Pain

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Reflecting on indirect, unconscious drawbacks and their impacts, and other weird thoughts

Well, there’s no lapcom here today, alas.  I just didn’t feel enough drive or urge or energy‒or perhaps impetus‒to bring it with me when I left the office.  Maybe I should say that the magnitude of the vector for taking the lapcom with me was overbalanced by the net vectors that summed up to pushing in the other direction in this (very) high dimensional phase space that is the description of the state of my nervous system and its effects on my activity.

You’ve heard of Hilbert Space*?  Well, you can call this “Robert Space” if you wish.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’m writing this on my smartphone today, and I’m already regretting it a bit.  The arthropathy in my thumbs is complaining rather vociferously (and quite metaphorically) just from the little writing I have so far undertaken.  So, hopefully, I will be able to keep this relatively short today.

That doesn’t always happen.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, sometimes when I get rolling in habitual behavior, I keep barreling through even when I can feel the negative effects already as I do it.

Conversely (or whatever the proper term is), it has occurred to me just in the last day or so**, that my thumb pain may be part of why I haven’t been playing guitar.  It’s not that, when I think of playing it, it occurs to me that my thumbs hurt and so I consciously choose not to do it after weighing the fun versus the pain.  If it were that conscious, I would (clearly) know it already.

But the thumb pain can make the process of playing less pleasant, and that can decrease the emotional reward and reinforcement I get from doing it, and so, in the fullness of time, make me less likely to do it in the future.  It’s sort of a very low-level application of the aversion training from A Clockwork Orange.

If so‒it’s strongly possible, but I cannot swear that it’s really, definitely the case‒that may mean that what I really ought to do to increase my playing is to try to increase the magnitude of that “take the lapcom home” vector.

But, of course, it’s not some axial vector, aligned along only one unit vector, with a cross-product (or outer product, I think, if memory serves) of zero.  And it’s not a fundamental vector, with only itself as its input, either.  It’s a vector that is, itself, the sum of many vector inputs (and heck, maybe some scalars, I don’t know, but I don’t think tensors would apply to this situation), some of which would probably surprise me.

Still, it might be worth a try.  It’s not as though the thumb arthropathy is something I like and want to keep.  So, if I can find ways to counter it, maybe I can see what effect that has on my tendency to play guitar, and thus, finally, on my tendency to sing.

I used to sing a lot, especially when I commuted by car and could play various CDs (but not treasury bonds, ba-dump-bump) and sing along but no one could hear me.

Even when driving my scooter*** to and from work, I had a Bluetooth enabled helmet, linked to my playlist on my phone.  When you sing inside a motorcycle helmet, in traffic, you don’t need to worry about being overheard.

Now I don’t commute that way, and since I have housemates, I don’t often feel comfortable just singing when I’m in my room.  But early morning in the office, when playing guitar, it can be good.  That is, as long as playing guitar is good, which is apparently not the case for now.

Oh, well, I guess I shouldn’t dwell on it.  Everything is futile, everything is imperfect, everything is chaotic, everything is entropic.  And to paraphrase the Stones, I’m neither waiting on a lady nor am I waiting on a friend.  I’m just waiting on the end.

Speaking of the end…

*Maybe you haven’t.  Let me know.

**You wouldn’t think it would take so long for this possibility to occur to me.  I mean, I’m reasonably bright, and the connection is not a distant or particularly occult one.  Unfortunately, you cannot choose to think of something before you have thought of it.  Likewise, you cannot choose not to think of something once you’re thinking it, but you can let such thoughts go and do your best not to identify with them.  Oh, and also, by the way, no one has ever been able to “unsee” anything, ever.  The expression is idiotic.  Also, there’s no hour (or other period of time) in your life that you’re going to get back.  Noting that fact about some specific, unpleasant hour just makes you sound semimoronic.

***I say “scooter” because I guess that’s the official term, but it was a 650 cc Honda Silverwing, so really it was a full-on motorcycle that just had continuously variable transmission.  I’ve always been clumsy with manual transmission vehicles.

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Oversharing again on a day on which to be fried

It’s Friday at last!  I get the impression that a lot of people feel an “at last” feeling when Friday arrives, so I am simulating that response, though it doesn’t really pertain to me this week.  There are only 22 shopping days left until Halloween.  Then the year goes a bit downhill.  I guess everyone can watch and see what happens then, if anything.

