Pain

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No April foolishness in this post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know.  I am at a loss.

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

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“Don’t you know you’re gonna…”

It’s Friday morning, at last.  I don’t know whether or not I’ll be working tomorrow, but either way, I’m glad the main week is done.  I feel as though these five days have lasted for months.

My pain seems to be creeping back toward its baseline level, which still sucks, but it’s way better than it has been earlier this week.  I hope it doesn’t just bounce back up once I’ve become relieved (relatively).  That would really bite.

I’ve been trying to exercise carefully and consistently, and that’s at least been okay.  I’m also always trying to adjust my shoes and socks from day to day, just to see if they make any difference.  Sometimes they seem to do so.  Of course, I’m being quite unscientific about this, changing more than one variable at once (and of course it’s very hard to do blinded studies, let alone double-blinded ones, when one is working on oneself).  There is a fair amount of desperation involved in all of this, which is probably not too surprising when one is trying to relieve or at least diminish pain.

I have had no ideas or inclination regarding any new stories, nor have I even touched a guitar.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time puttering through Threads and occasionally Instagram to distract myself (and sometimes BlueSky and the other one).  I’m following them at least partly out of novelty; they are websites I’ve never really used prior to recent weeks to months, so they haven’t gotten too boring yet.  Also, it was through Threads that I found the place that did my autism assessment, so that’s a real benefit.  But such short-format, chaotic sites discourage (albeit unintentionally) any depth and nuance of discussion.

Of course the Website Formerly Known As Twitter has always been a bit of a cesspool, precisely because it just encourages the equivalent of interaction via sound bite.  And since Musk®, by Elon™  has taken it over, both it and he have gotten worse.  I almost cannot believe that he indulges himself in such illogic and irrationality as he seems to do on the site, and that it has so leaked over into his real life.  Then again, even Ayn Rand, a fierce advocate of reason, fell victim to her own personality cult.

These are examples of the fact that it can be very difficult to maintain one’s clear-headedness without any input from others, and firm input at that.  This is why we have peer review in science (and various incentives to disprove each other in rigorous ways).

No great mind is ever error free, not even the greatest, whoever that might be.  It’s probably not possible for any finite mind to be error free*, and I’m not sure that even an infinite mind, if such an idea makes sense, could be error free.

Of course, none of it really matters in the long run, but in the short run there is much needless suffering in the world that could at least be mitigated if people would just calm down a bit and try to let reason govern them.  Alas, that’s an awful lot to ask of naked house apes.  They are saddled with all the evolutionary history that leads such jumped-up monkeys to hurl their feces at each other more often than to seek mutual understanding.

They also have a regrettable tendency to feel that they are right, that they just know something, and to be aggressively opposed to self-doubt.  That, I suspect, may be the attribute that will lead to the demise of the human race and possibly all other life on this planet.

I know the studies have been inconsistently replicated, but there are some experiments that indicate that people with depression evaluate themselves (and presumably the world) more realistically than those who are not prone to it.  Other people all tend to rate themselves above the median in most things**, whereas depressed people seem inclined to accuracy, not merely to downgrade themselves (at least when not actively depressed).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, self-confidence beyond a certain minimum requirement is inherently suspect.  I don’t trust people who trust themselves too much; they are much more likely to make errors and not to correct them, and then to compound and double down on such errors.  Current US politics is awash with this monkey-work, as is big business, and it can only be sustained for so long before the bubble must burst, and a bursting bubble is a violent event that can cause a great deal of harm.

This dysfunction of thought and communication is not isolated in the political right, though currently their pathologies are more immediately consequential and potentially disastrous.  But the left has its share of unthinking monkeys, too, and they often encourage and trigger the monkeys on the right.

As for me, I don’t consider myself a member of either camp.  I am orthogonal overall to the left-right axis of human politics.

And with that peculiar statement, I’ll bring this post, and hopefully this week, to a close.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a post.  Either way, please try to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Though errors are free in that you don’t have to pay for them in advance‒but they can cost you after the fact.

**It’s possible, in principle, for most people to be above average, when by average you refer to the arithmetic mean, but it is not possible‒by definition‒for the majority of people to be above the median.

