I’m not going to write a full blog post this morning; I have too much to do at the office, since it’s payroll day. I want to try to get as much of that done as early as I possibly can, so I don’t want to spend too much time editing and sharing this.
Anyway, I don’t get the impression that it makes much difference, certainly based on yesterday’s number of readers‒though maybe that number has significantly increased since last I looked. Nevertheless, I guess I feel that, since I’m still around, I might as well inflict a small sample of my personality onto the world at large*. It’s not as though I have any reason to be nice to the world.
So, there’s no real topic here, today. That’s okay. Everything is moribund, and more so with me than with most people online. I feel that it won’t be long at all before I post my last blog post, and I’ve probably already shared my last song and maybe I’ve even made my last video.
If, when it comes down to it, I know that it’s my last post that I’m writing (or that it is probably so) I will try to make it clear here, though I might postdate the publication of it so it arrives after the fact, so to speak. It will probably involve quotes and/or snippets from various songs and possibly poems, and maybe the specific sharing of the last song on the first disk of The Wall.
More on that if it develops. Otherwise, that’s enough for now. I hope you all have a good day.
*So that people won’t feel bad when I stop doing it. ^_^
Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday again—the first Thursday of the new year, the first Thursday of the month, and the second day of 2025 (AD or CE depending upon your preference).
I’m heading in to the office already this morning. It’s not the first day back to work in the new year, though; we worked yesterday, as well, and it was quite a longish day. We also worked on New Year’s Eve, though we got out an hour earlier than we would have because I shook my head and expressed some outrage (I was in an even more foul mood than usual) that we were not getting off early. I didn’t have any celebration to attend nor anyone waiting for me, but I thought others might want to get to something of the sort, and anyway, I just really wanted to escape the noise.
It was ridiculous that we worked yesterday (though unfortunately it turned out to be a successful business day). In the plaza in which our office sits, we were the only business open, and this is a full-scale strip mall with dozens of shops and restaurants and offices. The people at work who wanted vapes or to get something from the bakery or from the nearby restaurant were all out of luck. The only places open were gas stations and our office.
Oh, and also my coworker, the one with whom I share various duties, was out sick Tuesday and left early yesterday. This is not his fault, obviously, unless you mean it’s a design fault, but that fault is true of everyone, and my coworker certainly didn’t design himself. But it meant that, especially on Tuesday, when I had to do payroll in addition to the other stuff, I was particularly frazzled.
It didn’t help that I knew, quite painfully, that I was not going to be “celebrating” the new year. Why would I celebrate it when I had wished or yearned throughout the year for 2024 to be my last year?
In fact, on Tuesday—that was New Year’s Eve, in case you didn’t put that together and/or you’re reading this well after it was written—when I was feeling more horrible and stressed out and angry and sad than even I have felt in a long time, I developed a plan, if it merits that term. I was not hungry during the day, and so I did not eat anything at all. It occurred to me that I had a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at the house and about half a bottle of vodka as well. They have both been there for quite some time, since I rarely drink.
My thought was this: I’ve been on a relatively low carb diet for a few weeks, so I have relatively little stored glycogen relative to the usual amount; what glucose was in my system was probably largely the product of gluconeogenesis, which is the creation of sugar from various amino acids, mainly by the liver. I figured on stopping at a gas station near the train station when I was heading back to the house and picking up some bottles of Diet Coke (which also has no sugar, of course) and then that evening drinking vodka and Diet Coke and Jack and Diet Coke, all on an empty stomach. This would have not only the obvious effects of alcohol in disinhibiting behavior, but ethanol also suppresses gluconeogenesis—this fact is responsible for at least some of the typical effects of a hangover.
My thought process, if it merits those words, was basically to hope to get drunk enough and hypoglycemic enough either maybe to have a seizure (unlikely) or just to loosen my inhibitions enough that I would have the courage to use one of the means of suicide that I keep always nearby nowadays*.
When I thought about my plan, though, as the day went on and I finally headed back to the house, it seemed like a pain to stop in the gas station. I was already exhausted. I figured, okay, well, I can just drink liquor straight. Once you get started, once the alcohol begins to take effect, drinking it becomes easier. However, the thought of being drunk felt very unpleasant, and more importantly, I knew that if I did not work up the strength to go through with my “plan”, drinking the alcohol, especially with no food, would probably lead to a severe exacerbation of my chronic pain.
