Pain

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My way of life is blogg’d into the sere, the yellow leaf

Hello and good morning.

TTFN

Ha.  Ha.  Sorry about that.  Just, honestly, I don’t really feel much like writing right now.  There are no other twos here today (at least, I’m not going to be talking about them, except to the extent that saying that I’m not talking about them constitutes talking about them).

Actually, wait.  I will make a relatively fun note that includes the number two, since it just occurred to me that today is the fifth:  If you add (or if anyone else adds) the first two prime numbers together, they give you the third one.  2 + 3 = 5.

This is the only place in all the infinite realm of the prime numbers in which you will be able to add two consecutive primes to get the next prime, because all prime numbers except two are odd, and if you add (or anyone else adds) two odd numbers together, you (or they or he or she) will get an even number.  And the only even prime is two.

Actually, it’s worth noting that one can add two primes that are not consecutive to get a third prime.  If one takes any of the first member of a set of twin primes* and adds two (that solitary even prime) to it, one will get the second of the pair of twin primes.  This may be able to be done in an infinite number of cases; it’s thought that there are an infinite number of twin primes, i.e., that there is no largest twin primes set.

However, this has not been proven yet (as far as I know) though work has been done on it and progress has been made.  I won’t get much more into it than this, except to say that apparently a lot of the work has been done by large, decentralized groups of mathematicians (professionals and amateurs) through a site called “polymath”, if my memory is correct.

Now that is an excellent name for a collaborative mathematics website.

Oy, there I go again, talking about trivia about prime numbers and so on.  Maybe it would make sense for me to get into these things if I were truly involved, but I’m a spectator of mathematics (apart from my truly useless invention of the gleeb**, a number which, when multiplied by 0 gives you 1).  So my interest is entirely esoteric and reflected.  I apologize to those of you who find it tiring.  To those of you who like it, I’ll say “You’re welcome”.

You’re welcome.

See, I told you I would say it.  And then I said it.  I guess that’s one point in my favor.

I’m not sure there are any others.  At least, none of them appear to me to be in my favor.  I am all but completely worn out.  I’m running on fumes, or whatever other metaphor one might want to apply that is applicable (since applying inapplicable ones is stupid) and my incessant pain continues to wear me down, adding to my depression, and eroding what little joy I have left.

I really have wanted so often just to hang it up.  I came relatively close yesterday afternoon and considered leaving a “post” that just said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”  The would be the title and the content.

I didn’t do it, of course, which you can tell by looking, if you are so inclined***.  But I came closer than I’ve come before, at least subjectively speaking.  Last week—I think it was—I posted a similar sentence on most of my social media, just the line “I don’t know if I can do all this much longer.”  I’ll embed a screen shot here:

 

So, fair warning is being given, here and elsewhere.  The fire alarm is giving off little warning beeps.  The readout dial is high in the yellow range, perhaps already inching into the red.  Creaking sounds and little wisps of steel and concrete dust are issuing from the support beams of the bridge.  Small tremors and puffs of escaping steam are increasing in frequency near the hitherto dormant volcano.  There’s a red sky in the morning, today****.

But, I appear not to be able to stop yet.  I’m not yet able to escape.  I’m still pushing the stupid boulder up the stupid hill, like the stupid idiot that I am.  I’m even writing this blog post on my lapcom for the first time in two weeks (well, this is the first time at all that I’m writing this blog post, but hopefully you know what I mean), just because I felt mildly nostalgic.

One of these days, though, I’ll be able to end my blog post with just “TT” instead of “TTFN”, and it won’t be over just for now but finally and for good—not just the blog but everything.  And I don’t know if that will be sad or a relief for anyone out there, but I hardly think it will be a tragedy, nor will it be more than little noted, and it will certainly not be long remembered.

But for now, I must needs sign off with the annoyingly non-climactic

TTFN

*Primes that are two apart from each other, such as 29 and 31, or 137 and 139.

**Seriously, I worked out a lot of the algebra that involves it and everything (for instance, it turns out that a gleeb squared is still a gleeb, and 1 over a gleeb equals 0).  I’m sure I discussed it in a previous blog post.  If I can find which one without much trouble, I’ll leave the link here.

***In principle, you can tell by looking even if you are not so inclined, but you simply will not tell because you won’t look.  Should that count, then, as a “can” situation if it’s not physical impossibility but mental disinterest that leads one never to do a thing?  If it simply will not ever happen, can one not just then say that it cannot happen?  Are “cannot” and “shall not” synonymous here, as when Ian McKellen misspoke his most famous line when facing the balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring?

****This may be true somewhere—it probably is, come to think of it—but it’s not true for me, because it’s still fully dark as I write this; the sun is not even lightening the eastern horizon yet.  I’m just being melodramatic.

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どうも ありがとう Mister ロバあと

It’s Wednesday the 4th of February (02-04-2026 in the US).  The best I can currently think of to say about today’s date is that it is composed entirely of even digits‒twos, zeroes, a four, a six‒which is at least uniform in a sense.  But it’s rather boring, too.

Admittedly, most people probably find any such evaluation of dates with respect to numerical patterns boring.  I would apologize, but it’s not as though anyone is forcing anyone else to read my blog.  If someone were doing so (and I wouldn’t necessarily try to stop them), I’d like to think I would have a far larger circulation than I have.

As it is, my circulation is roughly 5 liters.  Ha ha.  That’s a (lame) joke regarding the volume of blood in a typical adult human body.

While I may not feel as though I am a member of the same species as most humans, I recognize that my gross physiology is basically the same, and so my blood volume should be comparable.  My body just doesn’t seem to work quite as well as that of the average person, at least in some senses.  For instance, my chronic pain has continued to attack me with exceptional aggression over the past several days; yesterday was particularly bad, and today is not shaping up well so far.