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I can’t think of a Shakespeare based title right now

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer instead of on my smartphone, because yesterday when leaving the office, I felt like carrying my laptop computer with me.  That’s it.  There’s no better reason than that.  I was still in a lot of pain, but since trying to be careful with my back wasn’t making any difference, I figured the extra load of a pound or two couldn’t matter much.  It didn’t, as far as I can tell.

I don’t have any subject about which to write at the moment, and that’s beginning to get troubling, though I’m not entirely sure why that should be; certainly, it’s never slowed me down before.  I can always seem to write, the way some people can always seem to talk, and the good thing about writing is that I can go on and on about whatever subject I choose, just indulging myself, and I don’t have to stammer to a stop at some point because I realize that no one nearby has any interest in—and often no idea about—whatever I’m trying to discuss.

For the most part, people try to be patient with me, and for the most part, I try to pay attention to when people are obviously getting bored.  But it’s nice not to have to worry about it.  Anyone who isn’t interested in what I’m writing simply doesn’t have to read.

My pain is slightly less intrusive this morning.  I can move a bit more easily than yesterday without having to stop and hold still for a bit every time as if I’ve been stabbed or something.  It still hurts, but then, it always hurts.

I kept having an idea go through my head yesterday—it’s not a new idea—about possibly trying to write a new story, starting and finishing entirely on my smartphone using Google Docs.  I don’t know whether I would enjoy it or not, or if I would even do it; currently I don’t so much as have a candidate idea for a new story.  And, of course, those of you who have followed this blog for a while will recall that I recently wrote a new novella, called Extra Body, but that after an edit or two I lost interest in it and just published it here.  If you haven’t already, you can read it here.  If you like it, maybe you’ll look into some of my other stories.  Heck, maybe you can share and maybe tell some friends and followers.

Still, the prospect of writing a new story, which ought to be at least a little exciting, is just a dull and even an unpleasant thought to me, because I would expect to put in the effort of writing and then have barely anyone read what I wrote and have to watch it just sit out there, pointless and inert.

So, I don’t know if I’m going to write anything.  I guess I could look through my old story ideas and see if anything jumps out at me.  I haven’t had any new story ideas in a while, or at least, I haven’t written any down that come to me (they still do come).  There doesn’t seem to be much point in doing it.

My coworker is going to be away tomorrow and Monday because it’s his wife’s birthday and they’re going on a short trip, so it’s going to be slightly more stressful than usual at work.

I don’t understand it, really.  Who, as an adult, goes on a trip when they have a birthday?  I don’t recall ever going on a trip for my birthday, to be honest.  I don’t think I would want to do so, but even if I did, I don’t think it would happen.

I don’t have anyone with whom to go on a trip nowadays, or frankly, even with whom to go to see a movie or watch a TV show or whatever.  I’m actually very lonely, but it’s not as though I’m just able to make friends with just anyone and just start hanging out with someone.  The process of meeting someone new and getting used to someone and being comfortable making plans with another person is very difficult and ridiculously anxiety-provoking even to contemplate.

It’s very much a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.  And so, I’m just blah, just a dust mote floating in nothingness.  Unfortunately, it’s not a free-fall kind of nothingness, so there is net gravitational force on me at all times, and that causes my various pains to continue to act up.

I’m sure it’s probably nothing that I don’t deserve.  Goodness knows that I’m hard for other people to get close to, or even to tolerate, since I get so awkward around other people and have such a hard time feeling any common ground.  Also, I’m pretty fucking weird.

Anyway, that’s about it for today.  I don’t think I’ve said anything that’s of any use to anyone, except perhaps as a way to pass a few moments’ time on our mutual path to oblivion—or, as David Mitchell put it, “Whiling away our finite time before the grave.”

He says this at approximate time stamp 10:15 in the linked video.  It’s worth watching; it’s quite funny.

I don’t know if I’ll put a picture here or do a Shakespeare-based title.  I guess you’ll already know the answer long before you read this part of the post, won’t you?  I envy you.  I wish I’d already decided.

