Pain

by

On the eighth day of Hanukkah…nothing much happened

It’s Friday morning, December 15th, and I’m waiting at the train station for the second train of the day, again.  It’s really quite windy this morning, even more so than it has been the past few days, but it’s not as rainy.  There’s just a slight bit of drizzle around, and some of even that is probably just the wind blowing former rain off the trees.

I’m not sure what I should write about today that won’t just be rehashing all the other crap I’ve been writing nearly every day.  It doesn’t seem to do me any good as therapy, and it certainly doesn’t seem to do you people any good as readers.

It also hasn’t really seemed to garner me any real help, other than perhaps being at some level the trigger for my ex-wife to ask me to sign up for health insurance.  That was, of course, a nice impulse on her part, although it’s very stressful for me, and I haven’t yet done it, though I’m supposed to try to get it done by today.  I keep hoping there will be a car accident or some health catastrophe that will take it all out of my hands before I have to go through with it, because I find the prospect ridiculously stressful.

I don’t trust “the government” if they’re involved in the process, but I also don’t trust private industry.  You may say that I have only myself to blame for my issues, then, to which I would reply…well, blame isn’t a very useful concept most of the time, but it’s definitely because of my own psychopathology that I am in my situation.  The only person who’s ever been able really to beat me is me, but that guy really is quite dedicated to the task.  I’m probably not too unusual in this.  I suspect it’s the case for a great many people.

My sister has also offered to help with getting the insurance together.  I’m not sure what she might be able to do from where she is.  She may know, but I’m not sure.  I’m hoping to go through a person who got a good deal on insurance for a work friend, and presumably that can be done over the phone.  I hate talking on the phone most of the time, partly because I have difficulty hearing, but also just because I am quite awkward, socially.  Still, I hope I can do it.

I really need some help, and with a lot of things.  It’s sad and painful to say it, but there are many aspects of life in human civilization that I find very uncomfortable and alien and anathema to me.  And though I have work friends, I have no real other friends of any kind, and as I’ve said, my family is scattered hundreds to thousands of miles away.  I don’t do online relationships very well, other than my ongoing relationship with the likes of Amazon.  Ha ha.

Incidentally, I have the weekend “off”, so I won’t be writing my blog either tomorrow or the next day.  The Sunday thing is nothing new; I almost never write a blog on Sunday, and when I was writing fiction, I never wrote fiction on Sunday.  I had to give myself some mental break, and it made sense to do it on the day when I never did have to work.

Today is the last day of Hanukkah, of course.  I’ve been neglecting lighting the candles at work, though I have a nice little menorah there.  After the first two days, it just felt sad.  Actually, it felt sad the first few days, too, since it’s the sort of thing one does with one’s family, especially with one’s kids.

It’s a weird thing to think of wanting to have medical care for myself.  Having been on the delivering end of much life-prolonging care, I know only too well how much we tend to strain to stretch out the latter portion of our days, even when all it really does is compound misery, or at least make it last longer.

Pediatric medicine makes more sense—we should prevent kids from suffering and/or dying young and from falling victim to illnesses that might harm their later life and joy.  But why do wasted, washed-up, older people like me*, who are alone and sad and depressed even want to stay alive, other than due to persistent but pointless biological drives?

I’m not saying that I’m drain on the world or anything; I earn a living and pay my rent and electricity and water and cable and food and everything.  But I have a chronic illness from which I’ve been suffering most of my life**, and though there are treatments for it, there is no known cure.  It has a fatality rate—just counting suicides, not addressing the manifold ways in which it wears away at general health—that is worse than many cancers.  And I possess several of the attributes that are associated with increased risk of suicide, including age, solitude, probable “neurodivergence”, chronic pain, all that good stuff.

Why is there no physician-assisted suicide available anywhere for chronic depression?  It’s certainly as miserable as just about any disease can be—it turns one into the spiteful Satan of one’s own personal Hell.  Of course, the real trouble with a physician-assisted suicide for depression is that, by definition (if you will) the person involved is suffering from mental illness that affects that person’s judgment about the process, so legitimate consent is troublesome.  I guess I can’t blame “the powers that be” for wanting to keep their fingers out of that particular pie.

Perhaps that’s evidence that they’re not entirely unethical.  Mostly, they’re just largely nonethical.

My train is going to be arriving in a few moments, so I’ll wrap up for the day, feeling no closer to any improvement in my situation than I was at the beginning of the week.  I am giving up on the dietary changes I recently began; my GI tract has gotten no better with it over several days, and it’s just not worth the suffering to try to sustain it.  I’ll try to go back to a more workable healthy solution.

What I really want is to be able to rest and to feel rested.  Obviously I didn’t do that last night, or the night before, or pretty much all the way back to the mid-nineties.  And then, there was only one night I can remember on which I slept and awoke refreshed.

It stands out because it was such a departure from the norm.

Oh, well.  Life is hard.  It’s also a cereal and a game and a magazine.  Time is just a magazine, as far as I know.  And Scientific American has become an ironic, contradictory insult to its former self.

Have a good day and a nice weekend, please.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*Yes, I’m “only” 54, but I have felt much older for quite a long time.  My subjective age has been increasing on an exponential growth curve for years.  Sadly, my wisdom does not appear to have been growing similarly, and it may actually be diminishing.

**Dysthymia/depression, in case that isn’t clear.

by

They will eat like wolves and blog like devils

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 14th of December in 2023 (AD or CE), and it’s the second to last day of Hanukkah.  Not that such a thing matters to me, really.  I don’t have anyone with whom I’m celebrating this or any other holiday.

I’m not really celebrating anything at all, come to think of it.  That seems appropriate.  What, really, is there in this world for me to celebrate that isn’t drowned out by all the noise and idiocy and spitefulness and pettiness?

I’m waiting for the second train today, not the first.  I was awake well in time for the first train, but there was not really any point in trying to get to that one.  It was at least as crowded as the second train has been, and getting to the office an hour earlier just left me puttering around there.  Also, it may have contributed to me writing quite a long blog post, yesterday.

I’m not sure if anyone actually read yesterday’s post all the way through.  Certainly, no one appears to have left any comments, even on “social” media—although I guess someone might have commented since yesterday afternoon, which was the last time I checked.

I’ve decided to go back to wearing my slightly larger Timberland boots, which—obviously enough—I have neither given away nor discarded.  They are simply more comfortable and feel more protective than most of my other shoes or boots.

I haven’t been doing any long-distance walking for a while, but I’ve walked in total 2 to 3 miles a day each day this week, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular problem with the boots.  Of course, my back and my legs hurt—a lot—but they almost always hurt, so it’s difficult to attribute that to the boots.  I’ve also not been wearing knee or ankle braces at all this week, because they’re irritating me.  They probably give me some benefits, of course, but sometimes I just don’t care.