Not that this is anything new.  I’ve been in chronic pain every day for a quarter of a century now (though I suppose when it had just begun one would not call it “chronic”), if my memory is accurate, which it usually is.  That’s just a bit longer than my youngest has been alive.  It’s not pleasant (though my youngest is), and at least partly in consequence of my chronic pain, neither am I.

I do think that my outlook and my personality would be much better if I did not have pain every day.  I would probably sleep better, as well.  I almost certainly would not have gotten involved in trying to treat other people’s chronic pain in less than ideal circumstances, and so would have avoided at least some catastrophes that happened because of that (apparently misguided) intention.

Still, I’ve been prone to depression since I was in my early teens, well before the onset of my chronic pain, so maybe I’ve always been unpleasant.  And though I didn’t know it, I’ve had ASD all my life (even after the heart-based ASD I had was corrected through open-heart surgery when I was 18).

That’s a weird coincidence of acronyms, isn’t it, those two kinds of ASDs in one person*?  It can be rather confusing when the same acronym signifies two quite different things.  Still, there are only so many 3-letter acronyms available.  The maximum number in English is 26 to the 3rd power, or 17,576.

You might think that ought to be more than enough for there to be no overlap, but of course, acronyms aren’t merely randomly chosen letters.  They need to signify something specific in order for them to be useful, and far more words start with A or S or D, for instances, than start with X or Z or Q.

It’s a bit like dealing with words in general.  In principle, a word of a particular length (let’s use the variable x to signify that length) in English could be any one of 26 to the xth power possibilities.  But English is not a random cipher, and there are many possible orderings of letters than are not “allowed” in English, because they don’t produce any plausible sound.  English is, of course, a written version of a spoken language.  If a word can’t even be pronounced, it’s not much of a word.

One cannot, for instance, have a word that consists of all consonants (certainly none are coming to my** mind).  One could produce strings of consonants that could be sounded out, I suppose; one could for instance pronounce the string “mrndl” pretty readily, I think.  But that’s just generally unwieldy, and in some languages it cannot be done.

In Japanese, for instance, all but one pair of kana representing sounds/syllables (hiragana for native words, katakana for imported words) are of the “consonant-vowel” sound type (e.g., ha, ke, ni, su, to, etc.) or just vowels (e.g., a, i, u, e, o).  Only the “n” syllable stands alone (sometimes pronounced as almost “m” depending on the context) and it occurs only at the ends of words.  Thus, in the game of shiritori***, if a player says a word that ends with “n”, they lose, because the next person cannot possibly begin a subsequent word.

How did I go from discussing the uninteresting digits of today’s date to the game of shiritori?  I suppose I’ll find out when I do my editing.  It is strange, though, even to me.  I can only imagine how bizarre and confusing it must be for others to read my blog posts.  With that in mind, I’ll cease this particular crime against humanity or against logic or reason or whatever for now.  Please accept my apologies, and hopefully you will have a good day.

[P.S. The above headline would be transliterated as “Doumo arigatou, Mister Robaato”, which can be meant as “Thank you very much, Mister Roboto” (as in the Styx song) or as “Thank you very much, Mister Robert.”  Curious, ne?]

*Actually, there is a higher incidence of cardiac ASDs, as well as several other atypia that I have (such as a cavum septum pellucidum) in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD than in the neurotypical population.  Interesting, isn’t it?

**Wait a moment‒the word “my” is superficially composed of two consonants, isn’t it?  Well, in a sense that’s true, but this is one of those cases we were taught about in elementary school in which the letter “y” acts as a vowel.

***(しりとり)  In this game, one person says a word, and the next person has then to say another word that begins with the same syllable with which the previous word ended.  It goes on until one player cannot think of a word that hasn’t already been used or until someone uses a word ending with “n”.

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Who’s hogging all the ground?

It’s Monday, and I think it’s Groundhog* Day in the US, but I may be misremembering that.  It’s never been a holiday to which I’ve paid much attention.  The notion of the groundhog seeing its shadow and that leading to six more weeks of winter is one of those rare superstitions that I don’t think anyone I’ve met actually takes seriously.

I was awake almost the entire night last night.  It’s very frustrating.  On Friday nights (when I don’t work on Saturday) I tend to sedate myself rather thoroughly, though I use only legal, OTC methods.  To a slightly lesser degree, I also do so on Saturday nights, though I have to make sure I get up to do my laundry on Sunday morning.

But then, on Sunday nights‒and to some degree every other weeknight‒I have a terrible time getting to sleep and then staying asleep.  And then my brain becomes ever more frazzled and worn down, even after a relatively restful weekend, at the very beginning of the week, and it rarely improves as the days pass through the weeks.

Of course, my rest isn’t helped by the fact that I’m continuing through a flare-up of my chronic pain.  That’s probably not helped by the unusually cold weather in south Florida; it went down to 33 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday night and about 35 last night.  That’s as chilly as it’s been since I’ve lived down here.  I know, though, that cold weather is not the main culprit behind my pain flare-ups, because they happen at least as often during the middle of the summer, when it is neither cold nor dry.

Also, my chronic pain problem only began after I was living in Florida.  Before coming here, New York City was the warmest place I had lived, but I never developed any chronic pain problems up there.  Of course, I’m older than I used to be, which is what happens when you haven’t died yet.  But that didn’t happen all at once, whereas my chronic pain sort of did‒and not terribly long after I had moved to Florida.  So, the problem is basically internal, a neuromusculoskeletal kind of thingy.  I suppose perhaps changes of pressure might affect it, but temperature doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.

Anyway, sorry, I know that must be tremendously boring.  Believe me, I get quite bored of being in pain, which has been ongoing for more than twenty years, with no days off, not even major holidays.  It gets very, very old.  It certainly contributed to the downfall of the life I had tried to build and to the wreckage in which I now live.  And it’s damnably hard to build anything back up, literally or figuratively, when one is in pain.

