Pain

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“Everything is…broken”

Hi, everybody.

(Hi, Dr. Nick!)

I am writing this blog post on my mini laptop computer this morning, because I’ve been getting sick and tired of writing on the “smartphone”.  I’m also getting sick of writing blog posts to some degree, so it’s best to make it relatively easy on myself when I can, and when I have the gumption, or the will, or the “spoons”, whatever you want to call it.

We have some new people at the office this week, so depending on how many of them would be able to show up, I may be working tomorrow.  If I do, I suppose I’ll probably write a blog post tomorrow morning.  So, I guess you’ll all know whether or not I’m working based on whether or not there’s a blog post.

Of course, if I don’t work tomorrow, there will be no blog post (or at least it’s very unlikely).  And, definitely, if I die (or become gravely or catastrophically ill or injured) before tomorrow, there will of course be no blog post.

As for everything else, well—to a good first approximation, everything else sucks.  Although the universe as a whole may actually be doing the opposite of sucking, since the cosmologic constant, or Dark Energy, or whatever, appears to be leading to the universe’s accelerated expansion.  But metaphorically, at least, the universe could still suck even while it expands (you could even say it blows).

None of my problems are resolving, nor are any improving, to be honest.  I can’t even accept telephone calls from people I know, nor can I seem to find the energy to play any music, nor to write any fiction.  I am more or less all out of “spoons”*, or nearly so.  And I don’t seem to be getting as many of them replaced when I do get them.  It’s as though my subscription has been downgraded.

That’s all metaphorical, of course.  When I say spoons, I’m referring to all members of the dairy professions.

(That was a Life of Brian reference.)

I’m sorry that I keep pausing while writing; I hope it’s not too boring for you while I do (ha ha).  I’m having some difficulty concentrating.  This is at least partly because my left eyelashes seem to be getting tangled and poking at parts of my eyelids in the wrong way, and I have not yet been able to locate and remove the offending lash(es).  This used to happen only to my right eye, but apparently things are changing themselves up—equal opportunity offenses, I guess.  Sometimes I feel like I want just to pull my whole eyelid off, it’s so irritating; it’s hard to ignore something that’s basically poking you in the eye.

My back and legs are already flaring this morning well above their baseline, and I feel like I got even worse sleep than usual.  I’m not as overtly angry as I was yesterday, not because the causes are any different, but because I’m just steadily more exhausted all the time.  I don’t have the energy to do anything much.  I can barely conjure the will to do this.

And, of course, my depression and my ASD and the related anxiety and all that continue to make life uncomfortable at all moments, and there are very few things that make up for it.  Even food is losing its taste.  Where is Lestat to turn me into a vampire?

Well, I know that isn’t going to happen because that doesn’t actually happen.  It’s called reality.  Google it.

Well, this post is going nowhere, isn’t it?  I guess in that, it’s like everything else, including the universe itself (as far as we can tell).  It’s some measure of how far I’ve sunk that the first draft of this little tidbit of a blog post has taken me over an hour to write, and again, this is on my mini laptop computer.  Given that I can generally type far faster than I can speak, that should give some indication of the degree of my dysfunction.

That’s it, I’m done with this for today, I’m out of here.  I unfortunately did not die yet this morning, so here we go again with the blog post.  Couldn’t I at least be hospitalized?  Heavy sigh.  I guess I’ll finish with a quote from a great artist who took what was probably the sensible course: “Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

*All Out of Spoons was the original title for the old Air Supply song All Out of Love, but they decided that wasn’t catchy enough**.

**That’s a lie, of course.  At least, it is as far as I know.

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*Or as title

It’s another Wednesday morning, and I’m not walking to the train again this morning, because my feet blisters are still quite irritated.  It’s so frustrating; why were they okay on Saturday and Sunday but not on Monday?  Did I overdo it?  Or‒as I suspect‒did my socks influence things?

I wore a different type of sock on Monday than I had on the weekend.  I also wore that preventative ankle brace on my right foot, and that is the foot on which the majority of my blister problems developed.  Is that a coincidence?  Quite possibly, of course.  Don’t let Sherlock and Mycroft tell you otherwise with their apparently clever but illogical and quasi-magical notion that the universe rarely indulges in coincidence.  Except for things that are literally causally related, there is nothing that isn’t coincidence.