I don’t know why, but that last sentence sounds like a sort of hinted threat or worry about the future.  Yet all I really meant, if anything, was just that we can only wait to see what the future holds, though we can make predictions to some degree.  Also, I just like to hear myself talk, as it were.  I’m damned if I know why (and apparently, I’m damned even if I don’t know why).

I’m going to try to keep this a bit short today, despite the preceding statement about hearing myself talk.  Yesterday’s post was too long.  Yet, despite its length, it accomplished nothing that did me any good whatsoever as far as I can tell.  It’s all just me oversharing online, because I have no one with whom I can overshare in person.

And while there is some degree of a chance that such oversharing might be used to harm me by someone in the future, nevertheless, as far as I can tell, there’s almost no chance that it will be used by anyone anywhere ever to help me.  That’s just the way it goes, I guess.  Or maybe it just goes that way for me, because I’m particularly…I don’t know, particularly weird, particularly unpleasant, particularly disgusting, something like that.

Anyway, I believe I’m going to be working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so you can feel justified in expecting that I will write another post tomorrow.  As for today, I already feel exhausted.  I wish that meant that, if I tried, I would be able to sleep, perhaps for quite a long time, but I experience leads me away from expecting that to happen.

I think I’m going to try a more concerted, formal bit of meditating again, at least for a bit.  I have to try to do something.  If it makes me more depressed, as meditation often does, and therefore more actively self-destructive, then let those chips fall where they may…and any other trite figure of speech that might apply here.

I don’t know if I’ll play any guitar or sing today, but I guess I might.  If so, I will probably play many of the same things I did on Tuesday, and about which I spoke on Wednesday.  I might throw in Pigs on the Wing, or One Headlight, or Ashes to Ashes, or even play A Space Oddity again.  I haven’t played that in a long time, probably not since I made the video of me playing it.  It’s weird, but once I’ve made a video of something, I rarely play it personally anymore.

It’s like, “Well, ‘me performing that song’ is out there in the world, so I don’t need to do it anymore”.  It’s strange.  I can’t even recall the chords and stuff from my own original songs since I released them; I would need to relearn them if I were to try to play them again.  It may sound strange, but I don’t think it has anything to do with ego, whether good or bad.  It is more that, whatever force created the pressure to write and then record the song(s) was released by doing them, and the pressure has not reaccumulated.

It’s weird, yeah.  There is more ego involved in my fiction writing, I think‒I want people to read and enjoy my stories and to appreciate me for them‒and maybe that failure is part of why I don’t feel capable of writing fiction anymore.

I don’t know, probably most of my troubles spring from my chronic pain.  I’m quite sure that many, many things would be easier and would go better if I were just able to get the pain under control.

Maybe meditation will help that.  It never has before, but “past performance is no guarantee of future results”, despite the supposed pop culture idiotic “definition of insanity” falsely attributed to Einstein.

Whatever.  Have a good day.

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‘Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a blog-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Well, hello and good morning to you, too.  It’s Thursday, and so I have used a version of my “traditional” Thursday blog post opening, and I will use a traditional Thursday ending.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m glad that at least some people liked my rather atypical* blog post yesterday, in which I basically just described what I had played (and sung) the morning before.  Somewhat ironically, I did not play, nor did I sing, yesterday morning, and I don’t expect that I will do so today.  This is mainly, or at least pivotally, due to my chronic pain.

I don’t tend to talk that much about my chronic pain anymore, or at least not as often as I think I used to talk about it.  I don’t know, maybe I talk about it roughly just as much as I have all along, at least in the time since this stopped being a Thursday-only blog.  Still, it feels to me that I’ve been discussing it less, because I fear it’s not only boring for people but also depressing, and I am depressing enough without talking about pain.

But my chronic pain has not diminished, though it is variable from day to day and moment to moment.  There are times when I feel that something I’m doing is making it improve, but it usually ends up just to have been a normal part of whatever complicated cycle the pain intensity and character undergoes.

There are cyclical and periodic phenomena at nearly all levels of the cosmos, it seems.  Biological processes, which often involve thermostat-style feedback controls, are far from being an exception.  So, chronic pain goes up and down‒in a complex pattern that has differing periods and amplitudes overlapping** each other‒in ways that can be particularly misleading if you’re also trying to reduce it by various means.  Also, the things you try, even if they don’t truly work, can nevertheless affect the periods and amplitudes of one’s pain cycles.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’ve been having a lot of pain over the last several days‒more than average, though I am almost never not in pain.  I have also been eating an unusual number of legal CBD/delta 9 gummies.  They don’t seem to make the pain go away, but they change how I respond to it a bit, decreasing the amount of spasm and disordered walking and posture and tension and grumpiness that I experience, at least a bit.