I’ve been trying to eat a somewhat healthier diet this week—heavy on legumes and beans and nuts and stuff and light on breads and cheeses and all that.  I haven’t even had any meat at all.  So far, it’s given me terrible gastrointestinal discomfort and has made me feel unwell, but I’m hopeful that this is just because of the shift in diet, and that my system will adjust itself.  If it doesn’t do so soon, I may give up on the notion.

Basically, I’m trying to do something, almost anything, to improve my overall daily mood and energy and motivation.  Because I really don’t feel any interest in or joy regarding much of anything anymore.  I haven’t read more than three or four pages of any book this week (in aggregate), fiction or nonfiction.  That’s weird for me, and it’s not a good sign.  But I cannot seem to conjure any interest.

If you’ve been reading my blog so far this week, you know I said that I would try to find health insurance for which I could sign up and which I could afford, and I have today and tomorrow left to try to meet my deadline.

That’s a good word, “deadline”.  But I guess it may be somewhat ironic when discussing health insurance.

Having that task before me really stresses me out; I don’t like it hanging over me, but I also don’t want to do it, particularly when I don’t even want to take care of myself.  The only possible silver lining might be that, just maybe, I might be able to check myself into some mental health facility that’s slightly better than some Florida county or state level shit-holes.  I doubt it.

I probably ought to be in some mental health place.  I’m almost certainly a “danger to myself”, at least for some portion of most days.  Not that I have imminent plans, mind you; don’t get all excited and call the local police.  I’m cleverer than that.

It’s quite windy and a bit rainy around these parts today, as it was yesterday afternoon.  That probably contributes to my back and legs flaring up above their usual baseline.  I’m still keeping up with my pull-ups and dips, though I need to get back into doing more crunches.  Maybe that would help my GI and back trouble.  It might make it worse.  It might have no effect whatsoever.

That’s the conundrum, and I cannot really do a case/control, double-blind sort of test to find out clearly what the reality is.  It may be that the boots I’m wearing now have never actually caused me any trouble, and that it was merely coincidence that I had flares-up before when wearing them.  Or my assessment may have been accurate.

None of it really matters, anyway.  I should just walk and walk, as much as I can, and to hell with the pain.  It’s not as though resting makes it go away, though pain does make one not want to do much.  That’s a biological, organismal thing, though, and it doesn’t necessarily make for the local best decision.

The train will be here in a few minutes, so I’ll wrap up this waste of your time for today.  If you’re celebrating Hanukkah, please have a good last few days thereof.  Please have a good day and good days in general if you can.  If you feel like commenting, please do so.  If you are able to “like” a post and wish to do so, please do.  If not, it won’t hurt my feelings.  I won’t even know it didn’t happen, not in any specific sense.  Eight billion people fail to “like” my posts every day, and I hardly even notice most of them.

TTFN

red eyed wolf smaller

by

“From ev’ry depth of good and ill…”

Does anyone else ever feel guilty about never letting their first alarm of the day sound, about always shutting it off before its allotted time because you’re awake anyway?  It feels almost like an unkindness—as though the alarm wanted to do its job, but was always thwarted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m the only one who so anthropomorphizes such a function, but what can I say?  I’m a weirdo.

I’m currently waiting for the very first train of the day, since I was awake anyway, and I decided to see how the new, even earlier, 4:20 first train is.  I’m hoping it will at least be less crowded than the 5:20 train.

They haven’t even opened the gates that lead to the stairs or the elevators or the ticket machines at the train station yet, which seems a bit unreasonable, considering they are the ones who set up the new schedule.  Still, according to the tracker site, the train is on its way, and it’s only two minutes (!) behind schedule.

I don’t know why it’s two minutes behind schedule at this hour.  I don’t see how it can be dealing with any kind of traffic or anything.  Oh, well.  This constant inability for people to keep to schedules is only one of the reasons I despise living in this world.

Speaking of things that make me not want to continue living, if anyone out there reads this on WordPress Reader, or by any other, similar means:  are you able to comment and “like” the blog posts I write just as used to be the case?  I know I’m having trouble doing so with, for instance, my favorite website that I follow, and that fact is starting to make me fade away from reading it as consistently as I used to do, because I cannot “like” a post and see the comments (or leave a comment) all in the same place.  I’m wondering if that’s also happened with my blog, because I’m getting many fewer views and stuff than I used to receive.

It may simply be that people have gotten tired of reading my posts or even of dealing with me at all.  I know I’ve gotten tired of myself, more and more all the time.  I can certainly understand if people have just gradually drawn away from what is, after all, a depressing blog.

Even posts like yesterday’s, in which I went into all sorts of minutiae and trivia about temperatures and percentages and the like, are probably just mind-numbingly dull for most people.  Many of the things I enjoy are difficult for other people to appreciate, it seems.  As Edgar Allan Poe wrote in one of my favorite poems, “…all I loved, I loved alone.”

Anyway, I would appreciate some feedback about the visibility and/or accessibility of this blog for others, because I cannot readily tell from my perspective how others are seeing it.  And please—as always—comment here, not on Facebook or TWFKAT*.

I fear that the “Happiness Engineers” at WordPress, as they nauseatingly refer to themselves, have altered things to try to make the platform more exciting and up-to-date and have instead caused it to cease to work properly for oddballs like me who really would prefer things to be consistent, for them not to be constantly fiddled with, especially since that so often makes so many things so much worse.

If I were more paranoid, I might imagine that the world is trying to push me finally to commit suicide, since so many of the things from which I have taken at least some small modicum of distraction, if not necessarily comfort**, are shriveling up and blowing away.  I’m getting increasingly bored of the science and mathematics offerings on YouTube, and the reaction channels I watch have already reacted to stuff I like, and no matter how briefly enjoyable it can be to pretend I’m watching something with a friend, that’s clearly really not what’s happening.

Most of these people would never be my friends even if we lived nearby and had anything else in common but shows to watch.

And the newer science and math and nature videos I’m encountering are sometimes astonishingly idiotic, credulously addressing things like UFOs and whatnot.  Ex-Twitter is even less interesting than it was before, and I was never a huge fan of it.

I try to get involved in Facebook, but it’s also rather sparse and spare, and there’s not as much interaction as might be beneficial, and even the briefly interesting little, short video things very rapidly become astonishingly repetitive and boring.  I think those are all attempts to compete with TikTok or whatever, and if that platform is at all like those things, then I can see that I am not missing much.

Even the podcasts by Sean Carroll any by Sam Harris are too brief and intermittent to provide enough benefit to make a serious difference, though they at least are truly engaging while they last.

