Neurology

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Aqua sea foam shame and be all a pile of cheese

Okay, well, today I’m writing this blog post‒or at least I’m beginning it‒at the train station, having walked here, since I hadn’t done that walk yet this week.  Of course, I’m soaked with sweat and I will probably be in a lot of pain today, but I’ve been in a lot of pain anyway, so I might as well get some exercise.

I’ve had a terrible time with respect to pain, even worse than usual, lately.  Yesterday, after taking three aspirin and two Tylenol at once, about half an hour later‒and for all of less than twenty minutes‒my pain faded briefly away, and it was ecstasy.  It was better than a holiday and a great book and a good movie with one’s favorite person.  Then that effect went away and the pain resurged back to prior levels.  It’s quite frustrating, almost a tease, though I don’t think anyone or anything is actually, deliberately doing any teasing.

And of course, though my coworker was back yesterday, he did that same thing where, even if I just say that I feel tired and worn out, he says that he knows how I feel.  I want to say, “No.  You don’t.  Even assuming your current pain is as bad as mine, try having that for more than twenty years, try losing practically everything that was ever important to you partly because of that pain.”

I of course really don’t want him to do any of that.  I hope his pain steadily decreases and his life improves and his family prospers and so on.  I don’t think I would wish my subjective experience on anyone else, though I know to a near mathematical certainty that there are many people whose lives are far more unpleasant than mine.  Still, mine is unpleasant enough, and I don’t recommend it.

I keep wanting to warn people at the office that I really don’t feel that I’m going to survive for much longer.  That’s what I’ve been feeling particularly strongly over the past few days.  I also feel grumpy and angry and hateful and spiteful, so I dislike my own self more than usual, which is saying something indeed.  But if I say to others that I don’t think I will survive much longer, the few people who take it seriously‒locally, anyway‒are the people with whom I don’t really feel a connection at all, and indeed, are the people I find most irritating (which is unfair to them, but I can’t seem to do much about it).

It’s a bit analogous to this blog, though the analogy is very weak.  I air my depression and pain and despair here, hoping either to be told some new information and ideas or to receive some form of help, either from without or from within, but after a while, if you keep writing about the fact that you feel miserable and your pain is worsening and you have thoughts of killing yourself‒but you haven’t actually killed yourself or tried to kill yourself yet‒people stop taking it very seriously.  I suppose that’s not completely irrational or at all unfair, but it is rather frustrating.  It really makes everything one does feel even more futile than it would have felt otherwise.

That’s part of what makes me think I should just give up on blogging, and on anything and everything else.  I should stop blogging, and I should also just recognize that I am not going to do any more music, nor will I write any more fiction, nor will I do any more drawing or singing or anything else creative.  I will not master General Relativity or Quantum Field Theory to the degree I would like to, which is to a near-professional level.

And I will certainly not make any new friends or develop any new romantic relationships; I will not have any form of new life or family.  I won’t achieve anything else of value in my life, I won’t ever see or rekindle my closeness with any of my old friends, and they are surely all quite happy about that.

I should just stop trying.  I should stop blogging, I should put away, give away, burn or otherwise eliminate all the hallmarks of foolish pipe dreams, I should stop getting new books or manga, cancel my cable and internet and streaming services and Amazon and all that and just let go.  I’m hanging on by my fingernails, anyway, and it’s damned uncomfortable.

Sorry this post isn’t much fun.  I don’t recall the last time I did a post that I thought was probably fun for anyone to read.  I’m even sort of dozing off while writing this, even though I’m now on the train.  I can only imagine how boring it must be to read.

Anyway, this is all almost certainly a waste of my time and of yours.  Sorry.  I hope it hasn’t been too dreary.  Thank you for reading it, in any case.  I really appreciate your kindness and patience.  I wish I could be more worthy of them.

All apologies

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This post was written on Sunday night. That may be the most interesting thing about it.

I’m starting this blog post on Sunday evening, which is obviously not when I usually write my blog posts.  I’m writing it on my phone, because I didn’t bring the mini laptop with me when I left work early on Thursday, and though I could use my full-size laptop, I have no desire to bring it along with me tomorrow.  I tentatively plan to walk to the train in the morning.  I’ve given up on the boots; I think they do exacerbate my back pain.  It’s very sad, because I like them, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

I still have a bit of a low-grade fever this evening, but that’s okay.  I’m not particularly interested in trying to protect my health.  I’ve been here in my room‒with some outings to the store of course‒since Thursday evening.  I’m not very good company, not even for myself, I’m afraid.

It’s rather amusing; I have recently gotten suggestions for videos on YouTube about dealing with trauma from being in relationships with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and probably also because I liked a video by a self proclaimed NPD person who did a good video about the Doctor, especially the 12th Doctor, as an example of someone with autistic characteristics.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve been in any relationships with anyone with NPD,  and I certainly don’t have anything akin to NPD myself.  Quite the contrary.  When I was younger, I used to sort of pretend to be an egotist and to have a huge self-image and I (jokingly) pretended to think I was great and wonderful.  I’m pretty sure no one who knew me really took me seriously.  I’ve certainly never acted like a real narcissist or psychopath or anything, but there have been times when I envied them their self-love.  I’ve even tried‒especially when I was in prison‒to do auto-suggestion with a mantra saying, “I love my life and I love myself.”

After a while, though, I couldn’t even think the words in my head, not while trying to mean them, not while trying to believe them.  It feels like telling a foul and terrible lie.  I am often amused by people and literature and the like that speak of the (supposedly) ubiquitous sin of self-love.

I don’t think I have ever loved myself, not in my entire life.  Not in my oldest memories do I have any sense of feeling that I liked or loved myself.  It almost feels like a category error.  I never thought of myself as the kind of entity or being or concept such as that to which love might pertain.  I don’t think of myself as some identity, really.  Who am I?  I’m just the specific being that is asking that question, that’s all, whatever that is.

I’m a weird, complex four-dimensional braid in spacetime, comprised of the swirling patterns of all the particles that come together and form this long time-space tornado, bits coming into it and going out of it, everywhere, all the time, the pattern changing as one moves from past toward future, but only gradually.  And the overall pattern is continuous, and presumably will last for a bit longer before it can no longer be self-sustaining, and then it will fray and scatter and dissolve, the former bits going to be temporary parts of various other spacetime braids.

L’dor v’dor.  Amayn.