So, instead, I watched some stupid videos, feeling regretful but not willing to risk worse pain in an attempt to do an end run around the bastard urge for self-preservation and escape my constant physical and psychical pain. I took something to help me go to sleep (which I don’t usually do on work nights), and I puttered around listening to the sound of all the amateur fireworks going off, feeling annoyed by them, for several hours, and I did not die—not even of natural causes. And despite my attempts, I slept less than usual, largely because of the noise, but also partly due to my (very inner and apparently unrecognizable to others) turmoil.
And here I am, writing the first blog post of the new year. I’m alive, and I’m not happy. I have no friends, my family is far away, and I certainly have no capacity to try to upend and alter where I am, anyway, not on my own—the very prospect of trying to change my life, to move, to go somewhere else, these things are horribly stressful inherently, and I have no strong reason to think any of them would make any difference for me. I am fundamentally alone, and I probably have always been so, despite past temporary delusions to the contrary.
Of course, so is everyone else, I guess, depending on how you mean it.
Anyway, here we are. I’m working this Saturday, so I guess I’ll probably write a post then, too. How lucky for you and for me, right?
yippee.
Well, my train’s about to arrive. I hope you enjoyed this little, shitty blog post, and that you’re having just a wonderful new year already. Yeah, right.
TTFN
*I have no fewer than two good lengths of rope, both tied into quite good nooses; a goodly supply of flammable liquids (more than three gallons) with which I could self-immolate; of course I have numerous blades, including very sharp razors and scalpels and box cutters and the like, with which I could open up some arteries; and I have various OTC medications that, especially in combination, could be toxic enough to be lethal. Also, I’ve been scouting the area for easily accessible high places without closed-in roofs (mainly parking structures) which are high enough that, if I jumped, it would probably be fatal. I have no guns anymore, alas, but there’s always the nearby Atlantic Ocean, always within sensible walking distance, and then again, there’s always just the long, open road.
Well, as often happens on the day immediately following a Monday, it is now Tuesday. Congratulations.
I don’t know why I wrote “congratulations” there. I felt as if I were saying that the fact that Tuesday has arrived was some manner of accomplishment and not merely the universe continuing to do what it does and work through its laws as always.
Maybe the thought was to congratulate those of you who consider it a positive thing to live another day for succeeding at doing so. Maybe it’s a supportive statement to those who really don’t want to go on, but who continue to endure because they don’t want to bring pain to their loved ones. Making it through another day for a person in that situation is no joke, and those people should be recognized.
It would be nice if they could be recognized in a non-judgmental way by those loved ones for whom the people in question endure. Not that I expect that the loved ones of the suffering have any better calibration than the people who love them. Nothing finite is without imperfections (and I’m agnostic about the situation with infinite things, but I have my doubts).
So, it is hard for a person with depression to endure, even when they’re doing it for their family and friends and are suffering because of it, and those depressed people are worthy of sympathy and non-judgmental support from their loved ones and the world in general. But the people around them are worthy of sympathy, too, and should not be regarded judgmentally for not being able to recognize or even help their loved ones’ suffering.
Here’s where we come to the concept of blame, and how utterly unjustified it is, in every single case. And to be clear, I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions in the sense that they are the proximate causes of those actions, and their behavior can be adjusted and improved. But they are not the ultimate cause‒not of what they are, not of their strengths and weaknesses, not of their limits and their experiences and their sensory acuities and their social skills
If you have car trouble and your cousin, with whom you are hanging out, doesn’t know the first thing about cars‒doesn’t own one, doesn’t drive, never has‒you may well be disappointed that this cousin can’t help you and doesn’t even recognize that there is a problem until and unless your car completely breaks down. But you don’t get self-righteously angry at your cousin for that lack of knowledge and skill‒not if you’re even remotely reasonable. You don’t fully understand what’s wrong with your car, yourself, and you certainly don’t know how to fix it. And it’s your car. How can you expect others to be both able and willing to fix your car for you? They have their own vehicular maintenance issues.
I’m pushing the metaphor, I know. But I think it’s a good one. We can all, of course, try to be there for those we love, and to be worthy of having others be there for us, and sometimes that’ll work out and sometimes it won’t. It can be quite natural to feel resentful and wounded by the people who fail to see your suffering, even though they care about you and are important to you. But, as Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.” So cut other people slack; and cut yourself some if you can, too.
You didn’t build the universe, or the world, or your nation, or your community. Neither did anyone else, living or dead. These things just happened, rarely with any kind of coherent, before-the-fact plan of any kind. And on the rare occasion when people did try to plan things, those plans essentially always went aglee‒the stricter and more regimented and more dogmatic the plan, the greater the apparent tendency to veer wildly astray, as though there were some manner of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that applies at the scale of societies.
Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled and self-assembling system, and like frost on a window, different parts of it carry different orientations and patterns that are not the product of any of the individual constituent water molecules. The molecules can only line up in the crystal where there is a spot and only in particular orientations, based entirely upon where it is in the system and what the surrounding dynamics are‒and what came before.
This may be the case for the entire universe, as well. The underlying quantum fields may just all “crystallize” out in particular ways that are highly stochastic and ultimately local, with different kinds of complexity in different places.
Anyway, I’m veering off topic. The point is, there’s no call for and no use in blaming people for not knowing about your suffering and how they might have done differently and it might have helped you. And don’t blame yourself, either‒unless you invented the universe. If you did, well, you’ got some ‘splaining to do.
Hello, and yes, good morning. It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.
I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste. I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.
Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week. I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.
I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.
I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while. I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own. I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest. The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it. I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi. It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.
You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA. Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.
I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view. I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.” That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.
I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say. I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging. I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”
I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her. But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something. They had a long string of comments.
A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.
But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.
I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.” The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future. I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong? You mean people were forced to read the post?”
And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:
“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive. I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything. Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair. Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives. Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”
Of course, I didn’t leave that comment. But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering. Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices. They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.
Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one. But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.
Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help. Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.
That’s enough for now. I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting. I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.
I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do. If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.
But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will. That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.
“Oh well, whatever. Never mind.”
TTFN
*The miniature laptop is a computer. The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.
**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it. What’s the point? They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.
***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record? Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster. Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people: Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws? The President doesn’t! Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts! It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.
****Who would ever choose such a thing? Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening. It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.
It’s the first Monday of December in 2024‒December 2nd, specifically, meaning that the 1st fell on a Sunday, which means that there will be a Friday the 13th in this month*‒and I thought I would write a brief blog post for the day. I don’t know if anyone was hoping for that, but it’s happening.
It’s relatively cool down here for south Florida; it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit when I left the house, which is, let’s see…(55-32) * 5/9, so 23 * 5/9, so 115/9, so just under 13 degrees Centigrade/Celsius. That’s also about 286 Kelvin, but the Kelvin scale is a bit inconvenient for most day-to-day temperature readings.
I could’ve just looked all that up online, but I think it’s good for the mind, and for people in general, to know and remember (and apply) the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, even if only for the mental exercise. If we turn everything over to apps and computers, then eventually no one (or at least very few people) will even remember what such things mean or where they come from, or why.
Anyway, it’s something with which to keep one’s mind occupied.
There’s not much for me to do or to say, anymore. I’m just killing time while waiting for time to kill me, so to speak. That’s all I see myself doing from now on. I have no goals or hopes or dreams or anything. I don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids again, or that I’ll ever see any of my other family and/or friends, or that I’ll make any new friends, let alone any kind of “new family”.
I’m not cut out for meeting new people or making new friends on my own. I never have been. All my old friends were people I knew from school‒junior high, high school, university, medical school, residency, all that. I’m basically alone, and I think I will be for the rest of my life‒which hopefully won’t be very long, because it’s really quite pointless and stupid, and I’m pointless and stupid, and so is the world as a whole.
Hopefully, some day soon I’ll be able to say to you all, “this is my last ever blog post”, because it will be one of my last ever anything. I’m so tired, and I’m stressed, and I’m in pain, and I’m depressed, and I can’t sleep for shit, and above all, I’m alone. I’m sick of just about everything that I do, and I’m very much sick of myself.
And, frankly, the world as a whole, the universe as a whole, is just irritating and stupid and such a waste of potential. There’s no point to any of it, and it’s not even headed in any kind of positive direction.
As Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”. I suspect that’s just the nature of things, since passionate intensity tends to be the habit of those with a dogmatic turn of mind, and those tend to be the people who do the most damage, who commit the most destruction: precisely the people who believe that they are right, that they know what’s morally right, and that belief gives them carte blanche to do what they claim to think is right and fumigates all their deeds from any possibility of wrongdoing (in their own heads, at least).
Dogmatic thinking tends to be profoundly dangerous and destructive. “Certainty” kills. That’s why I say, “Spay and neuter your dogmas.” We don’t need or want them to spread and reproduce.
Anyway, that’s enough for today, enough for a lifetime, enough for eternity, whatever. I hope you all have a pretty good week and month and so on, or even better than pretty good, if possible.
*If you stop and think about it, this will almost certainly be obvious, since the 2nd week of such a month will run, Sunday through Saturday on the 8th through the 14th, which means the 13th is a Friday.
I was about to start this post with “hello and good morning”, but I decided it wouldn’t be quite right to start a post that way on a Tuesday. And it is Tuesday morning as I am writing this, on my phone, while en route to work.