[FYI, the train arrived finally, just about here.  I meant to note this when it happened, but I got distracted.  It’s more crowded than I would have predicted, which is quite disappointing and borderline distressing.]

And now I have this external pressure to get health insurance, even though I don’t want to care for my health, because there’s not any compelling urge to keep myself alive and “healthy”***.  However, I did promise****.

I don’t want to take care of myself.  For what purpose, to what end, would I do so?  I mean, I do keep trying little things, attempting to tweak matters, trying to adjust and improve my physical and mental health, but even when I start a day in a relatively playful mood, I still wind up at some point slamming my forehead repeatedly against the metal posts that support cubicle walls in the office, until a coworker has to come and make me stop.

This was because some people who arrive late end up staying and working into lunchtime, bringing me alone for the ride, even if it’s supposed to be my break time.

I think, today, if at the beginning of lunch anyone is still on the phone who arrived at the office later than the official starting time, I’m going to unplug the modem and just forcibly interrupt these worms who have no consideration for other people’s time.  Of course, if there are people who were on time who are still on the phone, I’ll not do that.  People who began work when work is supposed to begin and who just overflow a bit into break time deserve some courtesy.  The others deserve only shadow and flame, but I’ll be merciful; they’ren’t really worth the trouble.

I’m really uncomfortable in my own head and my own skin.  I feel quite desperate, and I am losing most of what few psychological supports I had.  I will do my best to force myself through the process of setting up insurance before the end of the week if I can, but I can’t help but hope that some catastrophe will take the whole thing out of my hands and make it moot before then.

I’m running out of time, though.  I’m so tired and stressed out and frustrated and in pain, and it’s only the stupid, pre-programmed, hard-wired, firmware-like, non-intellectual fear drive that keeps me from doing the sensible thing and just dying.

I’m not afraid of anything specific, really; it’s just that innate, existential, unkind drive to avoid dying, which is about as pleasant to me as the need to urinate and defecate.  I hate being alive.  I hate my life.  And while I definitely don’t want to hurt people who still think I’m the person they used to know, and whom they wouldn’t want to have die “before his time”, it’s simply the case that that person is already dead, anyway.  He has been dead for years.

I’m so tired.  I feel like the last passenger pigeon or the final surviving quagga, whiling its time away in a bleak cage somewhere with no company of its own kind, waiting to die and put the final full stop on the extinction of its species.

I suppose it would still be acceptable if some miracle were to happen and change my life and bring me back to the way I used to be, or better, but I don’t see how it’s going to happen.  Certainly, no “supernatural” figure seems poised to intervene, and I don’t think any natural ones have the wherewithal or the inclination.  There’s certainly little to no benefit in the admittedly well-meaning cajolery to “just hold on” and all that jazz.  I try, obviously.  I’m still here and writing.  But it feels more like I’m fulfilling a prison sentence than it does like surviving…and I’m familiar with both.

As another poet I admire—and who escaped the prison by his owns hands—wrote:  “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”

*The Website Formerly Known as Twitter.

**WEIT is a comfort and often a joy, and I am very distressed about not being able to see and comment and “like” it, and other comments, as I usually do.

***Physically, of course.  My mental health is a lost cause, anyway.  I received a “how are you doing?” automated email from betterhelp.com last week.  I had briefly used their service, but I quit when my therapist had to go on leave (for legitimate personal reasons).  I didn’t want to have to try to find a new therapist.  I know the checking-in email was automated, and the corporate decision to send it was probably related to the time of year, since many people have troubles in this season.  It felt touching, in a way, even though I know that there were no real people involved in sending anything to me specifically.

****To be fair to me, this was a promise made on the spot, and to someone who had long since broken her own much less spontaneous promise to be with me for the rest of our lives, through better and worse, sickness and health, and all that bullshit, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too pressured.  Promises like the aforementioned, traditional ones, however, are no longer taken very seriously, even in the moment they are pronounced…or so it seems.  That’s yet another charming human innovation:  purely performative vows.

by

Don’t offer any spare change for my sake

It’s Monday morning, December 11th (2023), and they’re starting the new Tri-Rail schedule today.  The first train of the day was moved much earlier—to 4:20—but then the second one was moved back to 5:20, so now I’m waiting for that, since the earlier one is long gone; I didn’t think to leave the house early enough to get here for it.

I thought that the second train was at 4:50, because during peak hours they’ve set them to be every half hour, but apparently this early it isn’t “peak hours”.  I could have made it for the earlier one; it’s not as though I slept more than about half an hour to an hour all of last night.

I know, this is all really boring and pathetic stuff about which to write.  Sorry I can’t be one of those bloggers who writes about would-be helpful subjects, or about travels—those can be interesting—or be like WEIT, the website I like to follow, where PCC(E) writes about all manner of interesting things, because he’s actually an interesting person.

I’ve found myself inadvertently given various obstacles to following that website the way I normally had for years.  If I follow it on Reader, I cannot comment, but I can “like” the post…but I cannot see or like any of the other comments at all.  And if I follow it on the regular site directly, I don’t get updates in the Reader like I prefer to do, and writing comments, while possible, is unwieldy.

I think I’m going to give up.  It’s very sad for me, but I don’t like all these changes.  Websites and apps and everything else are all always changing and updating—usually in utterly useless and barely even cosmetic ways—once a month or more, or so it feels.  I guess they imagine that to remain static is to fall behind, but their changes are not usually improvements.

This is a predictable outcome, since while all improvement is change, most change is not improvement.  Even on a one-dimensional setting, things are more likely to worsen or stay the same than to improve (although, admittedly, that’s only a difference of one point on the line).  When things are more complicated, it’s far more likely for things to be worse than to be better if they are changed randomly.

For people like me, all these stupid little changes, even if only cosmetic, are just stress-inducing.  In some ways, it was better when you had to buy new editions of software and the like every now and then in order to get updates and upgrades.  Then, the updates were worthwhile, and were vetted and tweaked and all sorts, because there was some cost to putting them out there and to getting them.  Now, who gives a crap at the various software companies?  If the latest update turns out to be detrimental or irritating to people, they can just “fix” it in next week’s update.

Case in point:  the Uber app has changed its main page for when one is awaiting a driver, but not in any way that improves the substance—they’ve just altered the way the window looks and made the whole thing more unwieldy and childish-looking than it was before.  Why?  I don’t know*.  Possibly some software writer had to justify his or her continuing employment, and doing something substantive would have taken more mental effort.  Better just to take formerly clear data and put it inside a rectangle with rounded corners—wouldn’t want anyone to poke themselves on those purely graphical, sharp right angles—with only part of the data showing and in a big, ugly font.