I certainly feel continuous with the kid crying in bed with his leg aches when he was little, and who always kind of was watching everything from outside.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a good upbringing and a loving family.  I had good friends in school, and we did fun and interesting things together.  And I loved learning things, and I still do love that.  But I’ve always been weird, I know that.

I’ve felt…well, I wouldn’t say I felt different because it wasn’t really about any comparison.  Again, it feels almost like a category error.  I recently coined a term unsane as a contrast to the term “insane”, to mean something, someone, to whom the very concept of sanity doesn’t really apply.  I’ve often sort of thrown that (in my head) as an epithet at the deeds and behaviors of so many people and things around out there in the world.  But maybe it really applies to me.

I feel like maybe I’ve always been at right angles to every dimension of all the people around me.  But I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself, not even for a moment, though there are plenty of other people and things I love.

I think the person I’m most like, in raw aspects, is my Dad.  I had the advantage of being the youngest of three children, and so had support and people I could watch to see how things were done (and sometimes to see what not to do, what sorts of things didn’t tend to work).  My Dad was the eldest child in his family, so I guess he had to pick up a lot of things on his own.  But to his credit (and to hers) my Mom was with my Dad from when they were married until the day he died.

But he was often the one who in many ways made sense to me, even when I was really mad at him.  He was the only one who ever wanted to spend as much time at an exhibit in a museum or a zoo as I do.  Everyone else always moves along way too fast.  But somehow it’s not as much fun to see such things alone.  

I don’t know that for certain, actually.  I don’t think I’ve ever tried to go to a museum or library by myself.  The closest I’ve come is going to a bookstore by myself, and even that is just blah.  When I’m by myself, I have no will to get out and do much of anything at all.  I don’t do things for myself.  I have no desire to do things for myself.  I wish I didn’t have to obey the urge to eat or drink or breathe for myself.  It’s all quite boring.  I don’t even like to look at myself in the mirror*.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.  It’s just what this entity does at this point in spacetime, because of the various internal and external interactions among the various forces and “particles” in this particular spacetime weather pattern.  Why does that eddy in that river swirl about in that particular way at that point in a stream?  Because of physics.  There’s nothing deeper as far as I know.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s simple.  It’s ridiculously complex.  No system‒as I think I’ve said before‒can ever be complex enough to understand itself completely, for that would require an infinite expansion of complexity.

Anyway, this is already long enough for a full blog post.  If this is not the last paragraph**, it will mean that I’ve added something tomorrow morning.  I don’t know whether that will happen, but if you’re reading this, you will know the answer, but it’s further down the braid than where I am now.  I’m planning to walk to the train in the morning.  If I get hit by a car (or a bus or a truck, I’m not picky), or if I have a heart attack or a stroke, or if I’m sicker than I feel and collapse because of it‒none of which would break my heart, except perhaps literally‒I’m unlikely to add to it.  Maybe I’ll put this up on WordPress and set it to auto-post in the morning.  That way it will go up whether I’m alive or dead or something in between, and some mystery will remain.  I guess you all will see.

[Addendum:  I made it to the train station, and I did walk.  Better luck next time.]

*Though, curiously, I find listening to my own songs and covers relaxing.  Damned if I know why.

**Not counting footnotes.

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.

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A somewhat more positive blog post. That may not be saying much, but take what you can get.

Well, it probably won’t surprise those of you who read my previous post to learn that I left the office early yesterday‒at lunchtime‒and came back to the house where, after eating a bit, I took a melatonin and half a Benadryl.  I’ll say this for that group of meds:  it was only a few minutes after taking them that I felt a strong pressure to sleep, and so I did.

Some of that may just be fulfillment of expectation, and I was, of course, very tired, but they are supposed to be rapidly dissolving melatonin tablets.  Benadryl never seems to act very quickly on me, so I hesitate to credit the fast onset of sleep to it.

I did wake up quite a lot during the night‒about like usual‒but at least the night was effectively longer, and I don’t mean that in the sense that it felt like it lasted a millennium, as I said yesterday about Monday night.  I mean that I was in bed for a good ten hours roughly, and that at least is something special.  I regret to have to inform you that my pain is only slightly abated, but with a bit of rest, at least it’s slightly easier to tolerate.

I’m writing this on my phone today, by the way, because there was no way in hell I was carrying anything I didn’t really need to carry when I left the office, and that meant no laptop computer.

I think I’m going to try to take just a melatonin in the evening tonight, to see if it works to help me drop off.  The fact that I still reawakened frequently throughout the night at least somewhat assuages my fear that I might oversleep if I take it.  I’m too tense about oversleeping anyway, so short of a general anaesthetic, I’m unlikely to sleep through my alarm.

That raises an interesting point for me.  I clearly have a sense of chronic tension, almost all the time.  I suppose it might be called an anxiety syndrome, but that never feels like quite the right term to me.  I don’t feel “anxious”, like I constantly want to run away, figuratively, but more that I’m constantly ready to fight.  Maybe that’s just an example of different people’s reactions to the same process‒the sympathetic nervous system function of fight or flight, which in me seems to tend powerfully toward “fight”.  Thus, in my song Breaking Me Down, I sing, “I always want to hit someone, but I never get in fights.”

I was strongly trained by my father not to get in fights unless it’s truly, absolutely necessary, and I think that’s good training.  But I always feel ready to fight (not necessarily physically, though that’s always an option).  I even keep weapons (nothing that can accidentally go off!) at my side when I sleep and in the office.

I know, that’s a bit weird.  It’s not that I actually expect to be attacked.  Of all the people I know in the office‒and most other places, really‒I am the one most likely to be inclined to violence, but I have always had exceptionally good impulse control.  I’m not even prone to act on wholesome impulses!  But if I need to get in a fight, I do want every advantage available.

In a sporting situation, fairness is important, but in “real life” I have no interest in fighting fairly.  A fair fight is one where you have a fifty percent chance of losing.  I want to bring that chance as close to zero as I can if things really matter.  I will cheat in any way I can if it’s a fight about something important, and I will feel that I have done right.  The leopard doesn’t offer its prey a head start if it can help it, nor does the prey wait until the leopard has a fair shot at it to run away.