So, yeah, a lot of things that stir my ambition‒and ambition has always been a noteworthy part of my character‒get left behind at least partly because I just can’t keep doing things when I’m in pain.  I don’t know if that’s because biology has programmed us not to want to do things that are associated with pain (and most everything in my life is so associated now) or just because dealing with the pain wears out one’s willpower, in a sort of “learned helplessness” situation.  Probably, both aspects are involved, and there are likely to be others as well.

Okay, I know, this is still boring, isn’t it?  Sorry.  I would love to say insightful things or pose interesting questions or make serious comments about various things happening in the world.  But, alas, I am rather overdone.  The more I try to explore what’s happening in my life and mind, the more I have trouble finding much that’s positive.

I am surely an emotional drain on those near me; at the very least, I know that I am unpleasant to be around.  At least I’m not so unkind as to be willing to continue to inflict myself upon others when I know that I am almost always a net negative.

I’m really very worn out, in more than one sense.  And I don’t see much to which to look forward in the world.  Humanity in general is becoming even more disappointing than I expected it to be, which is saying something.  That’s not to say they don’t have their good aspects and individuals, just as I think most of the rest of the “natural world” is no more beautiful or inspiring or beneficent than humans are.

I’m very discouraged.  I suppose the only good thing about my chronic depression is that it would probably need to improve (perhaps due to antidepressants) for me to be able to find the energy to kill myself.  This may seem ironic, even contradictory, but it is a recognized phenomenon.

All right, that’s enough.  It’s time I stopped inflicting myself on all of you, at least for the today.  I hope you all have good days (or a good day overall).  You’ve earned it by reading through my dreck.

*I always thought of it as “Groundhog‘s Day”, but apparently it is not a possessive.

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That was a weird tangent dot com?

Well, it’s Friday, the 30th of January.  We’re almost done with the first month of the year (2026).  Has it been an auspicious month?  Has it been inauspicious?  I suppose the answer to such questions will vary from person to person depending upon how their personal month has gone.  And I suppose that points toward the notion that actual auspices are certainly not any kind of reliable indicator of how the future might go, at least not without great care to separate true patterns from false ones.

On the other hand, it’s not entirely mad to try to draw some potential conclusions about the near future from what’s happening in the present and what has happened in the recent past.  That’s one of the useful skills that’s available to minds that have the capacity to note patterns‒one can try to anticipate the future based on patterns one has noticed over time, and potentially, one can try thereby to avoid outcomes that are undesirable.

Of course, humans do tend to notice patterns that aren’t actually there a lot more than ones that really are there*.  This is usually‒probably‒related to the notion of the differential detriments of different types of errors:  It’s usually more useful to see potential threats that aren’t there than it is not to see potential threats that are there.

I think anyone who stops to think about such things will recognize that the first type of organism will be somewhat more likely to live long enough to reproduce than the second type, though they may be much less comfortable and content in the meantime.  Jumping at shadows can certainly be maladaptive, and too much of it can have a net negative effect on general outcomes, but not jumping at hyenas and lions (for instance) tends to be a very short-lived habit.

This goes back to my frequent talking point that fear, the ability (and it is an ability) to become alarmed and unhappy but energized and driven to fight or flee is going to be present in nearly every lifeform capable of movement over time.  Variations who feel less fear, or none, will not tend to reproduce as much because they are more likely to be killed in any given finite stretch of time, so whatever genetic makeup they have that leads them to lack a fear response, or to be prone to lack it, will not tend to propagate down the generations.

“Genetic makeup”, the term I used in that last sentence (go look, it’s there), made me think of a possible future technology in which people use some CRISPR-style techniques to achieve the effects that hitherto require the use of cosmetics.  They could insert genes into the cells of their cheeks, for instance, to lead them to have more pinkish pigment, or perhaps to make local blood vessels dilate for a nice blushing look, instead of having to use rouge (which is what I think the stuff is called that one applies to make one’s cheeks look pinker).  Or one could generate actual pigments in the cells of one’s upper eyelids, or increase the thickness of one’s eyelashes, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, doing this might entail risks.  Presumably, altering the genes of a given population of cells, even at the local level, could increase the risk of developing cancers, because one cannot perfectly control where genes will insert (at least not so far), and there will always be a chance of mucking up genes that regulate cell division rates.

Once one cell becomes more rapidly reproducing than its companion cells, it will tend to overpower them, in numbers anyway, over time***.  And with rapid and persistently higher rates of reproduction, there come more chances for new mutations to happen.  Those mutations that kill their cells obviously just go away more or less immediately.  Even the ones that revert their cells’ division rates back to “normal” will be quickly locally overwhelmed by the faster growing ones.  But a mutation that encourages even faster division/reproduction will quickly take hold as the dominant cell type, ceteris paribus.

And then, of course, this even more rapidly dividing population of cells will have that many more chances to develop mutations.  And so, down the line, given the billions of cells present in just one’s face, we find the chance for skin cancers to develop, once a cell line becomes so prone to reproduce itself that it cannot be constrained by any local hormonal or immune processes.

That was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  Although, frankly, I could change the title of my blog from “robertelessar.com” to “thatwasaweirdtangent.com” and it would not be inappropriate.

I’ll finish up today with just some basic housekeeping style stuff:

I will probably not work tomorrow, so I will probably not be writing a blog post.  But if I do write one, it will show up here.  I will certainly not be sleeping in the office tonight, but I did sleep here last night.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise, and after work I went to the train station but the train was badly crowded and there were no relatively comfortable seats available, so I gave up and trudged back to the office.

I just felt worn out, and I feared that if I did go back to the house, I might not come to the office today.  And today is payday, of course, and Sunday is the first of a new month, so rent is due (Wouldn’t it be nice if rent was dew?  Maybe not if you lived in the Atacama Desert.  Though a little dew might be very strong currency there, come to think of it, relative to most of the rest of the world). 