But they make me groggy, if that’s the right word.  They also make my time sense rather weird, though that’s rather interesting, since it calls attention to the subjectivity of the experience of time*** which I discussed the other day, I think.  They also engender some minor perceptual illusions, especially auditory ones, possibly because of my poor hearing, but that is also rather interesting.

So, they make my pain experience a bit less intense and maddening, and they make it feel less as though one or the other side of my body is being forcibly twisted and contorted as I move, which is often how this shit feels.  At least, they make that sensation less stressful, and they seem to decrease some of the muscle spasms.

They also make my mathematical figuring and other mental processes feel less reliable.  I already have a seemingly deficient sense of being right‒for instance, no matter how often my mental figuring of sales amounts and so on is shown to be correct, I never for a moment feel secure enough about it not to check a few times using the computer.

Even then, I feel somewhat worried and uncomfortable, but sooner or later, I have just to go on to the next thing, because I will never be able to convince myself that I am correct beyond even a reasonable doubt, let alone to mathematical certainty.  It’s like the classic OCD thing where one has to keep going back to the house to check that one hasn’t left the stove on even though one empirically knows they have, or things along those lines.

To be clear, the gummies don’t appear to affect the quality of my mental work‒as far as I can tell, I can do mental figuring and other, similar processes as quickly and as accurately with it as without it.  But it makes me feel less sure, if anything, than without it, though I guess it also makes me slightly less anxious about being wrong.

It also takes away some of my mental focus, and also generally makes me feel a bit less motivated.  Perhaps, if I were able fully to embrace that lack of motivation, I might eventually come out the other side of the phenomenon and have a new, purer kind of motivation, one not born of constant tension and anxiety (and even some paranoia).  But I don’t know how to accomplish that, and even if I did, my credence in the possibility of it working is not nearly high enough to make me willing to try it.

Anyway, so, these are some of my thoughts on why I didn’t play or sing yesterday, and why I almost certainly won’t play or sing today.  It’s also part of why I don’t write fiction or draw or paint, and also part of why I don’t finish teaching myself professional level general relativity and quantum mechanics.  Yes, my interests tend to go all over the place and get in each other’s way even when I am at my best.  But even I know that I could accomplish so much more, so many more interesting things, if I were not in significant pain every fucking day.

So, yeah.  I’m out of it more than usual, which I don’t like, since mental acuity is my primary strength, and the thing I like most about myself.  That may not be a high bar to clear, but still, it’s what I have.  And I’m enervated and discouraged, and I’m tired of bothering to do anything, but I can’t seem to convince myself that, no, the stove is not still on, it doesn’t need to keep being checked.

What a pain.

TTFN

*I’m not sure if there really is a typical blog post type for me, so maybe “atypical” isn’t a very useful adjective here.

**Fourier (I think he was the one) famously showed how any kind of waveform can be produced by the superposition of sine waves of various periods and amplitudes, and this insight has tremendous impact on the nature of quantum mechanics and its particular types of superpositions.  It’s also the deeper explanation of the Uncertainty Principle.

***This has no effect on actual time itself, of course, at least based on all the best information we have about such things.  It’s just a perfectly understandable product of the nature of a biological computer’s (multiple) means of keeping track of time and reporting on that process to the rest of that biological computer (i.e., the brain).  It’s simply not true that experience is reality.  One’s experience is part of reality, of course, and need not be treated dismissively, but while toilets are necessary in any office skyscraper, it would be absurd to say “toilets are skyscrapers”.  Unless, of course, one built a toilet 50 stories tall.  Even then, that’s just one edifice.  So one could say, “that toilet is a skyscraper” legitimately, but that doesn’t make it any more sensible to speak categorically about toilets being skyscrapers.

This is not about buildings and plumbing.

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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“Now far ahead the road has gone…”

First and most importantly for today, I want to say, “Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.”  So, I will say it:  Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.

Yes, though the movies were inexcusably unclear about the fact, Bilbo and Frodo were both born on September 22nd (Shire reckoning).  Mind you, they were born 78 years apart (Bilbo first, in case that was not obvious).  So the big party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring was a joint celebration of Bilbo’s 111th birthday and Frodo’s 33rd birthday (the year in which one officially comes of age in Hobbit culture).

Also, the people inside the tent in the big dinner at the party were chosen to total 144, matching their hosts’ combined age, a number also called (by hobbits and by us) a gross.  Many of the guests were quite miffed when they learned of that system, but as usual, Bilbo DGAF.