Anyway, enough of that pseudo-macho stuff.  I just mean that, almost all the time, I feel defensive/semi-aggressive, though I strongly dislike getting in arguments (or fights, really), and even feel mortified and ashamed and self-hating if I make a heated comment online.  Sometimes I even feel nervous when I make a positive comment, as though I fear having to deal with anyone responding to me, even if that response is also positive.  It’s weird.  I suppose, to some extent, it’s probably simply the fact that I have always felt weird, like I’m crazy, like I don’t quite function like the people around me, even within my own family.  I think I’ve mentioned that here, before.

All that tension does wear you out, though, and if not tempered, or at least counter-balanced, by positive things, it can make life very unpleasant.  I’m not sure what to do about it, though.  Meditation can soften it, but as I’ve mentioned, meditation often seems to make my depression get worse.  That’s not much of an improvement, if at all.  So, I have my ongoing conundrum.

I don’t know, also, how much‒if at all‒that tension contributes to the worsening of my chronic pain.  It’s possible that it does a fair amount.

In any case, I would say that I probably have some version of chronic anxiety, but that it doesn’t present as what I would call “anxiety”.  I don’t feel worried or afraid, I just feel hostile and often even hateful.  If the Force were real and I had any affinity for it, I don’t see how I could avoid the Dark Side.

Anyway, I’m going in quite early to catch up on things I let go yesterday because I could not focus at all on anything important.  But this pain and this tension and this depression are really grinding me down, and I don’t know how much will and energy I have left.  I’m very, very, very tired.  Maybe if I use the melatonin every day, I’ll gradually feel at least a bit better.  Just because it’s not globally useful doesn’t mean it couldn’t help for certain people in certain circumstances.

If it doesn’t help, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I keep speaking (or writing) about giving up and dying, but I keep on trying to find solutions or at least palliatives to my physical and psychological difficulties.  And I keep retrying lots of things that have failed before, in a sort of desperation to do something, anything, to see if I can feel less unhealthy.  I’ve not had a lot of luck, but maybe I would have been worse without the various things I’ve tried.  There’s no way to know, since I can’t compare alternate realities.  There’s also no way to know that I might not have been better than I am if I hadn’t tried to combat my dysthymia and pain.

Oh, well.  I’m probably wasting my time and my efforts.  But, if anyone out there knows of any brilliant new ideas, please let me know…but remember, they should probably be truly new, or at least not cliché.  I’m a trained MD, and I’ve read about and tried a lot of things beyond even that extensive training and practice.

The world isn’t made for us, and certainly we were never born to be comfortable.  It’s the feelings of dissatisfaction that prod us to act to stay alive and to thrive and to reproduce.  That’s good engineering, like smoke detectors being hyper-sensitive and fire alarms being extra jarring.  But if the smoke alarm gets stuck in an active position, leaving the alarm always going, eventually you’re going to want to cut power to it, and to hell with the risk of fire.  And if you can’t shut it off no matter what, eventually, you’re either just going to deafen yourself completely or leave the house.

That’s metaphor, of course.

I hope you all have a good day.  If you’re able to get good nights’ sleeps regularly, please make sure not to take it for granted.  And have a nap in my name, if you can!  I know it does me no actual good, but somehow it seems like a nice idea.

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“…and the worms ate into his brain.”

It’s Tuesday morning.

It’s odd how a night can seem to last for a thousand years, and yet, nevertheless, the morning can come far too soon.  That’s the situation in which I find myself, today.  It’s nothing particularly new, but it has been a night that’s tending toward the bad tail of the bell curve, by which I mean, it was worse than most of my nights.

I keep wanting to write some form of the present tense, as in “it is” a worse night than most, because there has been no real boundary between last night and now.  My back and leg pain has been more or less continuous, and though my consciousness has been waxing and waning, there has been no real rest.

There’s a rather famous philosophical notion that, as far as one knows, after one has gone to sleep, when one wakes up, one might have died and been replaced during the night, and one could be a completely new being in the morning, with just some implanted memories from the person who came before.  Of course, this could also be true in any given waking moment, since all we know of our personal past is our memories of it, but there’s a definite feeling of continuity during a given day—sometimes there’s too much continuity—that is interrupted when we have a true night’s sleep.

Well, I definitely feel a rather strong continuity now with yesterday; I have no sense of having been significantly unconscious overnight, though I know I wasn’t fully conscious the whole time.  And now I have to go to work, where my only regular, pseudo-social interaction happens, but which also tends to make me stressed much more than it makes me feel good, mainly because of noise and irregular interruptions.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are many people at the office whom I like, and even one or two with whom I can have enjoyable conversations, at least about some things, though not about very much.  I know, it’s my own fault that I have no friends anymore.  And by “fault” I mean, I know that I am faulty.  I’m a bad product, a lemon.  Any sensible consumer protection agency probably would have demanded I be recalled to the factory if there were such a thing.  I was born with both cardiac and (apparently) neurological defects.  These things should have been covered under the warranty.

I know, I know, melodrama, right?  It’s curious that I express myself so over-much here in this blog.  Apparently, in person, I’m rather wooden, and don’t smile very much—though I get the impression that when I talk about music I like or about math or science or things of that nature, I light up a bit.  Certainly, I get more energetic.  And then people’s faces soon tend to glaze over and look either confused or bored or whatever.

I used to wake up with leg aches a lot when I was little.  I don’t know what the cause was, really; they used to think they were “growing pains” or something along those lines.  I just know they hurt an awful lot, and they often woke me up.  When I started having my “new” onset of pain—it turns out almost certainly to have been related to a back injury—as an adult, I thought that it was some kind of recrudescence of the problem I had as a kid.

I underwent all sorts of tests to see if there was a neurological/myological problem of chronic, perhaps congenital, nature.  I even went through electromyography, which is a lot like getting a protracted series of intramuscular injections in which the needle is just left in the large muscle group and then you’re told to flex the muscle while it’s in there.  I don’t recommend it as something fun to do, even if you think you’re something of a masochist, which I am not.

Anyway, they didn’t find anything like that, at least nothing obvious, and I eventually learned I had a seriously ruptured/torn L5-S1 disc, and ultimately had surgery on it.  To be fair, the surgery reduced my pain, but it clearly has not eliminated it.

Sorry, I know this is all boring and repetitive.  Such is life, though, isn’t it?  It’s boring and repetitive.  At least, it’s repetitive.  I guess when one has family and friends and loved ones, people with whom one can spend time doing nothing in particular in each other’s company, the repetitive doesn’t feel boring.  I’ve been in that situation before, and for long periods of time.  I had a good, close family, with good parents, brother, sister, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on.  I had friends growing up, in school, and in college.  I was married for fifteen years, and that wasn’t boring, certainly.  I had friends in med school and residency, and I had my kids.  That was all truly great and wonderful.