Hopefully today will be a better day than yesterday with respect to pain.  So far, at least, it doesn’t feel any worse.  The hard office floor can help a bit sometimes with my back pain.  That makes a certain amount of sense, or at least it may do so.  After all, our ancestral environment did not include mattresses.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, that’s my life.  I mean that seriously.  That’s pretty much all there is to my life:  Getting up and getting to work (while writing a blog post), doing office stuff while dealing with noise and people and tinnitus, not getting long enough breaks because people seem incapable of watching the time, being the last to leave the office, commuting back to the house, trying to get at least a bit of sleep, and then repeating.  There appears to be nothing more than that coming my way until I’m dead.  Which, I think you might be able to understand, becomes more attractive and less frightening as the tedious, exhausted, and painful days go by.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  As for me, I hope at least to be able to sedate myself enough to have a longer-than-usual sleep tonight.  It’s not ideal (pharmacologically induced sleep being generally and significantly less beneficial than natural sleep), but it’s what I have to use.

*Think of the constellations**.

**Won’t someone please think of the constellations!?!?

***It’s like the difference between exponential functions. ab will grow much more rapidly**** when b is 3, for instance, than when b is 2 or 1.5 or 1.1, and so on.

****Stop looking at the negative side of the number line, dammit.  Just stipulate that a is always a positive number.  Or make the function the absolute value of ab, in other words, |ab|.

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Saturday.  Blog post.  Work.  Why am I doing this?

Okay, well, if we must, then let’s go.  I’ll try to write something that’s at least intelligible (which may or may not correlate with being intelligent) so that people won’t feel they’ve completely wasted their time reading my blog today-or hopefully any day that they read my blog, though I cannot guarantee that.

Obviously, as noted, I am working today, though I’m not happy about it.  I’m very tired.  I’m still well within my latest flare-up of my chronic pain, and I was so uncomfortable yesterday that I couldn’t even find any interest in eating comfort food to try to distract me.

The boss actually bought lunch for the office, but I didn’t really want what they were getting.  He offered to get me whatever I wanted, and told me to order from Uber Eats and he would pay me for it.  But nothing, not even ice cream or tacos or burgers or pizza or anything appealed to me.  So I didn’t have lunch.  I had some corn chips in the afternoon, but not very many, and I had a bit of bacon in the evening, because even when you’re not really interested in it, bacon is fairly tasty.

Anyway, this morning is already starting out annoyingly, and that’s not counting the fact that I am getting up to go to work on a Saturday after working Monday through Friday*.  Not that I was asleep.  I woke up more than two hours before I got up, partly because of pain, but also because of just my chronic insomnia/low grade feeling of lack of safety in the jungle at night.

To be clear, though I am living in a subtropical region, I do not actually sleep out in the jungle.  That’s just the feeling I have, that inability to rest and stay asleep, as if I might be attacked at any instant.

I won’t get into the specifics of what is so annoying.  It’s the sort of thing that would annoy pretty much anyone, though it is not life-threatening nor is it life-deranging, in and of itself.  It is, however, one more thing, another little weirdly heavy straw placed on the camel’s back, added to the already all but crippling pile.  Also, there seems to be some kind of fungus or caustic toxin in this pile of straw, because it itches and burns like nobody’s business**.  This is metaphorical, of course, but not far from reality.

Anyway, I don’t feel well.  I’m tired, I’m in pain, I’m exhausted but can’t sleep, and even the things that often tend to give me some degree of joy are not catching my attention.  I feel chaos and decay and dysfunction everywhere, in the world and in myself, and now even in the (paid!) service I use to post my blog.

I feel almost as if I’m sliding along on a zip line over a field of lava far below, and the rope on which I’m hanging is frayed and unraveling.  I can’t tell how long it will last.  Nor can I tell how far it is to my destination.

Maybe there is no destination.  Maybe the zip line just keeps going until the rope finally gives way.  Or maybe, at the far end, you just run out of rope and your zip line rig‒whatever the proper term for it is‒zips off the end, off the top of that final pole, and you go slinging into the lava anyway.

I certainly see nothing that gives me any indication of even any relatively pleasant end to the trip.  It’s just dangling over lava until I eventually fall in, the scent of sulfur and other foul odors rising up to entertain me along the way.  But I’m strapped to the zip line, and to get free prematurely would require unbuckling the harness or cutting the line or perhaps bouncing on it to increase the rate of fraying.  It can be done, but it is intimidating because of the damnable instincts baked into my hardware.

I’m so tired.  And I have no future to which to look forward.  I wish I could just find the courage to take my exit, to unbuckle from or cut the line.  I’m all alone here, anyway, so there’s no one depending on me‒other than the people at the office to a limited degree, I guess.  But one cannot stay alive merely to continue to do a job that one does merely to be able to stay alive.

It’s not as though anyone is anxiously awaiting my next book or my next song, and even the people who read my blog every time I write it are surely not eagerly awaiting it.  No one will be significantly bereft when I’m gone.  They can’t be, because no one is significantly in my presence.  For the most part, with respect to other people, I’m just a concept, a theoretical entity.  I’m not really a person someone could look at and spend time with and potentially touch (let alone help).  I’m an idea‒and not a cool one like the idea of Batman, as discussed in Batman Begins.  Thus, any idea anyone has of me now, they can still have after I die.

Don’t try idly to persuade me that this is not true.  The evidence is strongly against you, so convincing me otherwise is going to be a serious task.

I hope you have a good day, though.

*Oh, and now it turns out the WordPress has changed the way their classic editor works, making it less user-friendly, with a smaller and less clear type-face, so there’s yet another irritating thing, this one involving something with which I deal every single working day.  Perhaps this is a sign that I should just call this blog, and everything else, quits.  I don’t know if I can stand this anymore.  Living in this world is like rolling around naked in a field of nettles and brambles.