As was the case yesterday, I have no topic in mind to discuss, so in a sense, you’re again reading my thoughts as they happen. Of course, I will edit them before posting‒editing is a very important part of my writing, and the fact that I know that I will be editing extensively (when I’m writing fiction, at least) helps give me the freedom just to write something.
It doesn’t really matter if what you first spew out onto the “page”* is terrible, since you’re going to go over and over it, anyway. It’s like sketching; your first line can be crap, and so can your second and so on, but you’re going to bring them all together into your final line or curve over time.
I sometimes almost wish I were able to say, with near-sincerity, that even what I first “spew out” onto the page is exceptional, is brilliant, is the product of absolute genius. I could even cite some evidence. For instance, when I was in high school I won a national writing award (there were two winners per state‒I was a representative of the solid state) and that was judged using a combination of a pre-written story and an impromptu, hand-written essay. Given the handicap always created by my atrocious handwriting**, what I wrote must have been quite good, but I have no memory of what the subject even was, let alone what I wrote.
In high school, I used to be able to pretend to be a rampant egotist. I could pretend to think I was the greatest, the most brilliant, the most admirable, of anyone anywhere. People took my antics quite well; I guess it was obvious that I was joking, and my pseudo-egotism was never about being better than any particular person or group of people. It was my silly pretense that I thought that I was the most brilliant being anywhere, ever, and there was no shame in being beneath me, since everyone was beneath me.
I have no idea how much my peers even noticed this, to be honest, or how much any of them would remember. Probably not very much. I was probably not as noticeable as I might have thought I was.
In any case, I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but there was a kind of sick desperation in my act, in my outward persona. I knew that I was smart, but I also knew I was pretty weird, and I at least didn’t want anyone to be mistaken about the fact that I was smart. I remember a particular formative event in this arc: I was on my way home from school (I think it was on the way home) in 9th grade, and a random other student some ways away looked at me and yelled, “Look at the reeetard!”***
Now, I don’t think he was even with anyone that he might’ve been trying to impress by being cruel, so it was just the expression of that innate urge to denigrate that humans often have. I didn’t even feel angry at him‒I’ve never taken name-calling personally, as such, particularly not by strangers. However, I was mortified by the possibility that such was the way people judged me when they saw me. I certainly hadn’t ever cared much about my appearance or what have you, though hygiene was never a problem. But I worried that I came across as atypical enough to seem…disabled in some way.
So, I guess that contributed to me trying to improve the impression I gave, overall, with respect to general ability and smarts, and so on. I think I was probably pretty good at that kind of “masking”, especially since I included at least some of my weirdness in my outward persona, more or less deliberately; I didn’t think there was any way I could completely suppress the weirdness. I also tried to be always polite, and that makes up for a lot in the world. If written language is the lifeblood of civilization, then courtesy is the lubricant, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.
Okay, well…I guess that’s what has come out of me today. It feels even more disjointed and weird to me than yesterday’s writing, but what are you gonna do? I’m just desperately trying to establish some kind of contact with the world of humans in some fashion, to try to suppress or diminish my depression and tension and the feeling of imminent and inescapable‒and ongoing, since it has certainly already begun‒disintegration. So, you know, no big deal.
*Conjecture: The “page ranking”, named after Larry Page, of Google, became so powerful a term in information space that the term itself back-propagated through time, and it thereby became the word to apply to a side of a sheet of paper, and related things (eventually including web pages) on which one might imprint information. Thus, all pages are named after Larry Page, it’s just that some of them are named after him…before him.
**I’ve said it before, the horror of my handwriting is the reason they call it curse-ive.
***His term, not mine. I’m just quoting, and I’ve never really used that even as a non-serious epithet between friends. Intellectual disability, or really any kind of mental disability, has never been something I found very funny.
As anyone who has read my recent posts will know, I have not been doing well, depression-wise*. Yesterday afternoon, after sharing a “memory” on Facebook (a picture of my son from one of the last times I was with him) and explaining in the comments that the reason I hadn’t seen him was that he didn’t want to see me, I felt particularly low, and had to fight to keep from crying openly in the office. Thankfully, it was a slow afternoon (as opposed to a very stressful morning, in which I was working on payroll among other things), or I wouldn’t have been involved with Facebook, anyway.
I was so low that I started Googling (on my phone) the lethal doses of everything from CBD gummies** to aspirin to Benadryl to a combination of fentanyl and Valium.
That latter combo, of course, is the only reliably life-threatening thing among the many that I searched, but honestly, I knew all that already. I am a trained medical doctor, after all, and I have a long-standing interest in ways to make one’s quietus‒including, but not limited to, a bare bodkin. I was mostly reviewing things like the mg/kg dosage needed to be more or less certain one would die.