I am now tired and worn down, and quite alone/lonely, but I don’t necessarily want to want to die, though I often do feel that I want to die.  I want to want to live, which is not quite the same things as wanting to live, unfortunately.  I need help.

I feel like the narrator of the song Hey, you, asking if people can feel him, if they can touch him, if they would help him to carry the stone.  But, of course, it was only fantasy, as the song goes on to note.  The wall was too high, and no matter how he tried, he could not break free.  And so on (see above).

Pink Floyd does seem to resonate for me, and it has since I first started listening to them, especially their big four albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and of course, The Wall.  I’m clearly not alone in this, which is actually somewhat ironic. Isn’t it?

Oh, by the way, based on the way I save my blog posts in the computer, I’ve just realized that the day of the week for the current date is one day later than it was last year.  In other words, July 18th (today) is on a Tuesday this year and was on a Monday last year.  This means that every seven years it should come around to the same day, except that leap years make the cycle irregular.

It will be five or six years instead of seven between returns to a given day, depending on whether there is only one leap year embedded in the course or if there are two.  There can’t be more than two, because leap years are every four years, but there are only seven days in a week.  I guess that could mean, though, that it could be more than seven years before a return to the same day, if the year when one would be returning to it is a leap year, and then that day might be skipped over again, leading to a longer course of time between.  I could try to work out the potential maximum length of time between when one date falls on one day of the week next time, but I’m already getting bored of this.  In any case, in the long run, it ought to be on average that the date falls on the same day of the week one out of every seven years.

Except February 29th, of course.  There are more than seven years between any repeated day for February 29th.

Anyway, I’m going to go.  I’m in so much pain, despite what meds I have available, that I think I’ll call a Lyft or something to get to the train station.  I hate doing that, but I’m just worn out.  Also, it’s not as though I’m saving money for some possible, imagined future retirement; I don’t see how it’s possible that I have a future of significance.

I would like to have a future.  I would like someone, somewhere, to find me some kind of answers or help or something.  But that’s pretty unreasonable to ask of other people, all of whom have their own problems and pains and troubles.

I guess the show must go on, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

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In Diana, we are simply passing through history.

It’s Tuesday morning, now, as I’m writing this, which makes sense, since yesterday was Monday.

In case anyone was wondering about the title to yesterday’s blog post:  After deciding not to try to work any reference to any song titles or lyrics relating to Monday into the title‒though I did link to that Carpenters’ song‒I thought I would reference the moon, nevertheless, perhaps as some metaphor for madness.  That seemed appropriate for my blog, since I’m rather steadily mentally deteriorating.  So I figured, who better to give a quote about the moon and madness than Shakespeare?

My first thought, though, led me just to the classic Heinlein novel, which I had thought had been a direct quote, albeit not from any play I had read.  But it wasn’t, apparently.  So I dug around a bit and found a quote from Henry IV part 1‒which I have read, but quite a long time ago‒and took the appropriate lunar reference.

However, I didn’t want simply my usual, slightly altered Shakespearean quote, though that might make up for last Thursday.  The fact that the original line references Diana* made me think of turning it into a Japanese “quote” and replacing Diana with Tsukuyomi, the traditional Japanese moon god or goddess (more often the latter in manga and anime depictions) sibling of Amaterasu, the Japanese god (or goddess) of the Sun/Dawn (obviously a very important deity in the land of the rising sun).

I can’t claim the Japanese expertise necessary to have translated by myself the quote into yesterday’s title, at least not without a lot of work and probably making a mess of things, so I used Google Translate.  I do know enough Japanese to have been able to tell, basically, that it was a decent translation.  I originally planned to leave it in the Japanese characters‒I had gone as far as to remove Google’s transliteration of “Tsukuyomi” or “Tsukiyomi” into katakana** and put in the actual kanji/hiragana characters‒but then I decided that would too pretentious, even for me***, and so I left it in the transliteration into romaji.

For the picture, I used a version of Tsukuyomi found in the brilliant and beautiful manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by the unparalleled manga team CLAMP, creators of such works as Cardcaptor Sakura among many other (in my opinion) even better and more beautiful works.  I altered the picture, though, to make it darker and more eerie and sinister-seeming, since that seemed appropriate for a moon goddess as a representative of madness, as the Shakespearean reference seems to imply, and which certainly seems most pertinent when it comes to me.

Anyway, I’m sure that’s all quite boring, but I thought the title might seem strange and obscure enough to merit an explanation, and while I was at it I ran off at the keyboard.  That, at least, is not too unusual.

I’m writing this on my phone again, by the way.  Yesterday I decided not to carry my laptop back to the house, because I knew I planned to walk from the train to the house (which I did) while talking on the phone to my sister (which I also did), and I figured I’d keep my load light-ish, just to make the process as pleasant as could be.  It wasn’t raining, which was good, but it was rather hot and, of course, humid.  Fortunately, having someone to whom to talk makes the trip pass rather quickly, subjectively speaking.  In objective time, it took slightly longer than usual for 5 miles for me, which makes perfect sense.  I was talking while walking, after all.

I’m afraid I have to report that I am still pretty stressed out at work, and when I am not at work, and just in general, other than when I was talking to my sister.  I had a third quasi-chamber locked and loaded already yesterday, if you’ll remember my reference and metaphor/analogy from the other day.  At one point, I decided just to take it, which I did, and that little bitty minor risk did calm me down a bit.

I’m still just quite, quite depressed, and I guess I’m also what would be called terribly anxious.  Though it doesn’t feel like “fear” of any kind exactly to me as much as it does a kind of mental itchiness and swelling tension, as though most things in the world give me a central nervous system neurologic allergic reaction that makes me want to peel myself out of my own metaphorical skin.  I’m not afraid of anything per se; it’s more as though I’m being squeezed and stretched at all times in numerous directions in some mental vector space, and it’s both crushing me and tearing me apart, slowly and sadistically.  I find nearly every interaction‒especially ones involving interruptions to something I’m already doing‒to be incredibly irritating and stressful.

I feel a bit like an injured and sick feral cat that’s being approached and molested by various different gawking people (no good Samaritans) and other animals when my instinct is to want to be left alone and unmolested, so I can succumb to the elements and just die.