**That’s a peculiar expression, isn’t it, “like nobody’s business”?

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“I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.”

I’m going to try to keep this short today, because my energy level is petering out.  Although, ironically, depending upon one’s tendencies as a writer, it can take more effort to be brief than to ramble on*.  Still, my communication urge feels quite low.  I don’t think this will probably be all that long.

For the last several days, I’ve been striving to keep my discussions upbeat, though the topics I’ve chosen haven’t been as naturally uplifting as, say, sunflowers and hummingbirds**.  Still, for me they’ve been pretty positive (unlike the “time” component of the Pythagorean-style formula used to calculate the spacetime interval between two events).

But being positive is something that requires deliberate effort for me.  It’s not as much effort as is required for socializing in person, trying to be expressive, gregarious, and pleasant, but it is close.  And alcohol generally does not make it easier to be positive (in contrast to its helpful effects for socializing).

That’s probably good.  If alcohol were not such a very mixed and often unpleasant bag for me, I would probably be prone to have a problem with it.  As it is, its ill-effects almost always, and very quickly, overshadow its benefits.

I’ve had Valium™ I think twice or three times, all in medical circumstances, in my life, and that was revelatory.  Even though I had taken it for procedures such as wisdom teeth removal and cardiac catheterization (both happened when I was a teenager), its effects made me feel normal for maybe the only times in my life.

Normal is not necessarily better than abnormal, either practically or morally; it would probably be better to be an abnormally good and clever orc than to be a “normal” one.  But to feel at ease in one’s skin is a truly remarkable experience for someone who never has felt that way at any other time.

Maybe feeling at ease is not a good thing.  People don’t tend to accomplish much without at least a little tension and dissatisfaction.  I’ve written about the evolutionary inevitability of fear and pain before.  Well, for highly social mammals like humans, social anxiety can be a similarly inevitable tendency.  It can vary from person to person, of course, with some having it to such a degree that it becomes debilitating and some having too little, though what specifically appears as dysfunctional will depend on the overall circumstances.

Speaking of anxiety and pain, my own chronic pain has been flaring up severely for most of the last 48 hours, though I’m not sure what set it into overdrive.  Even if it’s merely some inherent cyclicity to the syndrome, there is still an underlying cause, or set of causes, as there is always a cause or causes for even the basic cycles in nature.  And if one can understand the causes of something, one has a far better chance to do something about them than if one does not.

There is not always a “why” to things, but there is always a “how” to everything that happens.  Telos (τέλος) is almost always misperceived, in the sense that it is almost always not even there (though there is a human bias to perceive it nearly everywhere, seemingly a byproduct of the human tendency, as social animals, to attempt always to read the intentions of others).  But it seems never to be utterly useless to look for ananke (ἀνάγκη) “force, constraint, necessity”.

I don’t know what I’m even getting at right now.  Probably, I’m not getting at anything, right?  I mean, think about what I just said about “how” versus “why”.  

Whatever.  I’m very tired, and not just physically‒except in the sense that everything that actually exists is physical‒but at a deep mental, one might say a “spiritual”, level.  Reality is too noisy and irritating and distracting and often disgusting.  I need some rest from it all, from everything, and probably even from myself.  If “need” is too extreme a word choice (after all, I can survive without it, so in some sense I do not need it) than I want it, and not just idly.

I crave rest from everything, I’m practically jonesing for it.  My metaphorical stomach is growling and my hands are shaking with hunger for it.  If I saw the prospect of a simple, painless, peaceful rest before me, I would probably drool.

Alas, I have merely the ongoing, ever-shifting flare-up of my always irritating chronic pain.  This doesn’t help my insomnia, of course, nor my depression.

And don’t even talk to me about my tinnitus and hearing difficulties.  No, seriously, don’t talk to me about them; I can’t hear you very well.  Just send me an email or a text or something.

Ha ha.  Okay, I guess I’m almost never grim and disheartened enough not to make stupid jokes.

Anyway, I hope you all have a better time than I’ve been having.  I think I’m going to be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.

*Thus the famous quote, attributed variously to Mark Twain or to Charles Dickens or to Pascal or even to Cicero:  “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

**The reality of which pair is probably more brutal than anything I could say about the irreversibility of time or the nature of stupidity.

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Dysphoria, dat phoria, de udder phoria, to Hell with it, none of it matters

Well, we’ve reached the just-shy-of-two-thirds point in the month of January, and we’re exactly nine months out from the most important day of the year (Ha ha).  How exciting.

It’s still chilly here in south Florida; at least, it’s chilly for south Florida.  I don’t think we’re in any immediate danger of having snow in Miami‒we’re more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit* too warm for that‒but it’s cold if you’ve lived in the subtropical cesspool climate for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s way too long to be in Florida.  Florida is a nice place to visit, but given the overall quality of humans that tend to have influence here‒and we all know one extremely prominent one‒you wouldn’t want to live here.  Or, as a popular local saying goes, “Florida:  come on vacation, leave on probation.”  Even my grandparents on my mother’s side, who had lived in Florida for some years, moved back north for their final years.

I’m not sure what to “talk” about today.  Or, to be my usual unnecessarily strict self regarding such things, I am not sure about what to “talk” today.

Here’s a mildly amusing point:  when I try to construct that last sentence’s last phrase without ending it (not counting the word “today”) in a preposition, or a dangling participle, or whatever the proper term is, the stupid Google Docs word processor tries to suggest that I’m incorrect and recommends the less grammatically correct but more popular way to put things, such as what I wrote in the preceding sentence.  It’s pathetic and disgusting.  Google should be ashamed of themselves, every last one of them, to the point where they commit mass seppuku.

It’s almost as if someone said they wanted to listen to some lovely orchestral music, perhaps something by Rachmaninoff, and the respondent‒perhaps some artificial “intelligence” program‒played “Baby Shark”.