So, anyway, yeah, it’s Frodo’s and Bilbo’s birthday.

It’s also the day of the Autumnal Equinox, when the sine curve of daylight versus nighttime crosses the x-axis toward negative territory.  In other words, from now until spring, the nights will be longer than the daylight‒in the northern hemisphere, anyway.  In the southern hemisphere it is the opposite.

And, of course, it is the first day of Autumn, which is my favorite season and always has been (well, it has been for as long as I can remember, though certainly not longer than I’ve been alive).  It’s the time of most of my favorite holidays and so on (including Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday) and it was the time when school started again (which was a good thing to me).

Unfortunately, in south Florida, most of the physical charms of Autumn are almost completely effaced.  And the charms of south Florida have long since been almost completely blunted for me.  Unfortunately, I really don’t have anywhere else to go, at least not anyplace I could go in good conscience.

It would be nice to spend at least one more Autumn-Winter-Spring up north, to experience the change of the seasons again, before I die.  I’m not that optimistic about my chances, though.  I don’t see how it’s going to happen.

I often think about just…leaving here, on foot, and walking towards Michigan, just seeing if I can make it all the way back to the house in which I grew up, or if I would die trying.  Either outcome would be acceptable to me.  And I often feel that September 22nd would be an excellent day to start such a trek, since that’s when Frodo left Bag End to begin his own long journey.

Right now, though, I don’t know that I am in good enough shape for such a trip.  Though, of course, the trip would do at least a bit of working me into shape as I went along (or it might completely wreck me).

I think I have said here before that just going off for a very long walk would not be a terrible way to end myself, not least because nobody can intervene to try to stop you or hospitalize you, because you’re not doing anything that’s definitely life-threatening or associated with self harm or self-destruction.  It’s just walking.

That’s much more ambiguous than, say, nooses or blades or gallons of flammable liquids or big bags of rat poison or even bottles of analgesics of various kinds, all of which (and more) I have ready and set to go.  But those all make a mess, at least potentially.

Of course, I’ve also mused‒here as well as elsewhere, I think‒that maybe an ideal thing would be just to swim out into the Atlantic and keep going until it kills me one way or the other.  That way there really is no cleanup required.  Bury my body in Davy Jones’s Locker, you might say.

But swimming out into the ocean is more or less irreducibly frightening, at least to me.  I don’t think I could get past the activation energy required to start that process.  I’m definitely a good enough swimmer, but I’m not a comfortable swimmer, especially not in deep water.

Mind you, I’m also not exactly comfortable with poisoning myself with one or more things, nor with immolating myself, nor with hanging.  Those things are daunting, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise.

Cutting is less intimidating, interestingly enough.  It hurts, of course, but I’m pretty well used to that much of it (a face which can be frustrating in and of itself), and I have various topical lidocaine preparations that would make that process at least slightly easier.

But blood is messy, and I wouldn’t like to have someone need to clean up such a mess on my account.  This is also a problem with jumping from a high hotel balcony, which is another available option.  Maybe if I were ever to get to the point where I just hate everyone so much that I don’t mind inconveniencing anyone, even strangers, I might be willing to do one of those messy things.

Walking is still probably the best thing, though.  One might even see it as a test of a kind, a sorting process:  will one gain new self-respect and maybe even some contemplative insight on a very long walk, or will one die in the process?  Either outcome is not too bad.

Alas, I need to get in somewhat better shape before starting such a quest, and that’s frustrating.  My chronic pain doesn’t help, either, though there are interventions that can help that, at least a little, and it might even improve over the length of a long enough walk.

It would be nice to see the seasons change at a slightly accelerated rate while walking north.  But it may be too late for that this year.

Anyway, if I do such a thing, I’m unlikely to announce it here at the time.  I would likely just leave, and only maybe send intermittent reports as I go along, but with some built in delay such that, by the time people could see how far I had gone, I would have been well past that point.

Ironically, if I were suddenly to do that, I think almost nobody would even realize it.  No one tends to notice when I’m not around, as it were, except perhaps to feel a slight lightening in the air in rooms I used to inhabit.

Whatever.  Happy first day of autumn (in the northern hemisphere).  Happy equinox.  And a most joyous Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.

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You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks

It’s Friday, but I won’t thank God for it this time, because I expect to work tomorrow.  I also am simply disinclined to thank that imaginary sky daddy for much today, nor to say that he/it is great, since today is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, which were just the latest in the atrocities performed in the supposed name of the God of Abraham™ (other deities are available, though they are not really any better).