It’s all really very uncomfortable‒though there are pleasant interludes, at least, as noted above about talking to my sister‒and I really don’t think I can last much longer.  I need to escape, but there’s nowhere in this world, in this life, to which I can safely flee.  Not as far as I know, anyway.  There’s no rescue shelter out there that’s going to take in and try to help and heal and find a home for as diseased and damaged a stray as I am; certainly I see no sign of one, and I can’t just keep waiting and hoping.

Well…I can, or I could, in principle, but there is no percentage in doing so as far as I can see.  I’ve been waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping for quite a long time, meanwhile subsisting on the delusion that some nominal, abstract “fact that people somewhere in some abstract kind of sense kind of care about whether I live or die” can actually make any literal, physical difference.  But, like “thoughts and prayers”, it seems not to matter in actual fact (though it is appreciated, and I don’t mean to denigrate such thoughts).  Or, if it matters, it doesn’t matter enough to keep me going indefinitely.  I’m a miserable person to be around, and I’m a miserable person to be.  I just need to screw my courage to the sticking place and finally take more decisive action than exposing myself to a slight risk of a GI bleed.

Real daggers still work against daggers of the mind, but a bare bodkin is an intimidating thing to turn upon oneself, as Hamlet knew.  But I need to do something.  I can’t just keep waiting and deluding myself that something in me will get better.

Oh, well.  Time to head to the bus stop.  Maybe the walking will help my morning back and leg pain.

Have a good day.

*Not Wonder Woman, but, unless I’m mistaken, the counterpart to the Greek god (or goddess) Artemis, sibling of Apollo.

**Which seemed a dreadful bit of disrespect toward such an important deity, treating it as if it were a foreign-introduced word.

***If you can imagine.

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A troubling partial shutdown yesterday of unknown cause

I’m writing this on my phone today, because yesterday I didn’t bring my laptop with me when I left the office.  It was a deliberate choice; I felt absolutely…well, it’s hard to describe, but clearly I was not at all healthy or well.

It was a very strange day, internally at least.  I started out reasonably okay, after having no worse a night’s sleep than usual, which is something like 4 or so total hours of non-continuous sleep.  I wrote a relatively fun blog post, which just sort of happened.  I certainly didn’t plan what I wrote, it just all poured out, shaping itself even as it came into existence.  That, at least, is not unusual for me.

But then, at the office–actually, really, by the time I got to the office, and certainly by the start of business–I felt the first a wave of my usual, work-related tension that comes from having the endure the noise, and the questions and erratic shifts in direction and momentum, as people come interrupt me, while I’m clearly doing some work-related task, and ask me, without any preamble or waiting period, to do something for them, or to help them with something, or whatever.  I also went over the reports from one of the companies with which we contract to make sure their records match ours (I do this every week).  And then I just felt my nervous system begin to fade out.

I don’t mean that I lost consciousness or anything.  I just ran out of propulsion.  I hardly interacted, barely replied to questions, had a hard time even following what anyone was saying, and had difficulty even moving.  I could do it, but only when necessary, and it was much slower than usual.  I felt truly like someone who was in many ways already dead.

Indeed, I contemplated just taking a big fistful of Tylenol and swallowing it, just to take some kind of action, but that would only cause trouble for people in the office, assuming they knew I even did it.  I did take slightly more pain medicine than usual, because my left hip and lower back were acting up slightly more than average, but even that didn’t seem to stimulate any real behavior or anything other than the aforementioned stuff.

By early-to-mid-afternoon, I was barely moving, and in between specific tasks I mainly just stared in a random direction.  I thought about just lying down outside in the thunderstorm that was going on then, in the “alley” behind where the office is, only partly in the thought that maybe I would get run over, mostly in the thought that it would be good just to lay out and let the elements take me and wash me away.  But neither that, nor lying on the train tracks (which briefly went through my mind), were things I could think of too seriously, largely because I wouldn’t want to cause the trouble for so many other people such an action would cause, and because they would require movement to accomplish.

Also, in a way, I knew that I probably would not be able to resist the biologically mandated drive for avoidance that approaching cars or trains would trigger.  Maybe that’s part of the reason I think of such things–to trigger that fear and perhaps wake myself up.

Yesterday, though, it was mainly apathy and lack of energy that prevented me from doing anything.  I think if someone else had picked me up and plopped me on the tracks or in the road at one point, I would just have lain where I was placed.

I’ve had episodes somewhat like this before, where part of or a lot of my brain just seems to lose all impetus, all sense of motion.  It’s often associated with depression, but not always.  I didn’t even feel tired, or at least not sleepy.  Sleep is not a readily available thing for me a lot of the time.  It’s more as if the springs that drive my clockwork ran out of tension and everything consequently just slowed to a halt.

In particular, I noticed I had a hard time talking, certainly in anything above a mumble.  I was reminded of a strange thing that happened when I was very young, certainly well before I was kindergarten age.  I had become frustrated with some attempt to say something–either no one seemed to be listening, or I was told to be quiet for some reason or other (as little kids sometimes are, out of necessity) or I just couldn’t find the words I wanted, and I remember thinking to myself, in effect, “Fine, I just won’t talk anymore.”

But soon I realized, when I had gotten past my initial little grumpy response, and wanted to say something, that my voice didn’t want to respond.  I had effectively shut down my ability to speak.  And I could kind of feel that, if I didn’t force it, I might not be able to speak ever again, sort of like Holly Hunter’s character in The Piano (not that I thought about that…that movie lay a few decades in the future).

Anyway, it was quite frightening, and I really had to struggle to get myself to say something.  Finally I did, and I’ve never gotten quite that close to being nonverbal again.  But I felt somewhat close to it yesterday, and the thought made me wonder if this could be something akin to an “autistic shutdown” (though I’m not even sure if I’m “on the spectrum”…maybe I’m just a freaking weirdo, which seems most likely).  I tried to look the symptoms up, with my limited will, but the ones I saw at a cursory glance didn’t quite resonate.  There were videos I might have watched but I had no capacity to follow a video.

Apparently my state was noticeable and rather concerning to my coworker/work-friend.  He began showing me about a forthcoming movie, and then I told him it looked cool but I wasn’t going to be watching it, or any other movie.  But he couldn’t really hear me, because I was speaking so low.