And humans are so stupid, they’ll think they’re getting something new and be excited about the updates, as they are with the new phones that come out every other day.

The world is so stress-inducing, I really cannot tolerate it much longer.  I’ve said that I would get myself signed up for some form of health insurance, and I don’t want to break my word, but the very prospect—and the fact that I was asked to do it—almost feels as if I’m being set up for something.  I know that’s crazy, but it’s a feeling that exists.  I feel as if I’m being herded into some metaphorical abattoir.

I feel so overwhelmed by the very prospect of doing the insurance, though, that I feel like I want to die this week, before my unofficial deadline for signing up for it.  It’s ridiculous, I know, but the pressure is getting overwhelming, and I have no source of relief, no personal support, no tidings of comfort or joy.

I suspect the train is going to be more crowded than usual, and that’s pretty stress-inducing, too.  There are definitely more people waiting at the track than there usually were for either the former 4:45 or the former 5:15 trains.

I don’t think I can stand all this much longer.  I have a semi-serious of going to the sidewalk in front of the courthouse in West Palm Beach and immolating myself, so I can at least become some kind of protest or something.  I have collected enough flammable liquids to make it workable, and I have a backpack big enough to carry them.

But, of course, that’s a somewhat scary way to die—fire and all, I mean.  Even for a former Boy Scout who has a bit of fire bug in him, like so many of us did, it’s an intimidating thought.  Still, I tested out the backpack for its carrying capacity yesterday, just to see, because I was feeling particularly low at that time.  It could do the job.

I don’t know what to do.  I wish I could calm my mind.  I wish I could sleep.  I wish the world were not so stupid, and that I were not so stupid, also.  I don’t think I can do this much longer…maybe not very much longer at all.  I feel like I have a shorter remaining time to figure something out than I had thought I had…a lot shorter.

Just the thought of getting on the newly scheduled, overcrowded train feels like it’s going to be more than I’m prepared to handle.  I really hate this.  I hate my life.  I really, really hate it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I guess, as long as I’m around, I’ll keep doing these blog posts.  Aren’t you all lucky?

Have a good day.

*He’s on third.

by

Weird pegs hammered into “normal” holes and spiders living in beehives

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the train station very early—quite a bit too early for the first train—because I was awake anyway, and there was no point in waiting around at the house.  The train station (like the office) in many ways feels more hospitable than the house does.  That’s not saying much, but there it is.

There seem not to have been very many people reading my blog these last few days.  Evidently, when I’m not focused on my mental illness—and it is mental illness, it is not mental health—people don’t seem very interested.  Or maybe there’s a change to the WordPress Reader algorithm so that people don’t see my blog pop up.  I know something has changed, because I can no longer directly comment (or see the comments of others) on my favorite website through WordPress Reader.  That may be because the person who runs that website finds me annoying.  It’s easy enough for me to imagine that other people find me annoying.  I find myself annoying, so it’s not exactly a new notion.  Still, it’s very disheartening to be ostracized, deliberately or accidentally, from my usual interaction at that blog.

I don’t have much heart from the start.

I was approached—figuratively speaking—by someone yesterday morning asking me to please get health insurance, and making suggestions about how to do so affordably.  I listened, because of who it was and, even more importantly, because of on whose behalf they were probably partly speaking (though I am convinced of the caller’s true personal good intentions as well).  I agreed, fine, I’ll get health insurance of some kind.

It’s not the money, mainly, that’s been in the way of me getting insurance.  It’s my self-loathing that mainly gets in the way.  Why would I want to maintain my health and try to live longer or healthier?  What is the point of such an endeavor?  I’m personally extremely unhappy, and in pain, and sleepless, and alone, for one thing (I guess that’s more than one thing, but you probably know what I mean).

At this stage I’m just a net drain on the world, anyway.  Surely, the whole planet would probably cheer up slightly—but noticeably—if I were gone, like a pond that’s been muddied by heavy rainfall finally clearing after the silt settles out.  Most people wouldn’t know why the world felt a little more positive, a little more hopeful, a little more pleasant, but it would still be the case.

Anyway, I said I would do it, so I will, unless something kills me first.

I was in a weirdly upbeat mood part of yesterday morning before that event, although my blog post was rather angry.  To give you an idea of how weirdly upbeat I was, I had finished writing the draft of my post and was getting ready to lie down on the floor of the office (I do this a few times a day to help my back) and I set my computer to install updates in the meantime.  And as I saw the computer message that informed me that it was “updating”, I thought, “‘Updating’…that needs to be the title of a rom-com.”

Immediately, I thought up and quickly wrote out the plot synopsis for the romantic comedy in question and emailed it via my smartphone to myself.  Later, I told my boss about it, conveying the basic story line, and he said—with some enthusiasm—that it was quite good and he thought people would really like that story, and would read such a book.

I had thought of it more as a screenplay sort of thing, to be honest.  I considered getting on Skillshare or something similar and doing a quick course on screenwriting, to write it up.

Of course, I’m not in such a good mood as yesterday morning—it went away by early afternoon, when I suddenly felt a burst of severe tension, as if someone had injected me with epinephrine while I wasn’t looking.  It’s not a good feeling, but I have it a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve pretty rapidly and persistently gone downhill since then.

So, I guess I’ll sign up for some form of health insurance.  I have some degree of inherent resistance to the idea, of course, a big one being just my honest difficulty dealing with bureaucratic matters, with paperwork and personal records and trying to fit my weird and distorted metaphorical pegs into the square and round holes laid out—quite unthinkingly—by the world.

That latter comment about things being laid out unthinkingly is important.  No one should imagine that the world as it is was ever truly planned or designed by anyone, whether out of beneficence or malice or otherwise.  Individual people and so forth have had plans and goals and ideas, but no one is big enough actually to design a society or a government or an economy or whatever.  It all just falls together, like salt crystallizing out of a strong saline solution, or rock candy forming on a string in a cooling bath of saturated sugar water.

There are tendencies to form certain kinds of patterns, of course, because of the nature of the constituents and their interactions, but if one were to arrange ten million such rock candy baths, no two of the products would be the same.

Rock candy is simple, of course, and its point and purpose are simple.  So, it doesn’t really matter what specific shapes might be formed when making it.  Societies and civilizations, on the other hand, can take all manner of forms, and these can be truly better or worse by any criteria one might choose to use to measure them.  But they are not inherently real, they are not inherently good, they are not inherently stable or ethical or fair or just, and maybe they never will be.

Justice (however one may want to define the term) does not happen on its own.  Even if one tries to achieve it, one must constantly reevaluate, reassess, tweak, and adjust how one approaches it, because it is not a simple problem, and each local solution will engender new problems.  Problems are solvable, of course, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will be solved.  Wanting to solve them is not enough, and even trying to solve them is not enough.