I’m not going to get into September 11th related stuff, though.  I doubt that I would have anything to say about it that others haven’t said at least as well as I ever could.  If you would like a good discussion by a very good thinker, Sam Harris released a recent, brief podcast about it.  The event both shaped and catalyzed his career as a public thinker.  It shaped a lot of things, and unfortunately, very, very few of them produced anything good or beneficial as a consequence, unlike Sam’s work.

I don’t know what I am going to write, though.  I’m still really wiped out from a very bad pain day yesterday (that pain is far from gone).  Also, I somehow scratched my right eye during the night, and it is quite irritated, so looking at the smartphone as I type is more irksome than usual.

I had at least a passing thought, though, about the notion of owning up to when we’re making immoral (but best available) choices rather than justifying to ourselves why what we are doing is “right”, which can sometimes lead to increasingly excessive behaviors driven by a sense (sometimes desperately clasped out of fear of facing the facts) of self-righteousness that can expand into dogmatism.

Dogmatism almost never makes any real sense, and it often leads to terrible, horrible, and reprehensible deeds (9-11 was just one of countless such depravities).

I think it would be better for us, culturally and perhaps individually, if we owned up to it when we violated our own precepts, even‒or especially‒when we do it out of real necessity.  At least it might give us more intellectual and moral humility.

For instance, it says in the founding document of the United States that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights.  In other words, they cannot ever be taken away by some outside power, not morally.

One can argue whether those rights actually exist and whether any such rights exist and so on, but I’m not interested in that discussion right now (though it is a good topic).  But if we assume arguendo that the rights enumerated are real and apply to the USA, then we cannot resist the fact that we violate them frequently‒by law, by custom, by various accidental means.

We imprison people, for instance, often out of necessity (when we do it “legitimately”, anyway, but again, that’s another subject).  If someone is dangerous to others and cannot be cured of whatever makes them dangerous, then we must separate such a person from others to protect their rights.  That doesn’t mean we aren’t violating the first person’s rights; those rights are declared to be unalienable.  But we are trapped in a place of competing rights, and must do our best to balance them.

We should admit that to ourselves.  We should say to ourselves, “Yes, we are violating this person’s rights, and it is not by nature a moral act.  But it is the best act we have available right now, so we will accept and endure the pangs of our consciences and do it, while always trying to find better alternatives.”

It’s that last part on which the crux of my point rests.  When we admit that we are doing something that is not moral, but that is the most moral option we have available, then we leave open‒indeed, we invite and encourage‒the quest for better solutions.  Whereas, when we tell ourselves we’re right to commit such violations, then we effectively raise a barrier against forces that might improve things.

When challenged on the morality of such deeds, if we haven’t already faced their morally turbid status, we unfortunately often get defensive and double down, because it’s too uncomfortable for most people most of the time to face the fact that they might be really wrong about something really consequential.

But dogmatism precludes improvement.  And if you believe that there is no room for improvement in any ideas you have been handed, then, well…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.  You can pay me for it in cash or, better yet, in precious metals and jewelry‒I’m hoping to make a great big heap of gems and jewelry and try to sleep on it.  Maybe it would cure my insomnia; I’ve always suspected that Smaug was onto something.

Anyway, that’s enough.  I don’t think I did justice to that random, walk-in topic, and I may not even have been coherent.  But, it was the best I could do for now, until I can figure out a way to do better.

I hope you have a good day today.  I will write another post tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.

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Painfully to pore upon a blog to seek the light of truth

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you might be able to tell by my traditional, Thursday-associated “Hello and good morning” style opening.  But, of course, if you’re new to this blog‒I wonder if there are any new people reading this blog today‒then you might not know.

But I’ve been writing a Thursday-based blog for at least 10 years, I think, in case anyone wants to go back and check it out.  It then expanded into an “every workday” blog after my last fiction publication, which I think was my collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Though my last novel ended up being Unanimity Book 1 and Unanimity Book 2.

I have written a novella since then (Extra Body) that’s published here, and I’ve made beginnings on Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which are also available here as far as they’ve gone.

But for the most part, I’ve just been doing this blog.  I initially imagined it to be a kind of promotional entity, intended to help people hear about my books.  As far as I can tell, it utterly failed at that purpose, but whataya gonna do?

Then I decided to try to turn the blog into a sort of mental health thing (for me, not for my readers‒it cannot be good for my readers’ mental health), a kind of talk therapy, to try to help with my ongoing dysthymia and depression.