He asked me if I was okay, asked if I needed him to call an ambulance (no…what would they possibly do?) or if I wanted to go “home” (no…as I said to him, needing to repeat it since he couldn’t hear me, “home” is shit, my “home” sucks, and I like it no better than the office or the train or the street, except for the fact that I can vegetate there all alone).  Anyway, I tried to tell him I didn’t know what was happening, but that my brain just wasn’t working, and I didn’t know why.  It must’ve felt for him a bit like trying to have a conversation with Stephen Hawking when he had to use his voice synthesizer thing.

He did his best to give me encouraging and supportive words‒he knows I have trouble with depression‒and asked me to let him know if there was anything he could do.  I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t know what to do, or what anyone could do, but I sort of nodded in recognition of his kindness.

After a low point at about 3 pm, my capacity started to creep back upward, and I was able to talk and interact more, and by the end of the day I even made a few stupid jokes.  I kept up with my work as I pretty much always do.  But I never got quite back up to my usual, “normal” level of energy, such as it is, and I still don’t feel quite fully functional, even for me.  I guess we’ll see what happens.

It’s too much to hope that this is some kind of imminent moribund crisis that will take me inescapably out of the world, but it’s not good.  Today is payroll, and I must go to work to deal with that, but I wish I could just not move.  I’m not sleepy at all, unfortunately, and I don’t really even feel “tired”, not in the usual, normal sense.  I just feel almost immobile, or at least with very limited “motor” function (not in the neurological sense of motor versus sensory neurons, for instance, but very much in the thermodynamic, Carnot engine type sense).

Maybe that’s it.  Maybe I’m approaching maximum personal entropy.  Maybe I’m nearing some personal, metaphorical thermal equilibrium and there’s just no more “free” energy that can be turned into useful work.

I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see how today goes.

I have to leave now to head to the bus stop, because it’s getting “late” for me.  I will try to keep you all posted, but I don’t know what is happening, so I’m far from sure what will happen.  In any case, I hope you have a good day collectively, and good days individually.  Which is an interesting, parallel and coterminous yet not identical time construction and notion all on its own, come to think of it.

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How does one escape when one’s own mind is one’s persecutor?

Well, it’s Friday again, but since I’m working tomorrow, this won’t be the last blog post of this week‒unless some catastrophe happens and I’m unable to write and/or work tomorrow.  If something does happen, I hope it’s something that at least leaves me unconscious, possibly comatose, for however long it lasts.  It would be annoying to be stuck in a situation where I was, for instance, in great pain and unable to work, but still didn’t get any rest from myself.

I occasionally think about seeking out one of those experimental depression treatments, like ketamine or psilocybin or summat.  But I would be very nervous, especially about the psychedelic one.  I tend at times to have weird reactions, or at least unusual ones, to neuro-active substances, and as you may or may not have realized, my mind is not my friend.  I feel quite nervous that I would start a treatment like psilocybin and be stuck in a longish “bad trip”, which I know can literally last for hours and subjectively last interminably.

Of course, I frankly wouldn’t know where to seek out such a thing, anyway, and even if I did know, I don’t think I could force myself to go and seek it out, just on my own.  I can’t even work up the will to change the inner tube on the front tire of my bike.  I’ve been perusing electric scooters for weeks, but I’m no closer to buying one.  My ability to do anything other than my basic, daily routine is almost completely gone.

I can’t really foresee going on any trip, or doing anything fun on a weekend, such as seeing a movie, going to a bookstore, going to a restaurant, going to a zoo, or whatever.  Nothing is really any fun, anymore, anyway, so I have no motivation, no drive.  I wish I could just collapse, somehow.

I often think of the comic book version of Adam Warlock* who, when in distress, or after injury, or when needing healing or something, creates this cocoon around himself and just goes dormant for a long time.  I guess maybe some kind of sensory deprivation chamber might work like that, but again, I don’t even know where one would find such a thing near me, and I don’t think I would have the gumption to seek one out, anyway.

I don’t make things easy for myself, do I?  But then, who would make things easy for the person they most despise in the world?  It wouldn’t make sense.

I’m writing a bit slowly this morning, but that’s okay.  I always wait for a while at the bus stop, anyway, even when I leave “late”.  I would be terribly distressed if I left it to the point of barely getting to the bus on time.  That would make me feel horribly tense and uncomfortable and, frankly, angry at myself.

I always used to get to school more than an hour early, usually before most of the teachers.  That way I could just be in the place in silence for a while before anyone else showed up and began the cacophony.  Then the place at least felt, in some ways, like mine.

I do the same with work, now.  I can’t stand to arrive anything but quite early.  And I don’t like it much if other people get there too early as well, interfering with my time alone in the quiet.  But then again, I also hate when people show up late.  I really don’t make things easy, do I?  At least, the only person who suffers from all this is yours truly.  I mean, okay, occasionally I probably get grumpy, but since I don’t socialize much anyway, there are few consequences for anyone else.

For me, though, I start to feel tension build as the time approaches for the workday to begin, as people begin to arrive at the office, and they start to have conversations and interactions‒often talking to each other from clear across the room, rather than moving closer each to the others.  It’s horrible.  It’s like the shrieking of the damned, but they don’t even realize they are the damned, so it’s only other people they’re tormenting.

I’m being unfair, of course.  I am the weird one, obviously.  I am the odd one out.  No one else deserves recrimination for the fact that I’m always made uncomfortable by so many things other people do routinely without any malicious intent.

Of course, “deserves” is a silly, artificial, imaginary concept, like justice and goodness and law and money and civilization itself.  That doesn’t mean it’s all valueless, but it has no foundational, fundamental, inherent reality.

I wouldn’t say it’s a “language game”; that’s not really an accurate or useful description.  I like Yuval Noah Harari’s choice to call them all “fictions”, by which he doesn’t mean they are unreal‒a fictional story is, if you will, a real fictional story, after all, and though money is a fiction, its effects are immense‒but they are made up.  They don’t exist outside the minds of groups of humans and humanoids.

Anyway, as usual, I don’t know what point or points, if any, I might be trying to make.  I’m just writing because that’s what I do every working day.  I had thought for it to be a kind of therapy, hopefully helping treat or improve my dysthymia and depression, but I don’t think it’s doing that at all, and I’m sure many of you would concur.

Writing fiction seemed reliably to help my mood, which is consistent with Stephen King’s long-standing claim that his writing was, for him, the best therapy around.  It’s certainly ego-syntonic‒especially if, like Stephen King, you have other people who read and enjoy your work.