Of course, from another point of view, nothing is coincidence.  Everything follows the laws of physics‒or the laws of nature, or however you wish to characterize it‒and can do nothing but what it does when it does it.  That doesn’t mean it has any meaning beyond that, from the human point of view.  For instance, the idea that the universe is “sending you a message” is absurd, unless some specific person, who is of course a part of the universe, literally sends you a message.

I’ve often said that while everything has a cause or causes, many things‒almost everything, as far as I can see‒has nothing that a human would call a reason.  This is the old teleology error that goes at least as far back as Aristotle*.

I had no intention to write about all that today, but often the only way for me to know what I’m going to write at any given time is to start writing.

You might have noticed‒well, I doubt anyone was really paying attention, but now that I’m telling you it’s going to be much easier to catch‒that I have not indented my paragraphs today.  Before, I was trying to see how pleasing it was to indent manually while writing in Google Docs, in case I might decide to try again to write fiction, and to do it on Google Docs.  I’m sorry to say, I’ve felt no urge nor even any real willingness to write fiction.  I’ll probably never write any fiction again.  I’m getting pretty close to the point of not writing anything anymore.

I’m really just exhausted, in more than one sense of the word.  I hurt every fucking day, and have to dose myself with various things to keep it at least under control enough that I can carry out reasonably normal functions (for me, anyway).  I haven’t read for more than about twenty minutes total in the last week or week and a half.  I haven’t played my guitar in weeks, maybe more than a month.  I barely even listen to music**.  In fact, I tried to give my black Strat away, but that wasn’t really workable, and the person to whom I offered it was just confused.

Every little thing feels overwhelming.  The only thing I do in spare time is wander through things like Instagram and Threads, which are already starting to get boring.  Occasionally I will see things that are funny or interesting or frustrating, and sometimes I’ll even make comments that other people find interesting or funny or whatever.  But what’s the point?  I don’t feel a scintilla of any connection there; it’s not even an awkward conversation.  Not that it hasn’t been useful and sometimes enjoyable‒it has.  But I don’t have any friends there.

I also don’t really have any friends anywhere else (except if you count quite old friends, far away, with whom I rarely interact anymore).  I have “work friends” who are really more work acquaintances.  There’s no one with whom I share any time or interests outside of work.  I certainly don’t talk to my neighbors, nor to anyone on the train.

It’s been more than twenty years since I had a day without feeling constant pain (except rare moments of high-medication, which provides its own “fun”) and probably thirty years since I had a good night’s sleep without the use of heavy doses of sleep aids of one kind or another.  I’ve tried to get healthy during this time, don’t get me wrong.  I’m stubborn; I do not give up easily.  That’s probably the only reason I’m still alive, but it has other drawbacks as well.

What I ought to do is give up even trying to be healthy, even trying to get stronger or to thrive or even to survive.  Of course, knowing me, unrestrained self-indulgence in self-destructive practices would probably lead me to become unreasonably healthy and successful.

Nah, that’s not going to happen.  It would make a funny story, but the universe doesn’t seem particularly predisposed to irony, even if humans seem to love it and “find” it even where it is not.

I’m done for today, I think.  I wonder, if I didn’t ever write another blog post, how many people would notice, and then for how long they would keep wondering if I would return and how long it would be before they forgot about me entirely.  I suspect it would be a very short time.

*Anagrams include “a tit loser” and “tater silo”.  Also, see the top of this post.

**And when I do, it’s usually “reaction” videos to songs I know, because watching these feels almost like sharing a beloved song with a friend.

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I have not become comfortably numb

     Well, I misjudged things a bit, and though when I wrote my post yesterday I didn’t realize it, I had developed blisters on my feet from my long walking‒especially the right one, on which I had been wearing a spandex brace (prophylactically*‒I hadn’t yet been having any ankle problems, but wanted to avoid them if possible).  So, today, I am not walking, at least not to the train/work.

     I have realized that topical lidocaine creams, such as the max strength versions of “Icy Hot”, dull the irritation of blisters.  That’s nice to know, in a pinch, though I don’t know if it would dull the pain of a pinch; it seems only to work with superficial pain, not deeper pain.  Curiously, it also seems to dull some of the local signs and effects of inflammation (though Ibuprofen contributed to that).  Don’t worry, I’m not expecting to cover up my pain and forget about it.  That doesn’t seem doable.  I’ve tried.