I guess beggars can’t be choosers.  And we’re all beggars here, when you get right down to it.  No one was born because they deserved to be born, so to speak; you can’t earn your existence before you exist.  You can’t choose your parents/genes, your place of origin, your time of origin, or your developmental influences.  And if you could choose, the odds of you (or anyone else) choosing wisely seem pretty low.

In the meantime, just…try to have a good day if you can.

TTFN

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“…the only thing that’s real.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m writing this on my smartphone instead of the laptop computer.  There’s no important rationale for this choice, it’s just the way it turned out.  There are causes for everything that happens, but there aren’t necessarily reasons.

I was terribly stressed out yesterday, though arguably nothing too Earth-shattering happened.  Just quite a few unexpected and frustrating but relatively little things occurred that led me to want to hurt myself, and I wanted just to give away my black Strat at the office as well as a very cool piece of hiking equipment that I have that my boss really admires*.  I just wanted to divest myself of everything and go off and, I don’t know, try to swim to Morocco or something**.

I don’t feel much better this morning, but at least it’s been going reasonably “according to plan”.  I’m still in stupid amounts of pain, since right when I woke up.  Nevertheless, I did my morning exercises and got ready for work, though I feel almost as though my upper body and my lower body are hanging by a thread from each other.  Only nerves seem to connect the two sometimes; otherwise it feels as though my upper half is merely balanced atop my lower half, and as I sit, stand, lie down, walk, and so on, it wants to fall off its perch, and that process hurts.

I haven’t actually played guitar in weeks.  I’ve “wanted” to, intellectually.  I even got the red Strat out at the house, putting away the SG, because the Strat is my second favorite***.  However, that hasn’t led to me playing it, though I came close at least once over the weekend.

I of course also haven’t played piano/keyboards, partly because my keyboard is covered with superfluous clothes and other things that just need a place to be.  It’s shameful, I know, but I have little room for storage.

I also haven’t written any fiction or done any drawing, and I don’t even have any modeling clay, though the discussion of my pain made me think of when I used to play with clay every day (hey hey!).  Occasionally, one would get a single hair mixed in with the clay by accident, and then if you were splitting the clay, the two bits would sometimes be held together only by that hair; that’s how my back feels a lot of the time.

When I shift a little, at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, it feels as though my upper and lower halves want to separate, but they’re held together by the collected nerve fibers that carry all that lovely pain and spasm and electrical sensation back and forth to and from my brain.

I won’t say I wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone‒there are quite a few people in the world who merit such pain and much, much more, and yet they live with impunity.  Many of them have been doing their dirty deeds for quite a long time, and even if they were to die violent deaths tomorrow, they would already have gotten away with nearly a lifetime of successful villainy and will suffer no more than most people are near the end of their lives.  Indeed, these people will probably have better, more attentive health care in their final moments than most people who have done no willing harm to anyone.

Lovely universe you’ve got here.  (It wouldn’t) be a shame if something happened to it.

Also, you can’t threaten such people with stupid points like “history will judge you”, because such people don’t tend to give a shit about that kind of thing.  Many of them probably secretly believe themselves to be immortal; they certainly don’t care about what the milling masses think of them after they’re dead.  And any concept they may have of an afterlife is clearly not worrisome to them, or not enough so to deter their foul deeds.

And here I am, feeling like I am slipping very painfully off my lower half even as I write this, despite aspirin and naproxen and Tylenol and heating pads and Icy Hot and Voltaren cream and CBD and Delta-9 gummies and all that.

It’s too much.  If I cannot get this to improve soon, I may move up the deadline of my plan, because I am tired of being not only depressed and anxious and autistic (with all that that entails) but also just in chronic fucking pain every fucking second of every fucking day for more than 20 fucking years!!!  There is no sign of it abating.

Have a good day if you can, and thank you for reading.

*It’s a machete; I don’t know why I’m being coy.  It’s a beautifully designed and made machete, no cheap throw-away crap.  This is the sort of tool one could see being handed down with pride from generation to generation.  I bought it because of the aesthetics; I rarely need a machete for practical purposes.