But I can’t seem to do that, anymore.  And I can’t seem to do music anymore, either.  I certainly haven’t fixed the E-string on the Strat.  My toe is steadily healing, at least.  It looks worse than it feels, but it is still sore.

Anyway, that’s all stuff and nonsense.  I’m at the bus stop, now, and not improving this post with further writing, so I’ll stop soon for today.  I’ll be here again tomorrow, and then Monday, then Tuesday, and so on and on, until something finally breaks me, or until‒much less likely‒some kind of epiphany or miracle happens and I get better, or perhaps I receive help from somewhere, somehow.  I don’t expect that to happen, however.  I could use it, I would probably welcome it, but it’s not going to happen based on my actions and initiative.  So I don’t have much hope for it.

Anyway, have a good weekend.

*I still haven’t seen the movie, yet, and I probably won’t go to the theater to see it, but will wait until it’s on Disney+, if I even watch it then.

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The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to blog of.

Hello and good morning, all.  Though I suppose I should leave it up to each of your own individual intuitions and criteria about whether it really is a “good” morning, and indeed, what such a term even could mean.  But, really, it’s what they call “a polite nothing” I suppose, because it has no other purpose than being a ritual greeting.

Weird.

It’s June 8th.  In 10 days it will be “Fathers’ Day” (I’m not sure about the “official” placement of the apostrophe).  In 21 days it will be my wedding anniversary, so to speak; anyway, it will have been 32 years since I got married, and I will have been divorced for 2 years longer than I was married, which is a crappy, crappy milestone.  I’ve also already gone roughly 10 years without seeing my kids in person, which is getting close to being as long as I was a part of their lives.

What an utter waste of years and effort it has been for me to be alive since then.

I’m writing this on my phone still/again, at the house, before heading for the bus stop.  There’s not much going on so far today, except to note that I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me, so I’m starting the day already feeling exhausted.

As you may recall, yesterday I did not take any “antidepressant”, and I likewise have not taken any today.  I did feel less tense yesterday than I had the days before, and that was certainly a relief, but it’s the sort of thing that happens whenever I change something like that.  I had a brief elevation in my mood when I started the Wort, also.  I suspect it’s just a placebo effect, and/or a reverse version of the same.

Anyway, I can’t blame either starting or stopping the stuff for my sleep problems.  They were there before any meds and they’ll be there after them, probably for the rest of my life.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to keep having sleep problems after I die.

Well…yes, I would.  Both the fact of still having sleep problems and having the ability to be aware of them would be quite surprising to me after I’m dead.  In fact, the ability to be surprised would be quite a surprise after I’m dead.  It would certainly be intriguing, as would the fact of being capable of being intrigued.  In fact, it’s hard to see that, if one is capable of surprise or intrigue or any other emotion, one should actually be considered “dead” in any useful sense.

Of course, I don’t think any of that is possible, really.  I’m quite convinced (provisionally, as always) that death entails merely oblivion, which is one of the things that makes it so appealing.  Indeed, my “Bayesian Prior” on that is so high that I would, so to speak, be willing to bet my life on it.  Admittedly, that’s a cheap bet, from my point of view, but I don’t have any right to bet anyone else’s life, so it’s all I have, worthless and disgusting though it may be.

Almost none of the various antidepressants I’ve taken have ever seemed to help my sleep.  Tricyclics, Effexor, Trazodone, Wellbutrin, Celexa/Lexapro and most other SSRIs…they didn’t make it better and some made it worse.  Only Paxil seemed at least to make me enjoy sleeping, which had never happened to me before, but its other effects were not good.  One downside was that I gained a lot of weight, and that’s not good in someone like me, who is constitutionally prone to overweight and its related effects.  That wasn’t the only problem, either.

Anyway, I don’t know why, but my depression, after initially responding to meds and therapy, has become tougher to treat over the years.  I don’t know if this is partly related to my apparent ASD, or whatever form of atypical, non-human neurology I have, or to something about the nature of depression, or to these and other factors mixed together.

What’s more, I don’t think anyone else in the world could actually know, either.  At most, at best, hypotheses could be made and tested, by me and by other medical/scientific people.  But it’s simply a fact that “we”, meaning all consciousnesses of which any of us are actually aware, don’t know well enough the nature of the normal functioning of the brain, let alone the nature of things like depression, dysthymia, autism spectrum disorders, insomnia (or in fact what sleep really does at all levels) very deeply and/or causally.  It’s extremely complex, and not enough resources have been or are put into the study.

We do spend a lot of money on science, but still more on war, and on politics, and on sporting events and so on.  Actually, I don’t know which if any of those things receives a greater proportion of civilizational resources than science does, but it feels as though it would be nice to divert at least some of the resources away from such things and into science.  The advancement of science is something that can benefit everyone, current and subsequent, especially since, once the information is learned, is discovered, it can (in principle) be shared at vanishingly small cost, to the potential benefit of the whole planet and its future inhabitants.

Of course, the company Elsevier apparently owns many of the premier scientific journals‒it did not originate them, it just bought them and is now rent-seeking through them‒and it not only charges a frankly obscene amount for subscriptions, but it even charges scientists who want to publish in the journals.  That is, in a sense, an actual white-collar crime against humanity, against civilization.

Such people deserve to be strapped down onto tables and have one drop of liquid Drano applied to their skin every hour, or perhaps even just every day, or somewhere in between, until it finally dissolves them away enough for it to kill them.  They could be kept alive in the meantime, and suffering for as long as possible, by IV infusions and naso-gastric feeding.

It’s just a thought.  Probably, even if I were given the power and resources to do so without the risk of consequences for me, I wouldn’t actually torture such people.  They’re just monkeys doing what monkeys do, after all.  But I might take away all their wealth and make them work at subsistence level jobs for the rest of their days.  It’s not the worst punishment, maybe, but getting medical and scientific knowledge out of the control of such people would be the real goal.

Anyway, I’m going to need to head to the bus stop here in a moment.  I feel tired and grumpy, and I’m not looking forward to anything about today at all, not even to its end, since the end of each day is merely a prelude to the dismal cycle of the next day and the next and so on.

I never look forward to going to bed, because going to bed merely ushers in the beginning of the next dreary, worthless day, probably to be faced with too little, too fragmented sleep, and with ongoing pain, and without being around or with any of the people I love.  It’s not the sort of thing to which one would look forward with anything better than weary resignation, and often with frank horror and disgust…and sometimes, honestly, with something akin to terror.

