winning scientists, and such people are not more likely to be right.  They are almost certainly wrong about everything important that led them to blow themselves up.  In fact, certainty of anything beyond literal mathematical and deductive, logical conclusions is the hallmark of a mind less likely to be right than would be a mind that is full of doubt and willing to criticize itself.

So, I am nervous, but there’s nothing I can do for now but wait.  In the meantime, I really should start writing on my laptop computer again.  This phone writing is losing what charm it had, since it’s making my thumbs hurt worse over time.

With that said, I’m going to end the first draft of this now.  I don’t have more to say that I’m sure I haven’t said elsewhere, before, probably eight-thousand times.  I tend to repeat myself a lot.

I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Sometimes I feel that the plural of aspirin should be “aspirins”, but I think it’s generally just “aspirin”, like “deer” and “fish”** being both singular and plural.

**Sometimes one sees the word “fishes”, but that is generally used, I believe, when one is discussing more than one kind of fish.

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O, you must blog your rue with a difference!

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course.  If you don’t know why I would say “of course” after my “Hello and good morning”, then you need to read more of my blog!

I recommend going back as far as you can; I certainly ought to have posts going back to, I don’t know, at least 2015.  For a while I just wrote weekly posts‒I was writing books and short stories and sometimes writing and recording music some of that time‒but then in more recent years I released one every workday.  Or perhaps you could say one escaped every workday.

That means…well, let’s do the figuring:  5.5 days a week (average) for 52 weeks is 286 days of a given year (roughly), and since I write an average of perhaps roughly 1000 words a blog post, then in a given year you have available about 280,000 words of mine to allow into your head.

You’ve already begun.

This means that there are multiple millions of my words out there, available for your imbibement, if you include my books and my blogs.  I really have written quite a lot.

It is from reading my blogs that you will probably rather quickly develop an understanding of why I said “of course” above.  But, of course (ha ha), reading my words, taking in my thoughts, can be terribly detrimental to your mental health, like exposure to mercury in tuna or to lead in car exhaust or to radon in your basement.  Or perhaps it might even be as bad as reading De Vermis Mysteriis, or even Al Azif (the original title of the Necronomicon).

Mind you, it’s unlikely to be as dramatic as what the stories depict happening when people read the above books, but then again, perhaps that’s worse.  After all, the initial infection with HIV is not usually terribly dramatic (sometimes there’s a mononucleosis-like syndrome, sometimes there’s nothing much at all), and Hepatitis B and/or C can be even more subtle.  But the long-term effects of those infections, if untreated, are terrible, and there is no known treatment for infestation with my thoughts.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

Like a retrovirus, my words are not as aggressively infectious as the common colds and coronaviruses and even the influenzas of social and other media.  But such loud viral spreads and “infections” tend to be very self-limited and acute.  They can (and do) sometimes destroy particularly susceptible people (I’m sure you can think of some) but for the most part, they come and go like the hula hoop or pole sitting*.

If it takes hold, my stuff is not too likely just to fade away into a mildly amusing memory of youthful or not-so-youthful foolishness.  My stuff will gnaw away at you like black mold and dry rot, like rust that slowly claims even mighty battleships, like erosion that wears down mountains, like a retrovirus that triggers lymphoma.  It’s terrifying.  And, of course, you have already been exposed, so it may already be too late for you.

Perhaps I should post a disclaimer at the beginning of every entry:  warning‒reading this writer’s words may be dangerous to your mental health.  Although, that might effectively be a sort of perverse advertising, like suggesting to people that they snowboard down this particular slope at their own risk, and we cannot be responsible for the outcome if you choose to do it.  The more humble and prudent people might heed the warning.  But the more daring, those who thrive on excitement, might be more inclined to dive right into my blog.

I guess such people would receive what they deserve.  For there is no excitement here, as such (though my stories can be relatively exciting).  Here there is only dark thought, sometimes disguised as humor or whimsy or curiosity or something else, for I cannot write what I don’t have inside, and as far as I can tell, all that exists within me now is darkness.

I guess that’s not anything really new.  I’ve always been dark and largely detrimental by nature.  I do, after all, have a subject heading for this blog that reads “My heroes have always been villains”***.  I’m a mutant grown from a mutant source.  I guess that’s how all new infections come into being.  They are not created ex nihilo, because nothing is****.

Well, it’s too late for you now.  Hopefully you won’t have too virulent a reaction, but I cannot be responsible, except in the broadest of senses, for whatever the outcome may be.

TTFN

*Just to be clear, all the discussion of infectious diseases (viruses specifically) is metaphorical.  It may not be necessary to point this out to most of you‒it probably isn’t‒but there are always those people who are metaphor-impaired, and we should strive to be patient with and supportive of such disadvantaged people.  Who would choose to be so impaired?  No one who knew what they were missing.  But, alas, such people do not know what they are missing.  It can break your heart, if you let it**.

**You probably shouldn’t let it.  If your heart is functioning properly, you should try to preserve and encourage its health.

***That’s a play on the old Willy Nelson song My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.

****The only possible exception being everything.