**I would not succeed.  I am not that good of a swimmer, but even if I were, I don’t think any human or humanoid swimmer ever could swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

***My favorite is my Les Paul (see above), which was also, like my red Strat, made by my former housemate.  That guitar has such a beautiful sound, but it is very heavy.  It’s what I used for all the guitar parts, including the little arpeggios and whatnot, on Like and Share, and also for my cover of Something, with no pedals and only a little delay.  I used the red Strat almost entirely for Schrodinger’s Head and for much of Catechism, including the solos.  I used the black Strat for the solo in the middle of Breaking Me Down.  I have not recorded anything using the SG.  That’s no criticism of it; the timing was just wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“You gave me no warnin’ of what was to be”

“Monday, Monday…so good to me.”  So sang The Mamas and the Papas, though I’ve always thought those lyrics were strange.  I mean, who thinks that way about Monday?  The singer(s) is/are disabused of their fondness for Mondays already by the end of the first verse, at least if I follow its meaning, but I’ve never met anyone, as far as I can remember, who expressed such initial fondness for Monday, the beginning of the school/work week.

Looking back, I myself am probably the person who came closest to feeling that way of all the people I’ve known, back when I was in grade school and high school.  I’ve never had a great relationship with idle time, honestly, and I liked to learn, so Monday was good.  Also, my friends were at school.

I don’t know what to write about today, to be honest.  I’m working on my “project” of course, and taking steps toward its resolution.  I don’t think very much has changed yet, if anything.  I can certainly tell you that, so far, my pain has not diminished.  But I wouldn’t expect it to have disappeared so quickly with minimal (if any) physical alteration.

I’m getting a bit lost about things with which to fill my mental time.  I’m not really reading much anymore, fiction or nonfiction.  I did start rereading Unanimity:  Book I over the last few days.  I’m liking it, as far as it goes, though I appreciate when we leave Charley Banks’s point of view and get into the heads of the various other characters.  Charley is both the initial protagonist and the definite villain of the book, and boy does he do some truly horrible stuff, and it can be disquieting to be in his POV.

I’ve said to others that while of course the villain and title character of The Vagabond does or means to do more terrible things and more willfully so than Charley, the horror in The Vagabond is mainly supernatural style horror.  Charley, on the other hand, does horrific things that humans could, in principle, do to other humans.  In that sense, it’s a quasi-realistic horror story.  It’s not fully realistic, like Solitaire, but superficially nothing flagrantly supernatural happens.

Mind you, though it may carry the trappings of sci-fi horror, the things that happen in Unanimity are, in my mind at least, really not scientifically plausible, so I consider it supernatural horror.  This is in contrast to The Chasm and the Collision, which seems like a fantasy adventure story but which is, if you look closely, a science fiction story.  It’s wildly speculative science fiction, but so is Stranger in a Strange Land.

Anyway, I obviously don’t have much of consequence to cover.  It’s not as though my discussion is going to give anyone any new insights into my books, because no more than a handful of people have ever read (or ever will read) any of my books.  So I’m mostly just spitting in a high wind and seeing where it lands…which won’t matter, because no matter where it lands, it’s almost immediately going to dry out and be nothing.

Whatever.  I apologize for my constant grumpiness.  I am in pretty significant pain already today, but I’m trying* to work on it.  I’m constantly trying‒trying new shoes, new socks, new spandex joint braces, new medicine combinations, new forms of exercise and ways of doing the exercise I already do, avoiding specific foods, all that stuff and more.  I do not just saunter through life shrugging about my pain and my depression and my horrible social anxiety and giving up and not trying to improve.  I don’t give up on tasks very easily, and I try hard to be as rigorous in my attempts as is feasible in one life without the ability to do controlled (let alone blinded) trials.

I’m not optimistic about good outcomes when it comes to my present goal/strategy/plan of either improving my pain or killing myself.  People who say that, after enough torture, someone will beg for death are not lying.  Everyone has their limits, though some people’s limits are awe-inspiring, and death comes to them before they break.  But to have that strength requires some kind of meaning or purpose or at least a social connection.