To achieve justice, or at least to optimize it, for even a group of a hundred people would probably be computationally impossible even using a physically maximal computer.  Even assuming one had a fully agreed-upon definition of the term, the adjustments needed to get everyone in the best possible place seem fit make the traveling salesman problem trivial by comparison.

As for achieving optimal justice for 8 billion people, well…that’s not even a pipe dream.  It’s not even laughable.  At best it could only really be achieved at individual levels or perhaps in small groups, but then again, there’s not even an agreed-upon definition of the term.  This is one of the reasons to be suspicious of people who claim to have all the answers or a “real solution” or whatever, especially if you think they are sincere.

True believers are dangerous, far more dangerous than psychopaths or the mentally ill, and they have done vastly more harm throughout history than all the most self-centered of sociopathic villains could ever do, even if given absolute power (or so I predict).  This is at least partly because anyone who thinks they absolutely have the answers for civilization or even a society is simply wrong.  They always have been, they always will be.  Finite entities cannot even fully understand themselves, let alone ultimate, complex aspects of the world around them, so they can never be mathematically certain that they have the final word on any question.  It is always necessary, in principle, to be open to criticism and testing, to updating beliefs, even if one is very close to being sure.

Anyway, I have trouble dealing with bureaucracies and forms and paperwork and everything.  It feels utterly unnatural and uncomfortable.  It always has, but when I was younger and had people in my life, I was more able to put in the effort.  But it’s always felt unnatural to me, and deeply so.

It’s a bit like a spider trying to become a member of a beehive—seeking nectar and pollen and tending larvae and warding off invaders to the hive and all.  Some of the spider’s attributes may be useful—silk and venom and potent things—but a spider does not live on honey and pollen, and it will not thrive in a hive (if it even stays alive).  A spider is an alien in a hive; it can no more live like a bee than it can grow wheat and thresh it and grind it and then bake and live on bread.  However long it lives, it will simply be suffering.

That’s how I feel about a lot of this shit.  But I’ll do it.  Maybe I’ll even try to write that rom-com.  I can write pretty easily.  Of course, knowing me, the rom-com would probably devolve into a horror story, but maybe that would be good in a way.  After all, I’ve had romance of one kind or another in all my horror stories, and there’s usually at least a little bit of joking.  Sauce for the romantic comedy goose…

At bottom, though, I really don’t want to be healthy and alive.  I mean, it’d be nice not to feel physically miserable as long as I am alive, but that desire is preprogrammed into the organism, and I cannot rewrite that programming.  I can, however, shut it down, or let it come to a shutdown on its own, since I cannot update it, despite the title of my potential romantic comedy.  Life is shit—and if you’re a cockroach, shit is life, but that doesn’t mean you can make high art with it.

Anyway, here comes my train.  Have a nice weekend.

by

Probing train and work schedule inconsistencies and galaxy-scale “natural” selection

It’s midway through the week now—or it will be sometime today—and I don’t think I have anything intellectually interesting or challenging (or whatever) to write today like I did yesterday.  That’s probably a relief to most of my readers.  I don’t think those posts go over particularly well.

The train is supposed to be arriving on the proper side of the track, according to the tracker site, but we shall see.  It was also supposed to be here at 4:44 am, and it’s now two minutes behind that time, which was already one minute behind it’s programmed schedule.  Supposedly, there’s going to be some overall schedule change next week.  I hope it’s not too radical; I hate the notion of having to reset the whole system in my head.

Okay, well, this morning’s train arrived on the correct side, at least, though it was a total of six minutes late.  I know that’s not too bad—it certainly won’t change my day much—but it does boggle my mind how the very first train of the day can already be running behind schedule.  I mean, they promulgate the schedule themselves, so they know it in advance.  It’s the same every Monday through Friday.

Of course, I know that unexpected thing happen that engender delays, but if the unexpected happens and causes delays nearly every day, nearly every time, then it’s not the unexpected that’s to blame.  It’s the planning and preparation of the organization which is clearly inadequate and leads to too many things being unexpected that ought to be expected.

It’s a bit like what happens at the office.  There are people who are never there by the official time for work, and they keep being late because they face no consequences, not even embarrassment, for doing so.

I would be happy to offer some suggestions for such consequences.

Likewise with ordinary office maintenance.  I’ve announced and posted notes and signs repeatedly about, for instance, turning off the coffee pot (or brewing a new pot) if one drinks the last cup—the post-it note is literally at eye level just above the coffee maker.  But still, yesterday afternoon before I left, I had to shut off the coffee maker and put the pot in the sink to soak because someone left it on with less than a cup in it, and the residue baked into a crust of black, dehydrated coffee.

There are so many maddening things about the human world.

There are plenty of horrible things about the non-human world too, of course.  Nature does have its up-side, but it is also “red in tooth and claw” as the cliché says.  Darwin wasn’t crazy when he described that it is because of the war of nature, of famine and death, that we have the wonderful diversity of life and its beautiful and marvelous (and terrible) forms and functions.

The Buddhists were also right that suffering* is a key hallmark of life.  In any form of evolved life that I can seriously conceive, that’s going to need to be the case, since fear and pain are essential for staying alive in any world with competition for resources influencing survival and reproduction.  Genes that create bodies that don’t have pain and fear and disgust and so on don’t tend to get replicated nearly as much as genes that do, and when there is competition for scarce resources, ultimately such genes will fade away.

It seems possible, in principle, to design a life form—however loosely you want to use that term—that would not actually be capable of any kind of suffering, and if it were a stand-alone being or machine or what have you, it could very well continue to be that way, at least until it broke down.  But if it’s any kind of self-replicating “organism”, such as a Von Neumann probe or similar, there are inevitably** going to be slight errors in reproduction in each generation.  And that sets the stage for evolution via natural selection, even if it is the evolution of self-reproducing robot probes.

If there is differential survival and reproduction of variants, the ones that reproduce and/or survive better will come to dominate, even if there’s no inherent competitiveness between the probes.  If they go out into the galaxy in opposite directions, their evolution could diverge, and when and if they later encounter each other, they might have diverged enough to be in true competition for resources and/or space or what have you.

Eventually, especially as easily obtainable resources are used up by earlier generations of such probes, the ones that develop a certain degree of aggressiveness relative to others might have an advantage.  Ones that came to recognize other probe “species” as handy, localized sources of material that are easier to use than mining planets and asteroids and whatnot might become a sort of predatory or parasitic species of probe relative to the more autotrophic ones.