Well, it’s difficult to assess an intervention’s effectiveness without being able to know how things would be without that intervention, but if this is me with a successful method of intervention, I shudder to imagine what I would be like without it.  Possibly, I would be dead, but that’s really not such a bad thought, to be fair.

I’ve had a few very bad days of pain lately, which is not unusual, but it is frustrating.  For a few days before this, my pain abated a bit, to just a sort of low, background thing, and when that happens, I start to feel stupidly optimistic for a time.  Of course, so far, that optimism has been profoundly misplaced, but what do you want from something as stupid as optimism?

The pain really doesn’t help things, though.  It’s been going on for nearly a quarter of a century so far, and that’s too long for my taste (in case you wondered).  In a few years, I will have reached the halfway point, i.e., I will have been in chronic pain for half my life.  From there, the fraction just gets bigger.  Indeed, if I were to live forever, the limit of the fraction of my life in which I’ve been in chronic pain would be 1.

That’s a pretty horrible thought.

So, yeah, that hasn’t helped with my mental health either.  It’s difficult to know what my mental health would have been like without chronic pain; it’s possible it could have been worse.  But there are decent reasons to doubt that to be the likely case.

Insomnia doesn’t help, either.  I will say one thing about Paxil, for all that it wasn’t great for my depression:  it made me enjoy sleeping, even though it didn’t make a big impact on how long I slept.  I have never really enjoyed sleep, either before or since.  I am not one who eagerly anticipates getting into bed and drifting off.

I know there are people who do seem to enjoy it, quite apart from its necessary function.  Not I.  My need to sleep, as with so many other things, is one purely of necessity; I need to rest, if I can.  And I certainly long for the feeling of actually having adequately rested, though I don’t know if I will ever experience that again.

Anyway, I’m tired‒from lack of sleep, from pain, from depression, presumably from ASD, from being alone with only my own miserable and annoying self all the time, from the fact that the world is so stupid and so pointless*, from general social awkwardness, from innumerable things.  And I have no apparent capacity to do anything creative now, which used to be one of my saving graces.  I haven’t even played guitar (or sang) for weeks now, if I recall correctly.  The black Strat just leans against my desk in the office, gathering dust.

Oh, well.  Like I said (or asked), whataya gonna do?  Although, there is always something I can do, but people don’t like it when I talk about that.  It makes them uncomfortable.  It doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable enough to act, but they don’t like it, and it doesn’t seem to do me any good except to make me feel slightly more hopeless, as well as somewhat guilty for bothering other people with my issues.

Anyway, it’s not like I can blame anyone for not wanting to have anything to do with a creature like me.

Enough.  This is idiotic, like so much else in the universe.  I hope you’re all doing well.

TTFN

*But especially the “stupid” part.  Pointlessness is tolerable, and it can even be rather freeing, but everyone and everything is just so idiotic.  I do not exclude myself from that judgement.

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Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…

Ugh.  I don’t feel quite well this morning.  I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy.  I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.

Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.

Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day.  So, that wasn’t very good.  It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.

On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week.  This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.

Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow.  Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course.  It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically.  But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.

And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract.  I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books.  And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.

Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now.  But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.

Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me.  Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday.  I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time.  I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought.  Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.

Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it.  For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do.  At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.

Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard.  It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek:  The Next Generation when he was younger.

I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek.  Before long I loved the new show.  But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting.  I hated the idea.  I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.

I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes.  I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.

And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…

…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.

Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship.  So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.

In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.

Unbelievable:  that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!

I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.  But, of course, I do.  Hey…it’s me after all.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.

I know I do.

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You can’t CURE a headache by banging your head, but you CAN make it all go away…

I am writing this post on my lapcom for the first time in quite a while*, but I couldn’t honestly say why I’m doing it.  I just decided yesterday afternoon that I wanted to bring my lapcom with me when I left the office, and since I have it with me, it would be a minor shame not to use it to write today’s post.  As far as I can tell, there’s nothing more to it than that.  I certainly don’t care much anymore.

I continued to feel pretty rotten all day yesterday, and I became quite stressed out and frustrated, even snapping at a coworker with whom I normally get along very well—actually, it was somewhat more than “snapping”, and it was not justified—before repeatedly banging my head on my desk.

This, of course, did not help my residual migraine discomfort, which was partly responsible for my horrible mood.