We’ve all surely seen human interest reports of people who face terminal (or merely deadly) illnesses or accidents or losses but keep upbeat and positive  and either defeat their illness or come to terms with it or die with dignity in an inspiring manner.  Such stories almost always (in my limited sample, anyway) show people who have strong social supports, of friends or families or groups with solidarity and purpose.

You never see shows about the people who are alone and face a terminal or painful illness without even medical insurance or friends or family or other support nearby.  That’s because those people die like they lived‒alone and unnoticed.  Also, one can’t easily sell advertising with an after-school special about the secluded man who dies of complications of cancer and is only found when his rent is overdue or because the neighbors make a complaint about the smell that turns out to be his rotting corpse.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I’m sure you’re all inspired and uplifted by my beautiful words (ha ha).  I hope that you are inspired and uplifted by something, anyway.

It may be a fool’s errand, philosophically, to try even to begin to discern who deserves happiness.  But heck, you might as well try to be happy if you can, as long as you’re not doing it by making other people less happy.  Mutual exchange to mutual benefit is entirely possible, and is responsible for many if not most of the good and pleasant things we have in the world.  The universe may be truly zero sum and zero outcome in the end‒if the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics holds true‒but it can nevertheless have a positive integral, the sum of the area under the curve across time.  It is mathematically possible.

There’s nothing that guarantees it, of course.  It can also have a negative overall integral in principle.  Whether that will be the case or the other will depend, at least locally, on human behavior and choices.

I’m not optimistic.

*Fuck you, Yoda, you’re just wrong about the “trying” thing.  It was your self-important arrogance that contributed more than anyone else’s input, to the decadence of the Jedi that left them vulnerable to the Sith.

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Why would mice and men plan things together? Small wonder such plans go awry.

It’s Friday, as you know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted.  I’m writing this on my smartphone because I didn’t feel like bringing my laptop computer with me when I left the office yesterday, but I’m beginning to regret it slightly.  My thumbs have still not completely recovered from their inflammation.  Perhaps they will never fully recover.  Who knows?  But it’s certainly the case that writing on the computer is much easier and more “natural” for me.

I will be working tomorrow if the office is open, and if so I will probably write a blog post.  For the past two weekends the office has not been open, since we had so few people willing to come in.  But maybe this weekend will be different, though we still have a lot of people out of the office.

As for anything else, well…I haven’t backslid on what to eat so far, in that I am following a path that should be good or at least useful.  I must say, though, there were times yesterday‒there are such times many days‒when I thought that maybe what I ought to do is just lock myself in the house and eat ice cream and cookies in huge quantities until it kills me.

Unfortunately, it takes a very long time to kill oneself that way, I’ll wager.  The body has a very high capacity to store calories before it completely breaks down and falls apart.  Individual mileage will vary, of course, but the mileage is long.  Such a course might be enough to make me stop liking ice cream and/or cookies, but that’s not the specific goal.

Yesterday I was also contemplating, both to myself and with my coworker, what I might be like if I had not had my back injury a little over 20 years ago.  I think I said something like, “You should see what I would be like if I didn’t have chronic pain.  You have no idea.”

I don’t have specific ideas myself either, but I do know that I used to be someone who‒when not suffering from too much chronic depression and apparently autistic burnout‒could do just about anything to which I put my mind.  For instance, I decided to apply to medical school more or less as an afterthought, but I never doubted that I could get in or that I could become a doctor.

It’s not that I was cocky.  Self-confidence of that sort has been something I occasionally pretended to have, but it’s not my natural state.  I just considered medical school an eminently soluble problem and proceeded to solve it.

Medical school does not involve a mentally super-challenging curriculum.  There’s a lot of information to internalize, of course, but none of it involves dealing with any counterintuitive notions.  There are rarely any complex numbers or linear algebra or calculus or differential geometry involved in medicine!  Quantum mechanics essentially never comes into play, except perhaps in describing vaguely how MRIs and PET scans work.

Anyway, things being so stochastic, it’s very difficult to imagine what I or my life would be like if I had never developed my chronic pain and back problem.  I might still be working in Winter Park as a doctor; I might still be married; and I would be much more likely to be with my kids, or at least to be able to see and interact with them.  I would also probably be much less grumpy than I am.  I don’t know how my autism itself would change its presentation.  Maybe I never would have sought out or even considered the diagnosis.