The biggest downside of the opiate/benzodiazepine combination is that they are controlled substances. Just try to get a prescription for the two of them without a terminal cancer diagnosis or something similar. Go ahead, try. If you succeed, please get in touch with me.
Of course, there are illicit sources of both classes of medicine, and I even know some people who might know where to get them. But such people, and such illicit medicines, are supremely untrustworthy, so that’s not great. I probably wouldn’t accept anything that wasn’t a name-brand pill, like the Valium tablets that at least used to have a big V stamped in them.
I suppose one could try to con one’s way into getting a veterinary cocktail such as might be used to euthanize a large dog or something similar. I can do injections, obviously, even to myself. But I am not good at conning people, and I certainly wouldn’t want to deceive a kindhearted veterinarian. That seems very uncool.
Alas, most OTC medicines are unreliable for many reasons, including limited absorption, nausea/vomiting, and other rather unpleasant symptoms that would precede death by quite some time, and might be awful enough to cause even the most committed would-be suicide to seek relief. It’s very hard to fight deep-seated biological survival drives, believe me.
Oh well, there are always many options, I guess, and I have the necessaries for many of them. I even used to have some helium tanks and a nonrebreather mask, but I gave the helium to people making balloons for parties‒they didn’t have the right kind of connectors for the regulator and mask I have, and I wasn’t confident of my ability to jury-rig something.
I don’t want any of you to think I simply wallow in depression, and my chronic pain, and my horrible sleep issues, and possible neurodevelopmental difficulties. I am constantly attempting new exercises, new habits, autosuggestion, self-hypnosis, meditation, dietary adjustments, postures, medicines, and so forth to try to help my problems. I don’t ever stop doing all that, which is exhausting in and of itself.
It’s likewise exhausting to keep trying to act as normal as I possibly can, because I don’t like to cause other people more trouble than I absolutely must. Also, it’s just my lifelong habit to try to act upbeat or to try to be funny, at least during direct interaction. But it’s very tiring, and over the years, my grumpy side has definitely gained more ascendance, particularly at work.
Not that I’m an asshole at work, at least not any more than I’m just an asshole in general. But the noise in the office and people making really unreasonable, sloppy mistakes, stress me out quite a bit, and the frustration bleeds through more than it used to.
Sometimes that happens literally.
Anyway, more and more I’ve been just working and struggling merely to survive. I haven’t been working anymore on Outlaw’s Mind since the last time I mentioned it here; I haven’t even been taking my little laptop back and forth with me, though I type much more quickly on it than I can on my phone. The closest thing to any creativity I’ve done recently is as follows:
On Tuesday morning, something I read (I don’t recall what) made me think of infrasound and low-pitched noises that are reputed*** to be able to instill a sense of fear or dread in people. There was some indication that a 7 Hertz noise would be troubling in some way‒I don’t recall how‒but one needs a serious sub-woofer to be able to generate such a pitch at all, let alone with useful volume.
However, the low range of the human audible threshold starts around 40 Hertz, so I thought I would do something at least mildly interesting. I pulled up Audacity and generated two tones: one at 47 Hertz and one at, I think, 73 Hertz, and merged them. I chose those frequencies because, since they are both prime numbers, their waveforms would not tend to overlap very much, and so their constructive/destructive interference would tend to be relatively chaotic, producing a pleasing (so to speak) deep and unsteady rumble.
Then, I recorded myself doing an impromptu recitation of Hamlet’s soliloquy****, which (of course) I know from memory. I first lowered the pitch of that recording a bit, but not using the optional maximum quality pitch change (I didn’t want it to sound normal) after filtering out background noise and even breath sounds*****.
Then, I copied that track and shifted its pitch a step and a half, then copied that and did the same again. This produced three simultaneous recordings of the same thing, but with pitches at intervals that make it into a constant diminished chord (that’s where the third and fifth tones of a major triad are each reduced by a half step, making an eerie, haunting, somewhat dissonant chord).
Then I combined those three vocal tracks into one, put a bit of reverb on it, lowered the pitch again until it was at least close to that of my background tones, and combined them all after trying to adjust the balance to make sure that the vocal stuff was not quite clearly present against the background sound.
I then turned it into an MP3 file and put it on loop on the big TV we use as our room sales board, starting it once people came in, and only very slowly increasing the volume from too low to hear to just audible.
One coworker noticed it, and she kept trying to figure out what it was saying, or if anything was being said at all. I explained what I had done, to her and to my “main” coworker, who also sort of heard the noise and looked puzzled. They both thought it was odd but funny, but it was apparently also mildly irritating (almost the point of it, really), so once they said that, I stopped the playback.