It also hurt my neck.  I wasn’t surprised by this fact, though, since I’ve done this before, alas.  Indeed, I can tell you this tiny bit of potentially useful information:  banging one’s head on one’s desk is uncomfortable and somewhat injurious (I’ve been known to raise visible lumps on my forehead in addition to causing neck pain), while banging your head on a sheetrock wall is not as bad.  However, banging your head on a concrete wall is quite unpleasant.

And I really don’t recommend hitting your head on the top of a door (or “hatch”) in an aircraft carrier, but that was purely accidental, born of overenthusiasm**.  I’ll just add, for emphasis, that an aircraft carrier does not notice that you hit it; it does not give in any measurable way***, only your head and body do.

By the way, head-butting a human is comparatively laughable.  But mind their teeth; you can get cuts from them that are prone to bad infections because of the nasty bacteria that often live in the human mouth.

Anyway, all this nonsense is just to emphasize that I am not doing well.  I feel physically quite uncomfortable, from my head to my tail as it were, and down into my legs, too.  And my mood is worse than the rest of me****.

Some of this may be related to the weather.  The heat and humidity down here are utterly oppressive, and they make it all but impossible to exercise outdoors (such as by walking) unless one is committed to possibly dying or becoming quite ill in the process.  I am not entirely averse to dying in that process, and I contemplate trying to walk from the office to the house almost every day.  But I’m not committed to it yet, so it’ll have to wait.  It would be just too pathetic to start it and not carry through.

It’s also been very sunny lately, which just adds sunburn (which I have from Sunday) to the mix, but that doesn’t bother me as much; for unclear reasons, I don’t get as uncomfortable from sunburns as most people seem to get.  This is probably not a good thing, especially when you have an inherent fish-belly complexion like I have.  It might also have contributed to my migraine.

I’m coming to hate nearly everything about Florida.  Of course, it’s the state where my youngest was born (and where my kids still live), so it will always have that going for it, and that’s hard to overpower.  But even my kids unfortunately didn’t have the greatest scholastic experiences in Florida—which is no surprise, since Florida is known to have subpar educational system overall (though it has definite bright spots at the university level).  Just look at who our governors have been and are, let alone our legislators.  If Tallahassee were wiped off the map by an asteroid impact, the average IQ of the state would rise by 10 points, at least.

The trouble is, it’s entirely possible that I would hate things wherever I happened to be, because really, it’s myself I hate.  And yes, I know about the self being nonpermanent and really an illusion and not a consistent thing from moment to moment let alone from day to day or from one part of the brain to another.  That’s true but trivial, and it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself, whatever you want to call my self.

And while the self does change from moment to moment, it still has way more in common with its past and future states than it has with, say, the state of a different person, or with a dog or cat, or with a slug or with a tree or with a fucking rock.  There is a four-dimensional continuity of structure and identity to what I call my self, as there is with all of you, unless I am greatly mistaken.

Okay, sorry for that little diatribe, if that’s the correct word (“diatribe” I mean, not “sorry”).  I’m just frustrated with and angry at more or less everything.  Which, of course, implies that I am the problem, since I am the common factor in all the things that frustrate me.

Unfortunately, I cannot swap me out for some other person, and I don’t think I would if I could.  I’ve often wanted to be like certain other people in certain aspects, but I’ve never actually wanted to be another person.  In fact, I think the very concept is vacuous; I could explain why that’s so, but it may well be obvious already.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  You should all probably just stop bothering with me, to be honest.  I am only going to bore you at best and more likely cause you pain of one kind or another.  It’s what I do.  I’m not a good person by nature, though I try to act as if I am when I have the energy to do so.  But my energy is lagging and seeming to get worse all the time.

Honestly, I wish I could just sleep until I feel truly rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  Of course, the universe is not set up in such a way as to make the first thing necessarily achievable, but at least I know I can achieve the second.  It just takes commitment—or time, I suppose.

All right, that’s enough of that.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, of course, this is the only time I have ever written this post, and it is the only time that I will write this post.  I apologize for the somewhat misleading language, but I suspect you know what meant.

**I’m not likely to experience that again.

***Yes, yes, physics shows that it does indeed movie a little.  I suppose I could do some math to try to figure out just how much, but it won’t be much more impressive than how far the Earth movies in the other direction when you jump straight up in the air.

****Those of you who saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs might recall that “the rest of me” in an anagram for Hester Mofet.