Anyway, so much of nearly everything is so very frustrating in this life.  Nothing is rewarding.  Well, nearly nothing is rewarding, and the few rewarding things are not just few but also very far between.

I see no future for me.  I cannot visualize actually having a remaining life that’s any better than that of a homeless drug addict.

Everything is maddening.  Or maybe it’s just that I am maddened by everything.  It hardly matters which is the more accurate way to put things, since the experience for me is the same:  unhappiness, loneliness, frustration, insomnia, chronic pain, constant tinnitus in both ears, professional and personal disgrace, and who knows how many other things I could list if I had the energy for it.

I don’t think I can do this much more, perhaps not any more.  I’m so frustrated and miserable and stuck.  Supposedly, someone with my level of ASD‒level 2** officially‒needs moderate support, not just “some” support.  I don’t have any.  I am on my own.

That’s not to say I don’t have people who care about me, but they are far away and have their own shit with which to deal.  They certainly don’t need to waste their energy on the added piece of shit that I am.

I don’t know how often I have felt that I really ought to kill myself, that it’s probably the most sensible course of action for me‒socially, biologically, ethically, what have you‒but I have not done so yet.  Each occurrence of such contemplation must carry some certain percentage of risk****, like a more metaphorical version of Russian Roulette (though I literally tried that once).  Eventually, probability suggests that my actual killing of myself would approach a mathematical certainty.

It will never quite reach certainty, of course, even if (when?) I finally kill myself, at least not as a matter of retroactive probability.  Just because someone won the lottery last week doesn’t mean we can retroactively say that their odds of winning were 100%.  One could say such a thing from a certain point of view‒the past being unchangeable and so fixed and deterministic‒but it’s not a useful way to think about probability.

Anyway, enough of this shit for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write a post tomorrow; I mean, it’s always uncertain, but it feels less likely than usual.  If I do, I guess it’ll show up here.

*Let’s see, in centigrade (or Celsius) that’s five ninths as many degrees as in Fahrenheit, so 20 times five is 100, divided by 9 is 11 and one ninth, or 11.1111111…

**Level 2:  Perfume, lingerie, women’s clothing, and jewelry***.  Everybody out of the elevator.

***That stuff would probably actually all be on level 1.  They usually keep things of interest mainly to women on the first floor of department stores, since statistically, those are the things that bring in the most business.

****If you want to call “risk” something that would end my constant dysphoria and also free other people from having to think about me in any other than a sad little, throwaway, “Aw, what a shame” kind of way.

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What do we call a day on which we bread and cook things in hot oil?

It’s Friday.  It’s also pretty cold here in south Florida; it’s about 44 Fahrenheit right now.  We are now just over halfway through the month of January in 2026.  Yesterday we were just under halfway through.

Actually, no, that’s not really correct.  Since January has 31 days, the 16th (today) should be considered the median day.  There were fifteen days before this, and there are 15 days after, and there is this one day in the middle that stands alone.  So, maybe I can reasonably say that we are now rather precisely halfway through January, or at least we will be at noon.

Enough of all the date and number nonsense.  I’m probably the only one here who enjoys or even notices such things.

With respect to anything else, “enjoyment” is an even bigger question.  I did spend a bit of time yesterday watching some of the rather nutty inventors/amateur engineers on YouTube making and testing various odd devices, including some particularly nifty ones, such as various kinds of homemade flame throwers.  I’ve made homemade flame throwers myself, with varying degrees of success, so it’s nice to learn from the successes and failures of these other people.

It’s briefly amusing, but that’s about it.

I didn’t do any more problems on Brilliant dot org yesterday.  I’ll try to do some today.  But so many things distract me and get in the way, and work is not the only issue.

Mainly, I think the issue is that I am mentally exhausted.  Work contributes to that, of course, but not as much as my chronic insomnia, which is no better than ever.  And, of course, there is the dysthymia, which I think is officially designated now as “chronic depression”.  I guess that’s a more straightforward term, and I cannot deny that it is fairly clear, but I like (the word) dysthymia better.  The “dys” part carries the very sharp, ancient-world imprimatur of things going wrong, of shit not working properly, as in dysfunction, dystopia, and so on.

Believe me, there is shit that is not working properly here in this head.

Speaking of working and not working, the office will be open tomorrow, I hear, but I don’t yet know if I’m going to work or not.  That will probably depend on what my coworker(s) are doing.  I guess if I am working I will write a post in the morning.  I don’t think it will be a happy one.

I tell you, that high-rise, fancy balcony room (with king sized bed) in the fancy hotel in downtown [name redacted] near me is looking more and more enticing.  The daily rate is not very expensive, even on the weekend‒especially if you’re not going to have any expenses at all afterwards.  I guess I’ll keep that option in mind and keep checking the rates online for the nonce.

I don’t know why the nonce wants me to keep doing that, but so it seems to desire.  I do a lot of somewhat irrational things for that annoying nonce.

Okay, that’s enough of driving that particular joke into the ground.

I am still having trouble calming my mind without making myself more depressed.  Still, I have to admit, depression (in general) is somewhat preferable to extreme tension and (mainly social) anxiety, especially because, in me, anxiety presents as hostility, sometimes global and even cosmic levels of hostility.  Chronic pain doesn’t help that particular set point, of course.

I’m reminded of two different movie quotes, the first regarding fear and its consequences, from The Phantom Menace, spoken by (the criminally overrated) Yoda:  “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”  I always want to reply to that with, “Yeah…it leads to the suffering of the people who pissed me off.”  But that’s not very constructive.

The other quote comes from the (criminally underrated) movie Dragonslayer, when the old wizard, Ulrich, describes Vermithrax (the dragon) with the words, “When a dragon gets this old it knows nothing but pain, constant pain.  It grows decrepit.  Crippled.  Pitiful.  Spiteful.”