I guess it’s pointless to contemplate these things.  We cannot change the past.  Still, one of the big strengths of the human brain (or a pseudo-human brain) is the ability to contemplate counterfactuals as simulations so one can make decisions based on assessment of potential outcomes, colored by past experience and knowledge, rather than having to do everything trial-and-error, with death weeding out the worst local failures.

Still, all I can see stretching before me if I cannot reduce my pain and try to get better sleep at the least is loneliness (which is what I deserve, I guess) and pain and never-ending fatigue, with intermittent forced distraction.  That’s not worth the risk, especially since, in that scenario, an accidental or medical death would be one of the better outcomes.

Anyway, my resolve hasn’t changed since I discussed it earlier this week.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.  If I work tomorrow, I will probably write another post.  If not, I won’t.

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It seems to me most strange that men should blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, so I’m writing yet another blog post.  I’m also writing this on my miniature laptop computer, though it has seen better days and is getting a little bit laggy.

I don’t have anything in particular about which to write.  Certainly, I have no subject like yesterday’s, though I do wish to make clear that I was not joking in my previous blog post, and I am every bit as resolved today as I was yesterday to carry out my plan.  I’ve already begun, in fact, in the sense that yesterday I was very specific about what I ate.

Of course, I didn’t sleep very well last night, and I feel very, very tired, but what else is new?  I’ve been tired for almost as long as I can remember.  This fact gets tiring in its own right, which seems to be, well, not a contradiction, and certainly not ironic, but a positive (yet not positive, if you see what I mean) feedback loop.  Being tired is exhausting of morale, or poisonous to the will, or however you want to put it.

I think you probably worry too much about such things, though.  You should be like me, a catch as catch can, go with the flow, Hippy Dippy Dan sort of guy.

Ha ha, that’s a joke, of course.  I am not a laid-back person, and I don’t know that I ever have been.  I’m wound so tightly that only dogs and bats can hear me vibrating.  There were at least three times yesterday in the office when I literally jumped at sudden noises*.  It’s not such a surprise, I guess, that I get along well with cats—at least as well as most cats do with each other.

As an aside, since I’m writing this on the laptop computer for the first time in a while, might I say that if any of you have any avenues by which to address the movers and shakers of Microsoft, please tell them to do something about that stupid little icon that relates to their “AI”** which is there because, apparently, most people feel the need to have some electronic pseudo-entity hold their hands while they write something on a frikking word processor.

It’s pathetic and irritating.  If you know a way simply to turn that process off voluntarily, please let me know.  I haven’t looked for how to do it, but if it’s anything like how readily one can change from their new, horrible default font, there may be no readily available avenue.

I don’t need an AI to help me write.  I’ve been writing since before the effing TRS-80 came out.  I correct AI editing suggestions more often than they correct me.

I’m all in favor of spelling and grammar checkers, especially the ones that work after the fact, not while one is still writing (which can be quite distracting and annoying).  After all, pretty much everyone makes some errors in a first draft.  But I don’t need a machine to help create my writing for me, any more than I want one to help me come up with a tune or draw a picture from scratch.

My boss once said of me, when a few of us were discussing such things in passing in the office, “Doc is an AI.”  I guess that’s a compliment, and I took it as such, but if he was only thinking of our current generation of such things, it’s a bit insulting (though he didn’t mean it thus, I’m quite sure).

Anyway, that’s all as may be.  I got the payroll done efficiently yesterday, and honestly, I felt relatively upbeat in the office.  I haven’t yet revealed my plan to anyone there, yet; the time wasn’t really right, and I don’t want people to get distracted.  But there was a certain freedom of mind associated with having come to a decision, and having declared it publicly, that if I cannot in fairly short order get thinner and reduce my pain, I will kill myself.

Perhaps it’s just the sense of having an available escape that made me feel a bit less stressed.  As Radiohead sang in “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Yeah, I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape.  Escape.”  Hitting the bottom can be freeing sometimes, and the availability of an escape can be soothing.