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Migraines, after-effects, lesser evils, and greater goods

I’m a bit wiped out this morning, so I may only write briefly.  For those of you who may not know it, I developed a migraine headache yesterday.  It started with the surprisingly rapid onset of a “classic” migraine aura, which is to say a deficit in one’s visual field, marked by apparent, weirdly twinkling, almost rainbow-like lights.  It is not as lovely to see as one might suspect if one has not had it.  This first time it happened to me, way back in my early teens (while I was caddying), I worried maybe my retina had become detached.  Weirdly, this concern did not lead me to panic, nor to seek help, nor even to stop in the middle of that golf round‒work is work, after all.

The classic migraine, which is what this migraine with twinkling lights is called, seems to begin with a rapid, spreading depolarization of cells in the brain cortex, particularly (in this case) in the occipital lobe (thus the visual aura, because that is the region of the vision centers of the brain).  It spreads from there, and as part of its spread it seems to lead to vascular swelling and pressure in the meninges, which causes some of the pain.

The science has probably improved since the last time I studied it, so some of this description may be inaccurate.

In any case, as soon as I realized what was happening, I took steps to head things off.  Although I had taken a naproxen that morning, I popped three ibuprofen right away.  After a few minutes, as the aura progressed, I added two acetaminophen (extra strength) as well.  This was probably not ideal for my body‒kidneys, liver, and to a lesser extent, stomach come to mind‒but I didn’t really hesitate, because I have experience with migraines, and not just with treating them.  I also made sure to drink lots of water.

Anyway, I did get some dull pain (as well as just dull dullness) centering loosely on the left side of my head, but the Motrin™ and Tylenol® seemed to have done their work well, since I took them so quickly.  I did have pain, but it was not nearly as severe as it usually is, though I took one more ibuprofen a bit later when it seemed to be increasing.

With migraines, though, the pain is more an effect than a primary part of the process.  In a way‒and only in a way‒a migraine is a bit like a slow-moving seizure.  As such, it tends to cause quite a lot of fatigue in one’s central nervous system, and I certainly felt that yesterday and continue to feel the after-effects today.  For instance, I am making many more typos than I usually make right now.

I do seem to have slept slightly more than usual last night.  Tiring one’s nervous system by internally, directly causing the hyperactive discharge of whole populations of neurons seems to lead to slightly deeper sleep, no doubt because for the nervous system, it is something of an emergency and it must be cleaned up.  Trust me when I say, while the slightly longer sleep is nice as far as it goes, it is not worth it.

Even though I was able to prevent the worst of my migraine pain, the other effects were still quite palpable and unpleasant, and their after-effects remain.  They aren’t good.

This is not to say there aren’t many, many worse things in the world, and certainly when one has only two choices, one should choose the least bad of the two.  For instance, I would choose many migraines over a kidney stone.  The lesser of two evils is, mathematically, the greater of two goods.

If this fact is confusing‒I don’t know why it should be, but apparently it is, and that confusion has been consequential on large scales‒think of the old grade-school level number line, centered at zero.  If you have two negative numbers, such as negative two and negative twelve, you can certainly say that they are both negative.  But that’s a function of where you put the origin (where the zero is), which you can shift and put anywhere else, given the infinity of the number line and its inherent symmetry.

But even if you move the origin 100 places to the left, so that you now have 98 and 88 instead of -2 and -12, the distance between the two numbers, and their mutual relationship based on that, is unchanged.  One of the numbers is still less negative than the other.  And if that number measures the usefulness or the desirability of something, and if one has only the two choices, then one should pick the less negative one, which is by mathematical definition the more positive one.

A billion is less negative than a million.  And negative a million is less negative than negative a billion.

I’m not sure how I got from migraines to here, but that’s okay.  I’m sure it will make at least some sense during the edit.

Anyway, I hope that my mental fog will clear a bit today.  It would be nice to be able to sleep better without requiring general neurological, pathological exhaustion.  But then again, many things would be nice that are simply not so.  By which I mean they aren’t real, that they don’t exist, that they aren’t the case, not “many things would be nice that are simply not nice”, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

If wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in horse shit.  And then we’d probably wish for it to go away, which would just produce more horse shit.  Alas.

I hope you all have a good day.

[PS:  I tried to do a brief audio recording on the way to the office from the train, while walking, because a thought had occurred to me and an occurrence had gotten me thinking, and I also wanted to “experiment” to see how well I’d be able to compensate for the noise of traffic and (to a lesser extent) wind.  It was unfortunately something of a disaster, and to correct it all would have required many hours of audio manipulation that may be beyond my skill.  So I just deleted it.  But I thought I would at least mention it.]