What are you gonna do?  That’s life.  It’s not for the faint-hearted.  And I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it without significant caveats and reservations and misgivings.

TTFN

broken wine glasselectronic

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The General Relativity of life-threatening depression

There’s a moment in the movie version of Interview with the Vampire in which Lestat and Louis are sitting around a table and the latter is looking at a candle flame.  Lestat begins, “There’s nothing in the world now that doesn’t hold some…” and Louis finishes “…fascination.”

I used to be sort of like that, I think.  I’ve since become much more the opposite:  There’s nothing in the world now that doesn’t hold some irritation/frustration.

Of course, I can’t blame the world, especially not given my prior converse (or obverse or whatever the hell the proper term is) attitude.  The problem is clearly with the eye of the beholder, and more importantly, with the mind to which that eye is attached.  I know this.  But knowing it doesn’t change the fact that each waking moment‒and I have far too few non-waking moments‒is at least a minor form of torture.  And the only escape I get from my mind is in the precious few hours of interrupted sleep I have at night.  I need a better solution.

Speaking of that, as I said in my impromptu post yesterday afternoon, I haven’t taken anything for depression today (unless you count caffeine, which does have some benefit for depression, according to some studies).  The Wort wasn’t helping and may have been making things worse.  It’s far too early to notice any difference so far, but hopefully by the middle of the day to the afternoon, I might at least feel less tense.

As I said yesterday afternoon, a work situation got me so frustrated that I kicked my black Strat, briefly kind of hoping to break it*.  All that broke was the high E string, which needed changing, anyway.  I did, as part of the collateral chaos, break my PSP, which I had bought so I could play Pangya, but that’s no big loss.  I also really bruised my right big toe (not my left one, as I mistakenly wrote last night in my obviously quite severe mental confusion‒I don’t think I’ve ever confused my right foot for my left foot before) but I don’t think it’s probably broken.  It’s black and blue, but not as painful as I would expect it to be if it were broken.

That wasn’t the only frustrating thing at the office.  In the morning, I tried very hard to convince one of the office workers that they shouldn’t come to me and say “we need paper cups for the front”, because that’s just trivia, and it’s inaccurate and exaggerated.  After all, no one will die or even become ill without paper cups, and I don’t use them at all, so there’s no “we” in that situation from my point of view.  I just keep track of the cups and order them for the office when they get low.  In any case, the word “need”, in my perception, is usually manipulative.  I find myself reverting to my old Ayn Rand reading and thinking about the fact that each person’s need is their particular problem.  But I couldn’t get her just to ask for cups instead of proclaiming a need.  Next time I should just say, “I’ll alert the media.”

Anyway, it’s not as though I won’t keep providing and doling out cups as long as I’m around, and I was probably the rude one in that situation.  I just have a pet peeve about people not being able to ask for things directly and politely.  All this isn’t helped by my chronic pain and sleep deprivation and the horrible, high-pitched tinnitus in my right ear that’s been going on for 15+ years (objectively) or forever (subjectively).

I’ve also recently taken to burning several mosquito bites that have been really bothering me.  It’s been raining a fair amount lately, and it’s hot, so the mosquitoes are out and about in force, and I’ve always been particularly tasty to them, it seems.  Finally, I got so frustrated with all the itching** that, over the past few days, I’ve taken to holding the end of a paper clip briefly in a torch type lighter and then pressing it against a mosquito bite.  This worked in the past, when I tried it once, and it has seemed to help some, but it does tend to leave scars.

Two days ago, a combination of a bite on the back of my hand and the frustration of the noise and chaos of the office (and people just doing whatever they please, with no backup for me from the boss when I try to see if we can be more orderly and time-sensitive) led me to take that torch lighter and apply the flame semi-directly to my right hand.  It lasted only an instant, and it hurt less than the metal does‒which makes some sense, given how metal conducts heat‒but it did raise a nice blister.

However, though it has since spontaneously drained, that blister seems less inflamed and quite a bit more superficial than the other marks.  Frankly, it doesn’t look as bad as the copious other plain, unburned mosquito bites, which are scabbed and inflamed and still itchy.

I also had/have a headache and some slight wooziness from literally banging my head against a wall and a door at various times out of frustration.

Why am I telling you all this?  I’m trying to give some hint as to how distressed I am.  I think maybe my sardonic, sarcastic, jokey style makes people think I’m not being serious about some things about which I am, in fact, deadly serious.  It’s my own fault, obviously‒my own need, you might say‒so I’m trying, in my own weird, absurd, idiotic way, to be more effective in my metaphorical screaming.

Because one thing that’s clear from my own point of view, anyway, is that I am spiraling closer and closer to the pitch-black event horizon, and my orbit is getting faster and is more chaotic, and I’m starting to be torn apart, and will soon “spaghettify” if I can’t break out of this gravity well.  But, as is the case with real black holes in general relativity, “distant” observers can’t see the local happenings well or at all, as my apparent time slows and my radiated light is redshifted out of existence.  I don’t know if that’s ironic or appropriate or what.

Today is payroll day, which is always extra stressful.  I guess we’ll see if the lack of antidepressant makes a difference, for better or for worse.

I honestly half expect each blog post to be my last‒the final photon that’s just barely able to clear the gravity well and get out into the universe, perhaps to be detected by someone who might recognize it for what it is…but probably not.  It’s a big cosmos, and it’s mostly empty and getting bigger and emptier by the instant.  But I continue to remain, against all possible use or benefit to anyone, least of all to me.

I’m an idiot.  I ought to give up and go.  It’s not worth the effort to resist gravity.  But it’s also so hard to fight the dumbass biological drives and the moronic, faint delusion of potential hope that somehow, something or someone might rescue me.

With any luck, something will take it all out of my hands.  I try to arrange such things when I can.  I guess I haven’t tried hard enough yet, but if I keep trying, sooner or later something will nudge me over the horizon.  Or, less likely, something will pull me away from it.

Whatever.  Who the fuck cares?

*I was overwhelmed at baseline anyway.  I had earplugs in my ears and wore tinted reading glasses even indoors to try to blunt all the sensory input, but it didn’t make much difference.

**I scratch until I bleed and scab, and unfortunately, topical stuff doesn’t seem to be helping the itch, even stuff with lidocaine in it.