     If I could slather lidocaine all over my body and thus numb all my pain, believe me, I would do it.  But I always hit a wall beyond which the numbing doesn’t reach.  Heck, I’ve had multiple steroid/lidocaine epidural injections and they didn’t seem to do anything to my pain, even temporarily.

     I should probably study up on the nature of congenital insensitivity to pain, just to see if the metabolic pathways involved in the condition shed any light on the sorts of things that might make a person have their pain sense shut off.  Mind you, given the nature of that disorder**, I suspect that its effects come about through some aberrant development of the nervous system, not by the presence (or absence) of some neurotransmitter.

     If memory serves, the saliva of the vampire bat has significant pain-reducing as well as anticoagulant properties.  I’ve heard all my life about people thinking it would be good to investigate as a source of potential powerful analgesics, but nothing has come of it, as far as I’m aware.  It wouldn’t be all that hard to separate out the molecules in vampire bat saliva and examine them and try to replicate them.  Heck, if you can figure out the bat’s biochemical process for making the molecules, you could develop transgenic bacteria that could produce the substance en masse, like how replacement thyroid hormone is made.

     No, either there were unforeseen difficulties with using the vampire bat’s saliva analgesic, or no one was interested in doing the research (which seems unlikely but is not impossible), or “big pharma” has blocked the research because it would interfere with the sales of opioids and NSAIDs and so on (see picture below for an example of such interference).  I would like to think that’s unlikely; after all, there would be tremendous potential for legitimate profit in a revolutionary new pain treatment.

     Still, if it turned out that anyone in a big drug company or companies did block research into such a potential pain killer, then all the people involved would need to be strapped to tables and have all their joints and other “tender areas”, like genitals and nipples and lips and eyes, injected with some combination of‒for instance‒capsaicin and gympie-gympie leaf extract and fire ant venom, with some uric acid crystals*** thrown in for good measure.  Oh, and also they should be given constant, powerful stimulants so that they cannot escape their pain by losing consciousness.

     That’s if I don’t think of anything even better to do to them.

     Obviously, I take pain treatment seriously.  That should come as no surprise, given my personal, decades-long chronic pain and my own having gone to prison for trying (naively) to treat other people’s pain, only to be thrown under the bus by people who were taking advantage of my naïveté.  I have very little patience for those who would interfere with other people reducing their pain and suffering, or who would make light of the suffering of innocent people.

     Mind you, though I think vindictive thoughts and entertain vindictive fantasies, I would probably (like a moron and a sucker) feel pity even for people who had done such horrible deeds, and I would probably end their lives with minimal pain.

     I would not feel bad about that though.  People who willfully engender greater suffering in others for their own short-term (or long-term) profit, whatever form that might take (unless it is truly and honestly and reasonably something they perceive to be an emergency or an absolute survival need) are more than worthy of being erased from existence.  And while it might be reasonable for those who knew them to miss them, they would not deserve to be mourned.

     Look at me, getting all murderously vindictive about purely imaginary people, when there are so many real people who are thoroughly deserving of such animus.  But, anyway, that’s enough of this weird-ass blog post for today.  I’ll let you go to enjoy something more wholesome.  Please have a good day if you’re able.

*I am pleased to note that my right ankle is in no danger of an unwanted pregnancy.

**And yes, it is a disorder, not just a “difference”, because it significantly reduces the survival and thrival of people who have it.

***Look them up; they’re related to gout.

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“But when the blast of war blows in our ears…”

     It’s Friday, and it may, once again, be a true end of the week for me, though if it’s’n’t*, I’m sure I’ll write a new post tomorrow, barring‒as is always implicit‒the unforeseen.

     I’m in a bad mood this morning, though not in the usual sense.  Of course, I’m often, perhaps even usually, in a mood that others would consider bad; they certainly wouldn’t want it for themselves.  Although, I would never say “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy”, because that’s just not true.

     If someone were indeed my “worst enemy”, then I would wish to visit upon them just about any form of pain and suffering and other synonyms for torment that you can name, and I would be more than capable, psychologically, of delivering that torment personally.