There might then follow a vast Darwinian evolution by natural selection of numerous species of what used to be Von Neumann probes, originating initially just from one source, and becoming a galaxy-scale ecosystem of self-replicating robots, just as life on Earth is a planet-scale ecosystem of self-replicating robots.  And maybe there might evolve some manner of multi-“cellular” “life”, and even a higher-scale form of intelligent, or meta-intelligent, “life”, that might begin to think about exploring other galaxies, and making new forms of probes, perhaps, to do that…

I don’t know if the universe would be “habitable” long enough for any further steps to occur.  It depends how long the steps would take.  But at all levels, some manner of drives and urges inherent to the system would exist, and deprivation and damage and danger to those urges’ ends would also engender some form of what would be fear and disgust and pain.

Always.  World without end.  Amen.

*duhkha is the official Sanskrit word, apparently translated as everything from “suffering” to “unease” to “unsatisfactoriness”.

**By which I mean, it is literally impossible to copy any complex structure or information perfectly and repetitively without infinite precision and infinite checking and awareness, which is not achievable in reality, as far as anyone can tell.

by

“A hideous throng rush out forever, and laugh—but smile no more.”

It’s Wednesday morning—quite a bit before five o’clock and well before when the day “begins”, at least if the day begins at sunrise.  That will come…let’s see…at 6:49 am.  So says the weather app on my smartphone.  I’m at the train station today even earlier than yesterday because I woke up even earlier than yesterday and the day before.

I occasionally entertain the whimsical—and clearly untrue—notion that a person’s lifespan is limited by the time they spend awake, and so I expect to die quite a bit earlier than most other people (on average) because I’ve spent more of my time not asleep than most people have.  I’d say I get on average at least two fewer hours of sleep a night than most people I know.

Many nights, it’s quite a bit worse than that.

In a year, that’s 730.5 hours (roughly, ha ha) of sleep deficit, which is just over 30 days.  Although, come to think of it, if we’re counting awake time as a day, and the “usual” waking day is about sixteen hours, it’s more like 45 days—which makes sense, since 24 is one and a half times 16, and 45 is one and a half times 30.

Yes, I did that figuring in my head.  It’s terribly impressive, I know*.  I did not, however, calculate the sunrise on my own, as I noted.  I don’t really know how to go about that.  I’m sure it could be done, but probably not with the data available to me this morning at the train station.  Clearly, when people started tracking and plotting the days and seasons and sunrise and sunset and all that stuff, they did not have smartphones or the internet.  Those were days even before Commodore 64s and TRS-80s!

Anyway, the point I was making is that with all those matters taken into account, if I average only two hours dearth of sleep (a conservative amount, since the deficit is often larger), given my notion of a fixed amount of time awake determining the length of a life, I’m chewing a month and half extra off my life every year.  That’s one eighth of a year per year.  Which would mean that, just since I was in my teens, when I already slept less than the other people in my family and the other people I knew, I’ve lost five or more years of my life.  And every year that I get older in real time, my ultimate lifespan shrinks another eighth of a year.  Eventually, those time fronts will collide, and that will be the end.

This raises an interesting coincidence**:  Autistic individuals are known to have a much higher incidence of sleep disturbance than the general population, and recent studies found that, in the UK specifically, the average lifespan of an autistic male is about 8 years shorter than that of the general male population.  That’s in the UK, where they have a National Health System and actual programs and support services in place to help people with autism, imperfect though those systems are.  I shudder to think what the expected lifespan reduction is in the United States; I think I have encountered estimates of ten and more years’ reduction in healthy lifespan.

Still, it would be silly (and foolish) to attribute that decreased lifespan to number of hours of sleep loss.  There are many ways in which people on the autism spectrum have difficulty optimizing their health, even when they are otherwise “high functioning”, as the term goes.

If you don’t think those difficulties really matter, consider my circumstance (and I’m not even sure that I have ASD; it’s very difficult for me even to seek out, let alone avail myself of, resources to get evaluated).

I have strengths and talents of various kinds, but I’m living in a single, modest room in an old, cinderblock house in south Florida where I sleep on the floor on a futon and eat only microwave or order-in food; I work as a sort of office manager/record keeper/verifier in a phone sales office; I don’t have a driver’s license or any of that stuff anymore, nor do I do anything socially or spend any time with friends or family.  I supposedly have an IQ in the low 160s, I graduated with honors*** from an Ivy League university (which I attended on a full scholarship), I won a National Council of Teachers of English Award in high school, I went to medical school almost as an afterthought, became a doctor and did that job pretty well while I was doing it (though the record keeping and management functions were anathema to me).

But I could not thrive in the human world for long.  My back injury and chronic pain contributed to my specific failure, but I’d already had many instances in which depression and difficulty with certain kinds of administrative and record-keeping tasks caused me to land in personal crises.

I’ve written six novels and (self) published five, as well as several “short” stories (published individually and/or in two collections).  I’ve recorded and released four original songs (poorly produced, by me, on free software and with cheap, cheap recording equipment), and have written and shared a few others.  I can draw (and paint a bit), I can sculpt (with clay), I play piano and cello and guitar, I can sing, and I can even act reasonably well (how else do you think I pretended to be human for such long periods of time?  I even fooled myself).

All these abilities just make me even more of a failure, don’t they?  “How the mighty have fallen!”

Enough.  I’m almost at my stop (the train arrived just as I mentioned the TRS-80, which sounds like an omen…but an omen of what?), so I’ll wrap it up.  I guess I’ll write another post tomorrow, for what it’s worth.  Have a good day.

1427235137816

*I know, I know, it’s not actually impressive.  It’s easy enough to figure with multiples of 2, and 2 hours a day times 365.25 days per year is simply enough 730.5.  I left the extra digit just to be silly; it’s not significant, especially since, in the very next operation, I needed to divide that number by 24 hours in a day.  Since 3 times 24 is 72, I know that 730.5 hours is just ten and a half hours more than 30 days.  I could then simply have applied the 24 = 1.5 x 16 to do the next calculation, but that only occurred to me afterwards.  Anyway, it’s more fun to note that since 9 time 8 is 72, 16 goes into 72 four and a half times, and then multiply by ten, since 730 is ten times 73.  The remainder there is the same as with twenty-four—ten hours and a half—but that’s a bigger fraction of a sixteen hour day than a twenty-four hour day.  All this silliness at least can serve to remind us that the Phoenicians or Babylonians (I forget which) were not foolish to do things in 60s and 24s and 360s and so on—all these numbers are so readily divisible into fractions that they’re terribly useful.

**And yes, it is all coincidence.  Please don’t take my “lifespan limited by time awake” notion seriously.  Though it is certain that chronic sleep loss diminishes one’s health and can reduce one’s lifespan, it is not a simple arithmetic process, and there’s not the slightest reason to think that human lifespans are determined specifically by number of hours awake.  That’s even sillier than the notion of a lifespan being determined by the number of heartbeats one has.  I’ve had sinus tachycardia all my life; I would have been dead years ago if a lifespan were determined by numbers of heartbeats.