It’s not ideal, of course.  It would be much better if people didn’t ever need to feel that they needed an escape.  But reality was not made for us, and we were not so much made for it as made by it, and quite by accident, as far as I can see.  In a way, if there were a designer that made us for reality, there would be more about which to complain, because that designer clearly fucked up many times.

I am surely one of those fuckups.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  I hope you all have a good day, or at least as good a day as you can.  I’m going to have a usual, typical day for me, probably, which is nothing about which to write home.  And I don’t think I’ll write about it here.

TTFN

*My recording of a sudden versus not-so-sudden noise.

**That looks like the name Al, doesn’t it?  Can you tell the difference without context?

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I have a plan, though I have no dream

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day.  This means that today at the office will be relatively stressful, especially since the largest of the relevant weekly reports didn’t arrive until just before closing time yesterday, so I didn’t get the chance to start to work through it.  Still, that’s okay.  It’s been a weirdly slow week at the office, all things considered (even on Monday, when I wasn’t there), so it won’t be as bad as it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve come to a tentative‒well, not all that tentative, really, but like all rational conclusions it is in principle provisional‒plan or goal set or determination or whatever the most appropriate term might be.

Here it is:

Within a fairly short period of time (I don’t have a specific amount laid aside, but it will certainly be well before my next birthday*) one of three things will have happened.

1)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will help reduce my chronic pain.

2)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will not help reduce my chronic pain.

3)  I will fail to lose a significant amount of weight.

It’s not that I’m horribly overweight, but I am nearly the heaviest I have ever been, and that’s not cool, so to speak.  It certainly isn’t likely to be helping my chronic pain.

Anyway, the upshot of the plan is, if the first thing happens, I will then try to reassess my depression and anxiety and my lifestyle and my ASD and see where to go from there.

If one of the latter two outcomes occurs, I will kill myself.

I’m not sure by what means I will do so, and whether I will make it public or not, or if I will try to make it some kind of statement; I just don’t know.  I try not to box myself in with too many specifics about things I’m going to do, because to do so would limit me; the best means and methods might reveal themselves only in the future.

I think this plan makes good sense.  At the very least, I would like to try to reduce my chronic pain, and though I doubt that all of it would go away with a significant reduction in weight, I expect at least some of it will improve.  Whatever else is the case, if I lose a significant amount of weight and it doesn’t help my pain, well, at least I will have lost weight and will not die as quite the disgusting creature that I currently am.

I intend at least tacitly to inform some of the people at the office of this plan‒at least the people who are smart enough to take it seriously.  That way I can hopefully avoid anyone unwittingly sabotaging my goals by offering me food of various kinds that will get in the way of weight loss; it can be very difficult to resist temptation in any given moment.  And, of course, people who know my intention and who for whatever reason are willing to sabotage it, will be thereby revealed to be my enemies.

Now, enemies are not as troubling a thing for someone who is depressed and suicidal (Oh, what are you going to do to me, keep me alive?) but I do not promise that, if I fail and have just to kill myself, that I will not take the opportunity to take vengeance on those who deserve it.

Of course, I also do not promise that I will take vengeance upon anyone at all.  For the most part, in my life, the opinions, nature, state of being, and other aspects of people I don’t like (or who don’t like me) are not very important.  I suppose that’s one positive aspect of autism spectrum disorder:  no one really lives in my head rent-free, as the saying goes.

People who are literally in my presence impinge upon my consciousness, but I don’t actually ever really even imagine what other people are thinking or doing when I’m not with them**.  As long as they just leave me alone and don’t bother me, I generally don’t tend to hold grudges.  Just because I consider someone my enemy, doesn’t mean I consider myself their enemy.

That may be a subtle distinction, but it’s significant.  If someone is my enemy, it’s something I may need to take into account in my dealings, depending on the situation, but then, so is infectious disease and shower mildew.  It’s not personally significant to me.

But if I declare myself someone else’s enemy, then I will do my best to merit the title “The Enemy” like Sauron and Morgoth, like Doom and Lord Foul (and worse than Voldemort).