     As a doctor, when I was in practice, there were innumerable times when I had to cause pain to people I was trying to help (e.g., phlebotomy, lumbar punctures, paracentesis, incision and drainage of abscesses, etc.).  I did it without hesitation when it was indicated, though I always strove to keep any pain as minimal as possible.

     Also, I’ve been in places and in situations where violence was always waiting, and you needed to be capable of violence to protect yourself from potential violence from others.

     So, yeah, I would be more than emotionally capable of delivering any suffering I’ve ever known to someone who merited it.

     Of course, in reality, I wouldn’t really waste time delivering torment to someone who was somehow my “worst enemy”.  I’ve learned at least some lessons from fictional and real world situations of that kind:  don’t put your enemies in death traps, don’t gloat over them (while they’re alive), don’t draw things out.  Just delete them, as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Surely that’s the only sensible way to deal with someone who is truly your enemy.  The world will be a much less stressful place for you with any true enemies erased from it.

     Of course, you don’t want to be mistaken about that.  One shouldn’t use force unless it is legitimately necessary, and only against those who merit it‒ideally only against those who initiated or threatened it.  If they call the tune, so to speak, then there can be no legitimate moral complaints about the fact that they need to pay the piper.

     So, yeah, that’s the kind of bad mood I’m in this morning.  I’ve learned of something terrible that happened to someone I (distantly) know and like, at the hands of someone who had apparently been trusted by the person I know, and who was much bigger and stronger.

     I am, of course, in no way involved other than being aware of it, and of course, such acts occur all over the world, every day.  That doesn’t make accepting them any easier, nor does it make me any less angry.  If anything, knowing that one act of violence by a bigger person against a smaller, weaker person is just a tiny sample of a much larger statistic is ever more maddening the longer one contemplates the fact.

     However, the “madness” that can seize one in the event of an injustice, especially a violent one‒and the examples committed by those who are supposed to be in positions of protection and service are particularly common and especially egregious of late‒raises and reinforces the all-important issue of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

     This is why the concept of due process is even more important than the concept of punishment.  The tendency toward the feud, toward vendetta, is very strong in humans, and it can become a self-perpetuating and self-justifying process that leads to terrible injustice and unnecessary suffering.

     That being said, though, anger can be quite motivating, at least if it is anger unmarred by too much self-loathing.  So, though I am in pain this morning, and did not sleep well at all, I have a bit more physical energy than usual, at least for the moment, because when one becomes angry at an injustice, one wants to be able to do something about it, even if it is not within the reach of one’s arm at the moment.

     For instance, it’s much easier to motivate oneself to workout when one thinks of it as getting into shape to be best able to deal with unjust physical violence if it should become necessary.

     I’ve certainly let myself become softer than I ever used to be.  I do still work out nearly every day (with appropriate rest sessions) because when I don’t, my chronic pain becomes worse.  But I’ve left behind the martial arts practice I used to do, and I stopped learning new stuff along those lines quite some time ago.  I’ve also not been watching/reading things that motivated me along those lines in quite a while, but I may want to indulge in them a bit more, now.  If nothing else, they can get me motivated to get in better shape, and that’s almost certainly going to be a benefit.

    If it should ever become necessary and useful to use better conditioning to protect someone from harm, or to take action against those who commit harm against the innocent, well…I suspect it would probably be a better world if more people became more ready, willing, and able to use violence against those who initiate or threaten it.

     There’s always the critical rub of people being prone to bias and mistake, to rush to judgment, and to scapegoat.  Which brings us back to why the rule of law, and due process, is so important.

     But what does one do when those who are supposed to be part of the rule of law and to enforce and to bow to due process choose to betray their oaths and their duties, and do not submit to the rule of law themselves?

     The answer is probably obvious, but feel free to write your guesses in the comments below.

     Have a good day.

*In case it’sn’t clear, I combined the contractions “it’s” for “it is” and the contraction “isn’t” for “is not” into a next-order contraction.

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With purpose to be blogged in an opinion of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit

     Hello and good morning.

     Yes, I am continuing to indent the beginnings of my paragraphs, and it still is not a whim.  I’m not ready to reveal why I’m doing it; that’ll depend on how it works out for me.  But if any readers are interested enough to speculate, I will let you know if you get it right.  It’s not really important or consequential, but neither is anything else from a sufficiently broad perspective.