I’ll embed the audio file here, below, in case you want to listen. Feel free to use it to annoy or unnerve other people, if you wish.
And that’s it, that’s all I have for now, from the most creative to the most wishfully self-destructive (not in that order). I hope each and every one of you is feeling better than I feel. On any given day, at any given time, I think my odds of that being the case are good. If I were able to bet even money on it even once an hour, I think I’d pretty quickly have an excellent return on investment. Though, that might improve my mood and so alter the expected payoff rate of my investment…damn those economic feedback loops.
TTFN
*Though my depression, if considered as an entity with a “life” of its own, is thriving, thank you very much.
**There more or less is no practical lethal dose, it seems. The sugar in a gummy would probably kill you before the CBD would.
***Almost certainly untruthfully.
****The most famous one, “To be or not to be…”
*****Removing these throughout a recording has a curious way of deadening it, and it’s rather unpleasant if you’re trying to produce something that sounds good, so was ideal for my pseudo-purposes.
I already started writing this once, but it seems that Google Drive didn’t save what I had written, even though I had titled it and checked it. This has not happened to me before, as far as I can recall, but it seems to be par for the course for me right now. So, I’m starting over, though I’m not going to try to recreate the beginning of my previously initiated blog post. It was just a bit of nonsense, anyway.
I’m really not doing well, though I seem to have a difficult-to-break habit of acting as normally as I can when interacting with other people‒I don’t want to cause problems or trouble for the people who care about me. But I’m not doing well, even for me. My depression is terrible (or I suppose one could say it’s very good and impressive as depression goes), made worse by the changing of the seasons and the clocks. My chronic pain is as bad as ever and somewhat worse than usual. My overall health is poor.
I’ve had more than one person from back where I grew up, including family members, tell me I should take a break and come to visit them, but when I try to consider it, I cannot see myself being able to work out the logistics of such a thing. My “executive function” is at its lowest ebb.
I’m basically out of gas and coasting along until I crash into or go over the edge of something. Or perhaps it would be better to think that I’m an airplane out of fuel, not a car‒gliding along as best I can and trying to see if there’s any way for me to make a landing. But I cannot apply any power. I can only go along with the air currents through which I am steadily descending.
Also, I’m mortified at the thought of anyone who used to know the person I used to be seeing me as I am now. It reminds me of the stories of Syd Barrett coming to visit the band members of Pink Floyd in the studio after having to leave the band because of his mental health issues and them not even recognizing him. Having seen the various photos, I can understand their confusion, and I can also imagine how horrifying it must have been for him to realize how much he had changed and how he did not belong with them anymore; that he was not the person he used to be.
So many of the lyrics in the greatest Pink Floyd albums refer to Barrett’s oh-so-changed nature, from Brain Damage‒ “and if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear / you shout and no one seems to hear / and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon” ‒to Shine On You Crazy Diamond‒ “remember when you were young? / you shone like the sun… / …now there’s a look in your eye / like black holes in the sky” ‒and, of course, Wish You Were Here.
Anyway, I feel like I’m a warped mockery of the person I used to be, like one of the creatures twisted by the Illearth Stone in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to land safely on my own, but I cannot bear the thought of trying to ask someone to help me, especially someone who used to know me. I’m ashamed of me.
I’ve also been ill lately, as regular readers will know. I missed work again on Friday, and‒of course‒the office did tremendous sales that day. I fight to avoid superstition, since I don’t think there’s any sort of magical process happening, but I do think it plausible that my presence has a psychological effect on the other people in the office, dampening their spirits.
I feel sickly and sweaty. The AC unit in my room at the house seems to be malfunctioning, but having it repaired or replaced would involve having other people come into my living space, such as it is, and that’s a repulsive thought.
Also, the washing machine doesn’t seem to be working right. It washes, but I don’t think it rinsed properly yesterday, nor did it spin and drain properly. You would think at least that would mean that my clothes should smell of detergent, which is not so bad, and at first that seemed to be the case. Now, though, at the office early in the morning, I feel like I smell of cat urine, or something does. I haven’t yet been able to locate the source, though.
Anyway, I’m just worn out, and I see no future of any kind for myself, other than the obvious and inevitable one. I find myself wishing for something like tuberculosis (like that other infamous “Doc”, Doc Holliday), or even cancer, just so that I could have some inescapable deterioration that could not be denied, but that might afford me a chance to say goodbye to people I love.
I don’t think that’s likely to happen, though. My version of cancer is the disease in my head, frankly‒or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the disease that is my head. Depression has a rate of premature mortality that is higher than that of many cancers.