I feel you there, Vermithrax.

Incidentally, I’m not sure I understand the reason for the periodic eating of individual young virgin girls; that doesn’t seem to be nearly enough calories to sustain a giant, flying reptile that breathes fire.  I guess magic must be involved somehow.  And if the energy required for survival comes from some magical field, maybe food is only needed to provide raw materials but not to fuel metabolic activity.

I’m probably overthinking this.

I could use some magic now and then, I can’t deny it.  I don’t mean “magic” such as stage magic, though when I was little I got kind of into that stuff for a while, and I had several different books on how to perform magic tricks.  I mean “real” magic, like Harry Potter or Doctor Strange or what have you.  Of course, if such things existed in reality, they wouldn’t be “magic” except perhaps for nostalgic reasons.  They would be science.

I have long been irritated by the fact that there is no real “science of magic” in the Harry Potter universe.  They have all these classes about doing magic and so on, but as far as I can tell, even someone like Dumbledore (or Hermione) doesn’t get into the fundamentals of magic, the physics of magic, if you will.

But there has to be such a thing, of course.  Clearly the magic there has laws, it’s not just a “make a wish” kind of magic.  There must be a dynamics and kinematics and so on of magic.  But even the things they supposedly investigate in the Department of Mysteries don’t seem to have anything to do with fundamental magical laws.

Again, I’m probably overthinking things.

It’s a problem a lot of the time, and it often gets in my way.  I refer you to my point above that depression is probably better than the anxiety, tension, and hostility that seem to be my other option(s).  Maybe I should just lean into my depression, stop trying to be upbeat in any way, stop cracking jokes or even watching or reading comedy, stop trying to talk myself out of certain feelings, CBT-style, but rather just embrace and embody all my nihilism and pessimism and self (and other) loathing.

I don’t know if I can do it.  Still, it might be worth a try.  It’s hard to see it making things much worse.

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“The numbers don’t decide”

I don’t have any fun numerical trivia to notice about the numbers of the date today, which is Wednesday (1-14-2026), by the way.  It’s not that I’m saying there are no potential fun numerical comparisons or patterns or what have you in the numbers of the date today, just that there aren’t any that stuck out for me, which probably means that there aren’t any which I would think are fun.

Prime numbers and palindromic numbers are probably my favorites of these kinds of things.  But although the primes are considered the “atoms” of the number world by those who study such things specifically—I guess those would be number theorists—there are many situations in which there are no obvious prime numbers.  I suppose the same is true of actual atoms, come to think of it.  When was the last time you encountered a single, naked atom in the wild, so to speak?

Anyway, I’m not really interested in “talking” about that right now.  I’m not really all that interested in much of anything.  I know, I know, this is getting ridiculous, I keep writing one relatively upbeat or at least engaged* post, and then I turn somber and negative on the next one.  Well, rest assured, in case you weren’t already, I feel generally glum and somber during the day even on those days when I write posts in which I’m truly interested, like yesterday’s.  You just have the good fortune not to be around me.

Even among those who are around me, such as the people at work—actually, there’s no “such as”, these are the only people around me except on truly rare occasions—there’s probably not much of a clue as to my glumness.  Apparently, my moods and feelings don’t show on my face, even when I become aware of them consciously, which can tend to be rare (I appear to have a degree of alexithymia).

So, even when I feel that I’m not sure I can make it through the rest of a given day, let alone through any more significant time, no one seems to notice.  There are and have been people at the office who have dealt with drug and alcohol problems, legal issues, erratic life choices, sporadic attendance, stuff like that, and they get at least tacit moral support and even help; there are various resources in the community to assist them that are readily available, and our culture lionizes those who recover from drug problems, even as often as they might backslide.

I just have a dysfunctional brain, or so it seems, and the useful resources to help that (without insurance) are about as prevalent as icicles in Death Valley.  And unless you’ve truly gone down the tubes with those inherent mental health issues, no one gives seems to give you much moral support or encouragement, let alone congratulations, if you’re working on them.

By the way, speaking of drug problems, I was on constant opioids (including the dreaded fentanyl, the patch, in my case) for chronic pain for several years, .  I weaned myself off of them by myself, by my own choice, because I decided they were doing me more harm than good.  This is, of course, different from kicking an actual addiction—very different—but still, I have to try to find something about which I can brag.  Or wait, do I really have to do that?  Probably not.

I’m trying to do things to help myself mentally.  I’ve been reading a new (to me) book that deals with Adlerian psychology and philosophy, for instance.  So far it’s pretty good, but it’s not as insightful or useful (again, so far) as are things like Stoicism and Vipassana and the Tao Te Ching and so on.

I’m also trying to do more with brilliant dot org, which is a truly lovely app that can be used to study various STEM fields.  I did some problems on it in circuits yesterday—I had started that course months ago—but they are so far very basic.  There’s a lot of “drilling” on this app, but when it’s simple stuff it can get a bit tedious.  I guess that might be good.  Doing scales for piano practice is boring but very useful.

I want to get back into the math and science on the site.  I would love to complete every course they offer.  I would love to read every last bit of the textbooks and similar that I have in my mini-library at the office (I’ve added a few things since taking the latest picture).

I would love to learn everything that is learnable, to be honest, but to focus on the scientific before getting to things like literary and other criticism and such like.  As for political “science”, well…I think it’s probably still about at the stage of alchemy right now, and it may never get beyond that.

Unfortunately, my attention span is troublesome.  I get interested in one thing and/or idea and try to immerse myself in it, but then something distracts me soon enough, and some other interest draws me.  I do end up learning about a lot of esoteric subjects that way, though in bits and pieces**.  My ex-wife was always at least mildly annoyed by the number of books I had sitting on my bedside table, most either laid open or with numerous bookmarks.