     I was awakened very early this morning, even for me (I’ve noticed that a lot of the time I do a quick gasp or exclamation when I wake up, as if startled that I still exist or that the world does), by a combination of needing to use the bathroom* and a particularly severe exacerbation of pain, which continues even now.  I have no idea what made this exacerbation happen.  Yesterday, my pain was just at its baseline level, and while that’s not pleasant, it was basically that to which I have become‒out of necessity‒accustomed over the course of more than twenty years.  With adequate, slightly higher than recommended, doses of combined OTC pain medications, I can keep it to the point where I’m reasonably functional.

     Then shit like this happens and I start hoping that they’ll stop the flow of illegal fentanyl by making OTC fentanyl legal.  I’m being unrealistic there, of course; I was on a prescription fentanyl patch for years, and though it did keep my pain suppressed enough for me to function, it never eliminated it, and it had various long-term side effects on hormones and on neuropsychological function, so I stopped it unilaterally.

     Anyway, that’s all boring ancient history.  The bottom line of the point I was making is that I am not likely to be as chipper today as I was yesterday.  Yesterday I even tried to make some intellectually stimulating use of social media by going back and starting to watch/rewatch the videos on Numberphile from the oldest one on.  I got to the second video before I saw that Veritaseum had released his own new video about “the biggest misconception in physics”, discussing Emmy Noether’s theorems on symmetries and conversation laws, showing how, and why, on cosmologic scales, there is no conservation of energy.

     It’s a fascinating video.  Veritaseum always does good work and explains things very well, and of course, the more airtime Emmy Noether gets, the better.  Part of the substance of her story is how she showed where Einstein and Hilbert were missing some things, and it’s not just anyone who could understand let alone correct the insights of those great minds.  Watch that video, if you have any interest in the subject.

     From there I jumped to a guest lecture he (Derek Muller, who created Veritaseum) was giving at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics about AI and education and prior predicted revolutions in education.  I haven’t quite finished this because work and other things interfered and intervened.

     I have to admit that sometimes I think about trying to set this blog up as a subscription-option-available site, or to open a Patreon associated with it, or to start a Substack or something, so that I could try to make a living learning and thinking and writing and discussing and educating about various things**.

     Some people have been able to do it.  I doubt anyone would even be willing to pay tuppence (figuratively speaking) for my stuff, though.

    Anyway, by watching educational videos I was trying to avoid getting caught up in interacting with Threads (and to a lesser extent other social media) because while I’ve certainly had enjoyable interactions there and have found useful services, like the place I got evaluated for ASD, I never really feel like I have or am interacting with friends there.  When I do feel like I’m getting some degree of connection, I suddenly become awkward and feel I’m overstepping or being cringeworthy or just being too weird, which I probably am.

     I should give up on ever having any new actual friends, let alone any kind of relationship or pseudo-family or any such thing.  I just don’t seem to have the knack, though that fact makes me almost unbearably sad.  And, of course, my pain is showing no sign of diminishing, at least none that I can detect.

     If any of you think it could be doable‒in a practical sense, not just in a “physically possible” sense‒for me to make money on my nonfiction writing (or even audio or video), since the fiction writing hasn’t worked out, let me know, please.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep writing this, like this, as this, until either I am able to get my pain under better control or I give up on that possibility.  Also in the meantime, my “social” interactions with almost everyone will continue to be a bit like being in orbit around Mars or Jupiter and trying to make friends back on Earth.  Actually, those interactions could happen with as little as 3 minutes lag time due to the finite speed of light, so maybe Saturn or even Neptune would be a better metaphor.

     TTFN

*This is not a BPH thing; it has been this way all my life.

**I could name it after my short story collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, since it would probably be pretty eclectic.

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I don’t know what to title this post

Hi, y’all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I am a detriment…goo goo ga choob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Try to kill it all away, but I remember everything.”

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer because I wanted to write in a way that felt more natural (to me) than does poking away at the stupid smartphone (oxymoron?) with my sore thumbs.

I’m still on the recovery arc of my respiratory infection; I’m coughing somewhat less, and I’m not really bringing much phlegm up anymore, but the cough is still there and is more than slightly annoying.