Okay, well, that’s enough for now. Sorry to be a bummer on a Monday morning, but then, I’m a bummer every morning, really, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
It’s Monday morning‒the first Monday in November. It’s also my mother’s birthday, though since she’s no longer with us here, I doubt that she celebrates it any more. Nevertheless, it’s still worth celebrating. The world is a better place, I think, for having had my mother in it. True, she did give birth to me, but you can’t hold that against her too much; nobody’s perfect, and the positive things she did (including my brother and sister) outweigh the negatives, both literally and figuratively.
I felt really horrible last week, physically and mentally (and not just because of my ongoing acute viral illness). That’s part of why I just did my little sarcastic, blah-heavy blog post. I had no interest in doing anything more. What, indeed, would have been the point? I doubt that I have anything useful or entertaining to say, even today.
Of course, the big election is tomorrow, but honestly, that whole shit show is thoroughly contemptible at nearly every level, and it’s hard to feel good about it in any way. Of course, one of the presidential candidates is clearly the ethically superior person, but neither is particularly impressive. I look back with real nostalgia on the Romney-Obama election.
Oh, well. It’s probably appropriate that it’s Guy Fawkes Day tomorrow. Penny for the Guy? Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot. Let’s set this thing alight.
I have been rereading (and even editing) Outlaw’s Mind after removing the opening scene, thus making it into a story without that constraining ending. I think it’s a good story; better and more involved than I would have expected when I started it, with a tone that reminds me, oddly, of Stephen King’s Revival, though I’m not at all sure why.
It seems very unlikely that I will finish it, though. I would need to find some new lease on life, somehow, and right now my life credit score is abysmal, and the only existence I seem able to afford is metaphorically even more dreary and gross than the room in which I spend my evenings and weekends. I live alone in a single, cluttered, old place, but my mental and “spiritual” existence makes the physical location seem like an all-inclusive paradise vacation with one’s closest and dearest friends and family.
It’s all I deserve, really. I don’t want you to think I pity myself. I mean, I guess in a way I do, but it’s a contemptuous sort of self-pity, a kind of “look at that pathetic, pitiful, putrid excuse for a person” feeling.
I really could use some help‒some serious help, some professional help, probably some emergency help. But I know that I don’t deserve any help, I’m not worthy of help, I don’t merit any help. It would almost certainly be a waste of resources.
I’ve also had a huge back and leg pain flare-up this weekend, of the cause of which I’m far from certain. It has, however, made this last weekend almost anti-restful, even though I had Saturday off.
I did nothing to celebrate Halloween this year, despite the fact that it’s generally my favorite holiday. Then again, I did nothing to celebrate my birthday, either. As I said in a post on Facebook, I have no interest in anything. Everything is uninteresting. I would just like to stop being in pain, to stop feeling like I have to keep pushing forward, to keep moving and doing, just because that’s what one is “supposed” to do.
I can see, more and more, that the current shape of my life is the shape of the rest of my life. This is the landscape of my continued existence: doing an okay job that doesn’t involve my medical or scientific skills, working with people with whom I can’t really have conversations about anything that interests me, leaving work to commute to a dreary old room where I try (and fail) to get a decent night’s sleep, then spend the weekend basically doing nothing because there’s nothing interesting to do, and if there were, I would be too tired and in too much pain to do it.
This is all some of why I didn’t really write a post last Thursday. I don’t know if I will write one this week. But no matter what, one of these days (and it probably won’t be very long) there will just stop being any blog posts from me, and none of you will ever hear from me again. And your lives will probably be somewhat happier because of that.
Most people seem to be happier when I’m not around. Most things tend to go better.
Meanwhile, I can only try to distract myself from my chronic pain by inflicting other, more immediate pain upon myself. Nothing else does an adequate job, but even so, it’s not really enough.
It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “regular” weekly blog post. It’s the first Thursday in October of 2024. It’s also Rosh Hashanah, so for those of you who celebrate it, L’shana Tovah.
I haven’t been working on any fiction at all since my last report‒unless you count my façade of being a normal person or living a normal life, of course. That’s doing what it does, and I continue to do it for whatever reason(s)‒perhaps habit, perhaps duty (to whom or what, though?), perhaps out of self-punishment or self-harm, I don’t know.
I wish I had something interesting to discuss. I’m nearly done with Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach novels. They are (so far) much better than the movie Annihilation was. But they are disorienting, as I’ve mentioned before, and given my own chronic and worsening insomnia and pain, they make me feel as though I might not be experiencing my own life as what it really is. Not that I actually think I’m being fooled or am hallucinating in any serious ways. But I do feel disconnected, separate, as though I’m not fully within or fully a denizen of this universe, but of some nearby, partly overlapping one.