***I wrote my 50-page honors thesis in one weekend after it was revealed to me that I had misremembered the due date as being a month later than it was, and having been grudgingly given that one weekend extension to get it done if I wanted to get honors.  It turned out decently, because even then I could write very quickly tolerably well under pressure, and I knew my subject.  But this demonstrates all the more how, despite having talents (and some skills), I am rotten at navigating the ins and outs of human society (I’ve only gotten worse since then, because I’m just more and more worn out).  It wasn’t even my idea to try for honors; that was my then-fiancée’s idea.  It was something that looked good on resumes and applications.  Such thoughts, about self-promotion and seeking advancement in that fashion, have never been natural to me.  They are, if anything, worse now that I am on my own.

by

I am become Doc, the destroyer of worlds

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’ve just boarded the first train of the day again, since I wasn’t sleeping anyway.  I didn’t have quite as fragmented a night’s sleep as I often have, but it was short.  And yet, as usual, I don’t really feel sleepy, just fatigued, just weary, just [fill in random synonym for “tired”].  This is part of the reason I haven’t started walking in the morning again yet, though this morning the weather would have been reasonably congenial for such a thing, being relatively cool.  I just have difficulty summoning up the will and mental energy to do it.

I’m a bit frustrated—what else is new?—with something to do with WordPress or with a blog that I regularly follow and even upon which I comment somewhat frequently.  I had thought that the “Reader” function in my WordPress account was glitchy, because I could no longer see, let alone make, comments on the site to which I go every day.  It’s one of the things that sustains me, ever since the first time I began reading it, and writing comments on it and replying to them is one of the few pseudo-social things that I do (other than interact with people at the office, which doesn’t really count, since it’s almost never about anything of significant interest to me).

But then I realized that I could see (and make) comments on at least some other sites, even on the “Reader”.  Yet when I went to the site in question, even at its primary, official page, instead of through my “Reader”, it didn’t recognize me, and I had to sign in to make comments, giving my credentials each time, even though I’ve been following that site for years.

I even keep trying to hit the “subscribe” rectangle—let’s face it, it’s not really a “button”—on the WordPress “Reader” thingy, though I’ve long since been subscribed to the site, but as soon as I go back to it, it seems to think I haven’t done it.

I don’t know if that site’s owner is blocking me (it doesn’t seem like something he would do, but I can be insufferably annoying, I know—just ask me) or if WordPress is glitching only on my connection to that site.  It’s nothing to do with any one computer, as far as I can tell, because it happens on each one I have tried.

It’s very depressing.  I can’t even read other people’s comments when using the “Reader”.  It’s like losing friends, in a way, though of course I know that I’m not really anyone’s friend.

Maybe I should take it as a message from the Universe.  Not that I think the Universe actually sends me personal messages, apart from the obvious occasions when actual people, who are parts of the Universe, send me messages from them locally.  But that’s not really the idea about which I’m thinking.  Or maybe it is, I don’t know.  I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, at this point I’ve basically become little more than a detriment or a distraction or a disruption or a defect in the world.  It turns out I’ve been a defect since I was born, in at least two different objective ways.  I’ve struggled most of my life to be useful, at least to people about whom I care, if only to try to make up for how much I corrode and dysregulate things, but it’s been a losing battle.  To turn one of the last lines from Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 on its head and make it more appropriate to me:

I wasn’t born to be a dad; I was born to be a destroyer.

I wanted to be a dad.  I loved being a dad.  But I think I wasn’t a very good one, because…well, anyway, I haven’t seen either of my kids in over ten years, apparently by their choice (well, at least for everything after 2015).  I should probably just give up and accept the other role, though it sucks to give up on ever being with my kids again.  But I should just accept the other role.  And, of course, I don’t have a right to destroy other people, so there’s only one legitimate target for that part of my nature.

Well, I’m sick of writing for today.  This is going to be it for the moment.  I’ll write at you tomorrow—as always, barring the unforeseen.

by

It’s Monday morning, y’all.

Everyone seems to say “y’all” now, don’t they?  Or, at least online, a great many young people who are distinctly not from the southern United States say it.

I’m not complaining.  It’s actually quite a good and useful contraction—unlike those that presage the births of the vast majority of people.  It’s better than, for instance, “you guys” because the latter cannot easily be shortened to one syllable, and also, although in plural “guys” is often used to refer to any group of mixed sex and/or gender, the singular, “guy” almost invariably refers to a male.  Just try to consider referring to Jennifer Lopez as “that guy”.  It doesn’t quite work, does it?

On the other hand, weirdly enough, the term “bro” seems to be used without any reference to sex or gender or what have you nowadays, at least if one goes by various movies and shows and videos and postings and the like.  Various people reacting to various things can sometimes be heard to speak to anyone using the shorthand “bro”, regardless of gender or sex.  This is quite strange, to me, because it is only too obvious—and true—that “bro” is a shortened version of the word “brother” which refers to a male sibling, whether literally or figuratively, as in “he ain’t heavy; he’s my brother” and the like.

It would actually be rather funny if one started to hear guys referring to other guys* as “sis”, wouldn’t it?  One could remake the old Connect 4 commercial, but with two brothers playing, and the first one saying, “I win,” and the other objecting, “Where?  I can’t see…” and the first replying, “Here, diagonally,” and the second then grumbling, with barely disguised admiration, “Pretty sneaky, sis”.  And the first would not be offended!

All of that’s just a load of nonsense that came to my mind as I wrote it.  It was not what I planned to write; I know this because there is almost never anything about which I really plan write.  Rather like the Joker, I just write things.

I did, however, plan to state my hope that all of you in the US who celebrate it had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend.  I hope you ate one or more delightful meals with family and/or friends, with people you love and who love you, and were at least implicitly thankful for it.  If you did spend time and dine well with family and/or friends, with people you love and who love you, and you are not in any way thankful for it, well…fuck you very much.  You’re an asswipe.

Not that I’m not asswipe, myself, but I’m not that kind of one.  I did not spend Thanksgiving weekend with friends or family or with people I love or who love me.  I did eat a few decent meals by myself, but nothing really Thanksgiving-worthy, apart from some leftovers a coworker brought to the office on Saturday.

I watched The Star Beast, the new Doctor Who episode, on Saturday; it was not a great episode of Doctor Who, but it was a good one.  It was nice to see Donna Noble and the Doctor (and the Doctor Donna) back together again.  We have two more episodes over the next two Saturdays, and then, I believe, a Christmas special coming up in late December.  After that, I don’t know how long the delay will be before the next season, but I’m not sure I can wait for it.