I sometimes wonder if I could have some fungal infestation in my lungs that won’t go away on its own*, or even if I could be developing lung cancer or laryngeal cancer.  To be honest, that latter two possibilities aren’t entirely negative.  They feel more wholesome than a fungus, since I really dislike even the smell of mushrooms or mildew, and cancer would be a good, relatively slow death sentence, since I have neither the health insurance nor the inclination to seek any treatment if I were to develop cancer.

This is on my mind rather prominently because, starting last night, rather out of the blue, and for the first time ever, I thought what is truly and literally the most horrible thought that I’ve ever had in my life:  I wished that I would simply forget that I had ever met my ex-wife, and thus that we had ever gotten married and, of course, that we had ever had any children.

I cannot wish never to have actually met her and had children—I would not wish for anything that would imply their nonexistence, even though all such wishes are trivial and powerless.  I just wish I could forget all of it, because it’s all just a source of pain for me now, and it’s indisputably the case that I provide no benefit to my children (let alone my ex-wife) anymore.

I guess it’s a little like that movie The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I’ve never seen** and never intend to see.  Make no mistake, if I could eliminate my memories of my ex-wife and my kids, I don’t think it would solve any problems.  I doubt it would make me any less depressed.  But at least I wouldn’t just keep missing them and thinking about them and about what a failure I am at the things that matter by far the most to me, and how the people I’ve loved most in my life have all left of their own accord sooner or later, because being around me for too long is literally detrimental.

Of course, the fact that I am living in Florida would require some kind of retroactive justification.  Though I could surely confabulate some manner of explanation—I’m nothing if not good at conjuring stories—it would probably nag at me, and I’d try to look into what really happened in all the missing time between when I first met my ex and when I last saw any of my former family in person, about twelve years ago.

When I first got out of prison and went up to visit my parents and sister, my Dad specifically said that I was welcome to stay with them.  He knew that I was writing my books, and my parents both supported the idea of me being an author (they were avid readers).  But at the time, though I was grateful for the offer—I’m not sure I adequately expressed that gratitude, but I felt it—I wanted to come back down to Florida, to live where I live now, because my kids were here and I wanted to be close to them so I could be part of their lives.

Of course, it was they who didn’t really want me to be part of their lives, and indeed, my son didn’t/doesn’t even want to interact with me at all.  So, I’ve been completely wasting my time down here.  Sure, I’ve written stories and wrote and played some music, and I’ve been writing this stupid, pointless, useless, valueless*** blog most days—but all of that, when added to a buck fifty, won’t even buy you the cheapest cup of coffee at Starbuck’s.

I wonder how my writing and stories would have been different if I forgot my family.  I wonder how my life would be different.  Almost certainly, it would be no better; the tendency to fuck everything up is inherent in me, so it probably doesn’t matter what my circumstances are.

I hate my life and I hate myself, and the only person from whom I cannot be separated is myself, the person I hate most in all the universe.  I guess what I really want to have erased is not just my memory of my ex-wife and my children, but me.

Unfortunately, though I do not consider suicide immoral, I do find it difficult, due to powerful biological drives that cannot simply be voluntarily overcome by effort of will, any more than I can choose not to digest food or not to breathe.  Thus, not conscience, but an evolutionarily selected drive, makes a coward of me.

Come on, cancer!  Heck, I’d be willing to embrace the fungus****, I think.  I’ll even settle for just an accident, as long as it doesn’t get innocent people hurt.  This whole continued existence thing was ill-advised from the first, and now I’m just throwing good money after bad, one of the classic logical and behavioral fallacies.  Something needs to be done.

Oh, well.  I hope all of you, at least, have a good day.

*I know, I know, it hasn’t been very long, it’s just that these are the sorts of things that go through my excuse for a mind.

**As far as I can recall, anyway.

***To say nothing of “redundant”.

****”Embrace the fungus” almost sounds like a catchphrase, but I don’t think it’ll ever become popular.

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This is the title, not a deed

It’s Monday morning again, despite popular demand, and here I am again, writing a blog post to start the week (despite lack of more or less any demand).  Welcome!

It’s already stupidly muggy here in south Florida, even though it’s only the last day of the first week (the first seven day stretch, not the first Sunday through Saturday period) of April.  And, of course, the world is stupid overall.