I’ve long suspected that it would be difficult to “gaslight” me, because I have always found my own memory and understanding (certainly of my experiences) to be better than that of anyone around me. Yet I don’t “trust” myself, either, which means I tend to keep checking and confirming aspects of reality to test the consistency of my impressions. It may smack of OCD a bit, but it means that, at least intellectually, I find my own take on reality to be more coherent and consistent than that of most people with whom I interact. Though there are always things one can learn from others, too. One just has to be rigorous and strict in assigning credences.
As Descartes pointed out, we can never truly be certain that some powerful enough entity has not pulled the world over our eyes*. He famously came down to the conclusion, or rather the starting point, of cogito ergo sum‒“I think, therefore I am”, the point being that he knows, to his own satisfaction at least, that he is there and is thinking, because he experiences it even if all else is an illusion.
Of course, even subjectivity could be an “illusion” in some sense, in principle. The characters in all my stories have thoughts and subjective experiences‒they “think” they exist‒but that subjectivity only exists when they are being read, or when I wrote them.
And of course, we could be within an immensely complex “simulation”, and “merely” be aspects thereof. Such a simulation could be paused, say, and this could happen frequently or for tremendous periods of time up in the level of reality in which the simulation is being run, and as long as the simulation picks up right where it left off, no one here would ever have any way to notice or to know.
There could be a googol “higher-level” years between every Planck time in our universe** and as long as the simulation wasn’t changed, or was changed in ways that were logically consistent, there would be no way to see it from inside. This is one of the implications of the “simulation hypothesis” or whatever the “official” term is, put forward by such notables as Nick Bostrum, who apparently has a new book out called DeepUtopia. I have not read it; I never finished his book Superintelligence, because it dragged on a bit and I didn’t find it as challenging or revelatory as I hoped it would be. Maybe if I started again, the experience would be different.
I am reading at least two other books, though. I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus, which is quite good so far, though nothing is likely to surpass his first book, Sapiens, which is one of the best books I’ve read.
I’m also working through Now:ThePhysicsofTime, by Richard A. Muller. He’s trying to describe his notion of the true source and nature not only of time’s arrow, but of time itself. It’s reasonably good so far, but his arguments have not been as interesting or as impressive as I’d hoped they might be. Still, I look forward to getting to the point in which he elaborates on his idea that not merely space is expanding, but time is also doing so, and this is the source of time’s arrow and the nature of “now” and so on. It’s intriguing, and it’s far from nonsensical, considering that Einstein/Minkowsky showed that space and time are one entity.
I’m sort of on hiatus from Nate Silver’s On the Edge, which is a good book, but is quite long and in-depth, and some things he discusses are more interesting than others, to me.
Other than that, I continue to feel discordant, or hazy or separate, like everything, including me, is “a copy of a copy of a copy of itself”. Last night, the feeling of being disconnected, rootless, and that I am in the process of disintegrating felt highly distressing***. I wished I could find a way to feel connected with the daily, normal processes of my life, instead of feeling as though I am, for instance, one of the people exploring Area X and trying to understand it without much chance or hope of success. Or perhaps it felt more that I am the analogy of Area X, I am the alien thing/environment in the more “ordinary” world, dropped here perhaps by accident, with no idea where I really belong or whence I really came.
Now, this morning, those notions are not gone, but the alarm associated with them is not as intense, replaced more and more by fatigue, a kind of learned helplessness. As time goes by, I tend more and more toward apathy‒not acceptance but merely giving up, just not having the energy to continue to care. I would like to connect in some way, to feel as though I belonged somewhere, but I am a Nexus 13 in a world of humans‒a world where, inexplicably, nobody seems ever to have manufactured such replicants, and yet here I am, making everything ever more drearily baffling.
Oh, well. Maybe as the disjunction progresses, I will reach some turning point, and I will melt, thaw, and resolve myself into a dew. Or maybe I’ll have to try Hamlet’s next mentioned option and make my own quietus as I intended to do on the 22nd‒I don’t believe in any “Everlasting” being, fixed canons or otherwise, that could prohibit “self-slaughter”.
Or maybe I will find some answers; or if answers don’t already exist, maybe I’ll create some answers. It seems unlikely, given my personal experience and understanding, but the odds are not zero. Though they may well be close enough for all practical purposes.
TTFN
*To borrow a lovely expression from The Matrix.
**Ignore Relativity’s problems with simultaneity for…well, for now.
Robert Elessar 