I really don’t feel well, and I really don’t feel good (I deliberately used both of those words and, in my use at least, they have different meanings).  My life is just a decaying ruin, and the forces of erosion and rot and radioactive decay (to say nothing of the Red Death) and every other kind of relatively active entropy are eating away at it every moment.

I’m tired of everything.  I’m tired all the time, and yet I cannot stay asleep, even when I’m able to get to sleep.  I woke up this morning at roughly two o’clock, and I could not get back to sleep.  So I got up and caught the first train of the day, because there was no point in delaying.

I’ve been getting a fair amount of uncomfortable esophageal spasm recently, presumably from reflux, though I haven’t had symptomatic heartburn.  I would imagine it was chest pain from my actual heart, but I had some bad bouts of esophageal spasm way back in my late twenties, and this is pretty similar to that pain.

I guess I could be wrong, and it could be pain from my heart.  Still, it would probably be a good thing if I had a heart attack, I guess, so that’s not so troubling.  I do worry that I’d panic and try to go to the hospital or something if I had one—it’s hard to fight those fear/survival urges in the heat of the moment.  It’s like an addiction, or a bad dietary habit:  it’s so hard to stay on a diet in the face of temptation, and it’s so hard to let go of one’s life when one is in immediate danger.  Evolution has not left such things easily up to the control of the conscious mind.

Of course, the conscious mind can be wrong about things.  It would be supremely ironic if I were to have a catastrophic health emergency and suddenly come to the conclusion that, actually, you know what, I love my life…only to die shortly thereafter.  At least it would be funny, though.

Thant’s enough nonsense for today.  There will probably be more nonsense to follow, tomorrow through Friday, but I will be off this coming Saturday.  Of course, some would say that I’m “off” every day.

They are not without justification.

*See, “guy” tends to want to refer to a male.

by

I’m sorry about yesterday (not the song…the song is good, but I had nothing to do with that)

It’s Friday, and I did not write a blog post yesterday, because I did not go in to the office.  I also will not be writing a post tomorrow, because I am not scheduled to work then.

I’m waiting at the train station very early, by the way.  Technically, I arrived just in time for the scheduled first train of the day, but it’s apparently running about eleven minutes late.  It’s hard to hold this too much against them.  Over the past few days, the weather here has been so wet and windy and floody that it has bordered upon tropical storm level, but it’s persisted much longer than such tropical storms tend to do.

I didn’t go to the office yesterday as both a direct (I think) and indirect (I’m pretty sure) consequence of the weather.  You see, my back pain, with major radiation down my legs, especially the right one, was tremendously severe.  When I got up in the morning, I barely could move.  I don’t know if it was because of the weather directly, in that the changing humidity and pressure and whatnot cause my various injured spinal and connective tissue elements to act up—certainly my shoulders were also achy—but I also walked to the nearby gas station after taking the train to my station in Hollywood on Wednesday night.  Because of the rain and the wind and so on, there were lots of puddles, and my coordination was rather screwed up, so in trying to go over puddles and sometimes jumping them, I think I hurt myself.

I was going to try to take an Uber into the office, anyway, yesterday, but because of the weather, the Uber rates were more than twice what they would usually be.  Given that I felt very similar to crap, that would probably have been a bad decision, anyway.  I’m glad I rested, because while I am far from pain free, I feel better than I did.  I don’t ever really expect to be “pain free” anymore; I just try to get it below the threshold of interfering too much with conscious thought and effort.

I’m not going to be writing a blog post next Thursday, of course, because it is Thanksgiving here in the US, and that’s a day that more people take off than perhaps any other specific holiday but New Year’s Day.  It feels mildly weird not to have written my “classic” Thursday blog post two weeks in a row, but that’s just the way it goes.

I suppose that, if Christmas had fallen on a Thursday since I’ve been doing my blog, then I would have missed the blog posts two weeks in a row, because Christmas and New Years are exactly a week apart.  That probably did happen at least once sometime since I’ve started writing my fiction and writing my blog; it ought to happen once every seven years*.  But I’m not sure.  It certainly hasn’t been for a while.

My Thursday blog started basically as an attempt to promote my writing and to engage with potential readers of my fiction.  A fat lot of good that did me.  I probably should have known better.  I’ve never been terribly good at self-aggrandizement, or self-promotion, and I certainly should have realized that exposing people to my true personality—to the degree that such a thing is possible when writing a blog—was never going to be a good way to promote my work.  It’s a bit like an orc trying to enter a human beauty contest; unless it’s heavily disguised, it’s never even going to get in the door, and certainly no one looking for human beauty if going to give it high marks.

Mind you, of course, beauty is subjective and is relative to the species.  Peahens apparently find the peacock’s tail feathers not merely lovely—a sentiment many humans share—but they also find them sexy.  Moths are drawn to moth pheromones, Bower Bird females love a guy who lays out a brilliant-looking bower, even though it will never be used for anything, and certainly not for nesting.

That’s was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  My brain tends to do lots of weird things.  Although I laid around most of the time yesterday, it’s not true to say that I got a lot of rest.  My right leg, with its radiating pain, was so severe that it developed a bit of a “causalgia” phenomenon, in that vasomotor activity was affected by the pain process, and my entire leg felt tight as well as cold to the touch relative to the rest of my body.

It wasn’t too severe; it wasn’t as though it was going blue or otherwise discolored, other than a slight increased pallor.  However, it made it clear to me that my pain wasn’t “all in my head”.  It was certainly all in my nervous system, of course, but that’s a thing that spreads through the whole body, from the brain to the spine to all the limbs and the heart and lungs and the whole GI tract—the latter of which by some measures has a local nervous system as complex as the entire brain of a cat.

No wonder GI tracts can be so grumpy if you don’t treat them perfectly.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’ll not be writing tomorrow—barring the unforeseen—so I’ll next be writing on Monday, November 20th.  What a month it’s been since October 20th.  I didn’t expect to be here at this time, or indeed (possibly) to be anywhere at all—I don’t know what to make of it.

*Though, given the existence of leap years, there can be temporary deviations from the hard and fast pattern.  So Christmas/New Years might have skipped a year at some point within the past eight to ten years, and so I might not have missed my Thursday blog two weeks in a row for that reason.  I could check on it, but it’s not something about which I’m curious enough right now**.

**Though it wouldn’t be surprising if, later, the question nags at me enough that I go and look it up***.

***I did that (of course) and it turned out that, because of the 2020 leap year, Christmas skipped from Wednesday in 2019 to Friday in 2020.  So I have not missed two Thursdays in a row for that reason, since I did not begin writing my Thursday blog as early as 2013.