Well, I would be worse than the wizard formerly known as Tom Riddle in general, but like him, and less like the others, I would not tend to want to torment my enemies.  There would be no clever deathtraps and torture chambers (physical or psychological) from which one’s targets can potentially escape.  I prefer the style of the Terminator or The Accountant; just wipe the subject from existence as completely and efficiently as possible.

Anyway, that’s a digression.  I wouldn’t do to others what I’m not willing to do to myself, and the only person I’m at all likely to kill is me, which seems fair.  So, that’s the plan:  Try to do something that has at least some chance of reducing my chronic pain, and if I fail, die in short order.

I’m not completely sure which outcome I prefer.

*I’m thinking of setting it at no later than what would have been my next wedding anniversary if I were still married.

**This is probably related to deficits in the so-called theory of mind that are a frequent part of ASD.

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What shall I do now?

I wrote the beginning of a first draft of a post for yesterday (which was Monday, since today is Tuesday) before it became obvious as I was getting ready for work that something in my GI tract, something that I had eaten, was taking its vengeance upon me.

I ended up not going to the office yesterday, and I ended up not even posting the draft, which I considered posting as was*.  However, there was really not much substance to it.  I think I realized as I was writing that it was St. Patrick’s Day, so I mentioned that in passing, but it’s never been a holiday that means much to me, at least not now that I cannot eat my mother’s homemade corned beef and cabbage.

Anyway, that’s a lot of the gist of yesterday’s post, at least if I recall correctly.  Oh, right, I also mentioned that, starting yesterday morning, I am not taking St. John’s Wort anymore.  I gave it well over the 6 week potential time frame for antidepressants at least to start to make a noticeable difference.  Some enterprising reader can‒if you are so inclined‒try to work out based on mentions in my posts roughly how long I’ve been going, but clearly it’s not been making my depression diminish; I think we can all agree about that.

I was also worried, probably unnecessarily, that it might be contributing to the recent apparent worsening of my chronic pain.  I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a bit too soon to tell, and the matter is muddied by my recent GI trouble, which still leaves me feeling a bit bloated and sore this morning.

As for anything else, well, I don’t know.  What else do I have about which to write other than depression and illness and pain and insomnia?  I suppose I could write more about autism spectrum disorder, but I feel that would be a bit presumptuous of me.

Of course, I’ve learned a fair amount about autism in the research that eventually led me to seek a diagnosis, and my medical and scientific background gives me other advantages in understanding.  But I have been someone diagnosed with autism (level 2, not just level 1, so apparently I need significant support**) only for a few weeks now, so I don’t know about what even to talk.  What of the people, places, and events of my life are explained or explicated by the autism diagnosis?  Does it, or will it, help me come to terms with any of it?  I don’t know.

I certainly don’t feel that I can just waltz into any discussions of or by people with autism, or communities of such people, and have anything useful to say.  I also don’t feel that I have found “my people”, though I certainly can “get” at least some of the things they discuss better than I can some of the things that other people discuss.  But I still feel very much like an alien, an outsider, a changeling, a replicant, something that doesn’t belong on this planet‒even when I’m interacting with neurodivergent people.

So, I guess we’ll see what happens with the DCing of the Wort.  I doubt it will really affect my pain, though it may pain my affect*** if my depression worsens even from where it is now thanks to stopping it.  In any case, it really doesn’t matter, because I really don’t matter, so Batman knows what will happen.  If I implode completely, or if I crash and burn, or whatever figure of speech you want to use, there will be no significant loss, not even to me.

I don’t know what else to say.  I’m not doing anything creative or artistic.  I haven’t played guitar (or any other instrument) in weeks now, and I haven’t written fiction, and I haven’t drawn.  I’ve barely read anything other than rereading my own stuff to try to inspire or at least trigger myself.  That hasn’t worked.

So, who knows what will happen?  I certainly don’t.  But in the meanwhile, I hope you have a good day.

*The past tense of “as is”.

**I don’t really have that support, but just because someone needs something to be able to thrive doesn’t mean that thing is available to them.  Reality is heartless.

***Ha ha.