Still, it would be good to do something until the “end” before moving on to the next thing.  At the very least, it would give me a sense of accomplishment.  I was doing that pretty well with my fiction, starting while I was a guest of the Florida DOC—I would finish a given book (or short story) completely, including editing and, once I was out, publishing before starting the next one.  This was a big deal, because my fiction writing used to suffer from the same issues of my scattered brain described above.

I have veered off that trajectory in recent years, alas.  I now have no fewer than three “begun” stories that I haven’t yet finished.  And no, I haven’t gotten any work done on any of them recently.  I’m too stressed out and worn out, and I am, at bottom, thoroughly alone here.  It’s really very difficult many days just to force myself to continue at all.  Also, disappointing and stupid events throughout the country and the world make that all the more difficult.

I hope you all are having a better time than I am.  I wish for you to be well, however useless such wishes may be.

P.S. Okay, well, if you look at (01-14-2026), you can make each of the digits of the year by adding digits of the month and date, without reusing any given month-date digit for any given year digit.  1 + 1 gives you the 2s, 0 gives you the 0, 4 + 1 + 1 gets you the 6.  That’s pretty lame though, even to me.

*I don’t know whether or not they are engaging posts (a phrase that sounds like an alternative expression for “hitching post”).

**Perhaps the fact that I seem to have to do things this way at least contributes to durability in my understanding, because I keep having to pick up where I left off months and even years ago.  Over time, I have gotten pretty good at being able to do that, and to be able very quickly, usually within the space of a paragraph or at most a page, to remember what was “going on” when I last was reading the book.  Yay, me.

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“Try to hide your hand, forget how to feel”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you’re right.  I’m working today.  Heavy sigh.

It’s not as though I can opt out, since my coworker who shares some of my responsibilities is not able to come in‒he and his wife have a newborn and a toddler, and he’s doing some bartending work on the weekends, so it’s on me, even though I worked last Saturday and even though, honestly, my mental reserves are dipping lower and lower, and I need‒or, well, at least I could really use‒at least one night a week where I can knock myself unconscious and so at least get a form of mental rest.

Alas, that’s not going to happen this week.  I cannot sleep in on Sundays, because I do my laundry on Sunday mornings, and I need to get it done before everyone in the other, main part of the house wakes up and starts doing their things.

So, I’m pretty unhappy this morning, but that’s nothing particularly new.  I don’t have any whimsical musings about infinity to share today.  Also, I did not write this post the night before, as is probably obvious; I’m writing it in the morning.  And, of course, I’ve written no fiction, unless you count the fact that yesterday’s post misleadingly seemed full of pep and vim and spark and pizzazz.  That was a lie.

I feel very just generally hateful toward reality as a whole, to be honest.  There are things and people here and there that I don’t hate, and even a few people I love, but they are far away and far between.  Seeing or interacting with even one of them is a sort of special occasion.

I did try meditating the other day, as I discussed, and though, yeah, I did get depressed, with intrusive thoughts about, for instance, going and lying on the railroad tracks* troubling me.  But I got through the day‒as I guess you could tell, since I’m here.  I wondered if maybe that meditation contributed to my weird but lighthearted digression on infinities and related topics yesterday.

Unfortunately, though yesterday started okay, it didn’t continue as well, and I had a fair amount of pain (and other things happened).  And then, of course, I found out that we’re working today.  Also, I slept terribly last night, but that’s true almost every night.

I wish there was a real “The Force”, including the dark side, because I think at least it would be some compensation for my depression and tension to be able to use force lightning and to be able to choke people out from a distance without needing to touch them.  Though, I like to think I’d use more creative attacks, like squeezing someone’s heart or brain with the Force.  That would be quicker, and they would have less time to know they were being killed, but honestly I’m not interested in causing suffering to people who are intolerable.  I just want them gone.

Yeah, I’m not a good person, I know, though that does depend a bit on specific answers to the questions “good for what purpose?” and “good by what criteria?”, and probably on others.

I’ve said it before, but I do often feel some regret about not “winning” when I played Russian roulette way back near the end of 2012.  Nearly everything in the years since has been of questionable value, and much of it has honestly been rotten.  And it’s not as though the years immediately preceding 2012 were great‒chronic pain/injury, divorce, disability and the like colored a lot of it, but at least I was part of my kids’ life back then.

Again, I’m not going to engage in foolish overgeneralizing if I can help it; there have been moments of joy and even a few achievements in the years between, though the latter have often been causative of reflective reproach, like someone who grew roses but found that the “thorns” were vastly more prominent than the few little misshapen and mutated flowers that were produced.

I occasionally wish I could be like Lord Foul** and just hate everything and everyone except myself, as opposed to the way things are, in which a big chunk of my hate is directed inwardly.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that Lord Foul’s “ethos” is astonishingly pathological and also astonishingly illogical and irrational.  But it has its attractions.  Madness in general often has such seeming advantages, though I suspect that, in reality, they are largely illusory.

I’m tired, and I’m hostile and even hateful, unfortunately.  Events in the world aren’t helping, and though some may counsel just staying away from “the news”, I consider that bad advice.  As Gildor said to Frodo, you can shut yourself in, but you cannot forever shut the world out.  It will impinge upon you, and by being aware of it you can best protect yourself and mitigate possible harm.  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The only ways completely to prevent the world from interfering with you are to destroy the world, to destroy yourself, or to do both.

Am I speaking metaphorically here, or am I speaking physically?  I think the idea can be considered both ways.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope all of you who read this have a good weekend.  As for everyone else, well, it would certainly be nice if the kind people in the world had good days.

What are the odds of that happening?***

*Incidentally, I would not actually do that.  I would find it far too rude to disrupt the commute of at least hundreds of people and possibly thousands.

**He’s the big bad in the various Thomas Covenant books, and he is one of my favorite villains.

***I’m speaking rhetorically.  I don’t expect that there’s any way for anyone to know the accurate probabilities involved.