But what else is new?  Individual humans can be quite intelligent (in my experience, often far more so than they would credit themselves to be) but humans in large numbers tend to be dragged down by the lowest common denominators or the weakest links or whatever other metaphor you want to use for the least impressive aspects of human beings, either between or within individuals (or both).

As for anything else, well, I’m steadily getting better from my bronchitis, which is certainly something I prefer to continuing to have it.  I’m also trying some newish shoes (not a new make or model, but a slightly tweaked size) that seems to be better for walking than some of my prior ones.

I haven’t read anything from any books in the last 10 days or so‒more or less since I started getting sick‒and though it’s weird, it may be a useful mental break.  To be honest, I’ve had a hard time getting into any books recently, whether fiction or nonfiction, and maybe I just need to clear my head before starting back into things.

Of course, I could go and do some Brilliant dot org stuff and really bone up on my STEM* knowledge.  I could also work on learning some new languages using Babbel, of which I am a subscriber.  I had thought about learning Russian‒women speaking Russian just sound really…good for some reason, and I thought it might be nice to be able to converse with such women‒but given recent politics and conflicts, it’s slightly awkward to be learning Russian right now.  I’d also love to learn more German, or maybe French, and I could use a bit of refreshing on my Spanish, which is rusty.

Unfortunately, Babbel doesn’t really have any Asian languages, or I’d want to use it to improve my Japanese.  I’m a fan and proponent of learning other languages‒I think doing so helps one understand one’s own native language better and to grasp the structure and nature of languages and of thought itself, or at least the logical conveyance thereof.

More likely and more seriously, I’ve been thinking about doing some more deep learning on, well, deep learning, neural nets, as well as general neuroscience and computer science.  I have some background in many of these areas‒for instance, we had a truly wonderful neuroscience textbook in med school that I really loved‒but I would like to understand more.  I’m also interested in complexity and chaos theory and information theory in general.

Who knows whether any of this will ever come to fruition or if I will ever learn enough for it to matter?  It would be nice to make some contribution to human knowledge in some way, and not just by random pontifications here on a blog that’s read by maybe 30 people on a good day.

This is probably all pie in the sky stuff, anyway.  I don’t know what I’m actually going to do, except that if I’m not able to improve my chronic pain significantly, then all other bets are off.  In the meantime, I almost want to put out an appeal for requests (or a request for appeals) from readers.  It’s the sort of thing people with YouTube channels (and similar) do by getting Patreon accounts, where people pay some nominal amount to be patrons and are supposed to get some form of extra benefits through that, like recommending movies to which to react, or asking “ask me anything” type questions, that sort of thing.

I guess I wouldn’t mind people asking me to write about certain topics or subjects‒it might be better than just shouting into the vacuum, hoping someone notices.  Maybe it would get me more readers.

So , if any of you have any requests about things you want me to discuss‒within reason, of course‒then feel free to mention it in the comments below.  And by below, I mean below here on the website robertelessar.com, not on the website formerly known as Twitter or on Facebook or Bluesky or Threads or whatever.  Maybe if I were doing this as a full time job, I could commit to monitoring such venues thoroughly, but unless there is someone out there who really does want to be my patron, then I can only do this in my spare time‒like now, while I’m commuting to the office.  So please, if you actually want to give me feedback, come here to do it.

Thanks.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good week.

*I recently saw someone recommend the STEM acronym be changed to STEAM in one video from Computerphile, I think‒maybe it was Bill Maher‒because the person was pointing out that we need to have exposure to the “arts” (and humanities in general) if we want people to get exposed to interesting ideas and creativity to apply to their science, technology, engineering, and math stuff.  The argument was well made, and I’m not going to do it justice here, just bringing it up.

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Please eschew sour grapes, or at least don’t chew them…they’re sour.

I don’t really remember what I wrote yesterday; I remember that I was angry, but it wasn’t really about anything solid or sharp, more just a general sense of frustration and despair.  I really felt and feel at a loss, with no sense of meaning or purpose or deep value.

I can’t claim to think that feeling is unreasonable; the world provides plenty of evidence for the pointlessness of all things.  I suspect that most people just try to avoid thinking about it.  They distract themselves with religions and other ideologies and with social interactions, whiling away their time until everything finally breaks down and they die.

Some surely die in a state of bewilderment and fear, never having accepted or even having truly contemplated their own mortality.  Some probably find comfort in the aforementioned religious ideas or just in community.  Having the love of family and friends, especially if such people are with them near the end, must help relieve at least some of the dread and pain as things wind down.

It must be at least some comfort if, when one is dying, one has loved ones nearby, helping to provide reassurance or at least just company.  If one has loved ones who willingly and lovingly attend to them while they are dying, or even just want to be there with them, one must at least be able to think that one has done something right in life.

Anyway, I’m on my way into the office, still rather sick but definitely improving.  I’m coughing, but not as badly, and the goo I’m bringing up is thinning out and looking less like some weird, opaque resin made from peas.  I’m still far from optimal, but then, I only started getting sick about six days ago.  If I’m substantially over it by, say, Friday, well that will have been a decently circumscribed illness, especially considering just how badly I’ve been feeling.

Somewhat ironically, my illness at least distracted me‒temporarily‒from the degree of my back, hip, ankle, and shoulder/arm pains, and those are becoming more prominent again as the illness recedes.  This leads me to wonder to what degree interferons or “tumor necrosis factors” and other aspects of the immune response can have beneficial effects on chronic pain, or if indeed they can do so at all.

It might be interesting to do a retrospective study involving, say, people who were treated with strong doses of interferon (with ribavirin) for Hepatitis C, or even for cancers such as melanomas, and who came out the other end healthy, then to try to learn whether any of them had chronic pain before starting treatment, and how the pain responded to the treatment.  We could compare them to age (and otherwise) matched cohorts who did not receive any such interferon treatments but who had similar amounts of chronic pain and see if their courses differed in a statistically significant way.

Of course, those high-dose interferon treatments for Hep C had their own serious complications and side-effects.  For instance, they could trigger serious depression even in people with no previously known disposition to have mood disorders.  These outcomes were generally worth the risk, if one could thereby eliminate chronic Hepatitis C, which is associated with significant morbidities and pathologies, not the least of which are potential liver cancer and sclerosis.

Still, if I could go through, say, a six week course of such treatment and thereby reduce (or eliminate) my chronic pain, I think it would probably be worth it.  I’m depressed and suicidal anyway.

Of course, we’re a long way from such a study outcome, even if we had unlimited funding and could start the study tomorrow.  Money can help make a lot of things easier to do, but as Kansas pointed out in Dust in the Wind, money has no effect on time*, and some things just take time.

I don’t expect to see such a study done, let alone to be able to benefit from the results, and honestly, I don’t have a high credence that it would show clinically useful effects.  After all, my own pain is not diminished now as I’m getting over my illness; it’s just changing back to baseline.  And, unfortunately, taking a vacation from one pain to another only to come back to the original one is probably not something anyone would really seek out***.

That’s enough for today.  I hope you all have a decent one‒do please try, at least.  Someone should, and it would be nice if most such people were reader-types who like blogs rather than wealthy assholes who don’t give much of a shit about anyone else, though those are the people who seem most likely to have happy days most often.

Not that wealth means someone is undeserving of happiness; that’s a non sequitur, really‒sour grapes projected onto the world by those who resent and envy the wealthy (sometimes with good reason, sometimes without).

Do your best.

*Okay, if you had enough money, all in one place**, you might form a massive enough object that it would measurably slow the local passage of time.  Heck, you could make a “money black hole” if you could get enough of it together and compress it enough, and at the event horizon, time would stop (to an outside observer, anyway).  Of course, according to GR, a black hole is a black hole is a black hole, with only mass, angular momentum, and charge differentiating one from another, so it wouldn’t matter if the black hole was made out of money.  Quantum mechanics demands otherwise, though, and thus we have the famous “black hole information paradox”, which isn’t really a paradox, anymore than is the “Fermi paradox” (When you come to an apparent paradox or contradiction, that’s just an alert, saying “something you’re doing here is incorrect or incomplete.”)

**Even if you’re just storing that money as information, with no bills or coins, there is still energy associated with the information, always.  So enough information about enough money could still have gravitational effects.

***Then again, there is the phenomenon of deliberate self-harm, and I can tell you from experience, it is sometimes a way of diverting oneself from a pre-existing, chronic pain to another pain, one deliberately and personally chosen.  Does that count as a pain vacation?