Pain

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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*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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Is there such a thing as Von Oldmann architecture?

It’s Wednesday morning, and here I am at the train station, writing my blog post for the day.  It’s quite wet and windy, which might have been a decent situation in which to do some walking, but I’m still feeling quite under the weather, so I haven’t done any walking of more than a mile at a time this week.  Last night/yesterday evening, I walked to the train station from work, and I had an umbrella, but it was terribly windy, so even though I was able to keep my head (and my backpack) mostly dry, my legs were soaked by the time I got to the station.

This morning, it’s not raining as hard, but it is drizzling and windy.  I considered just wearing a rain coat today, but I realized that wouldn’t protect my legs any more than the umbrella would.  I do have a long, duster-style coat that I guess I could have worn.  Maybe if it’s still windy and rainy tomorrow, I’ll wear that.

I also considered not going to the office today, but it’s Wednesday, which means it’s payroll day, so I need to go.

I started a new mantra (of sorts) yesterday, consistent with the way I expressed myself in yesterday’s post—indeed, I started it even as I walked from the train to the office in the morning:  I said, “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself.”  This was, to no one’s surprise, not at all difficult for me to maintain, unlike my former attempt at saying that I loved those things (as if to convince myself) which made my metaphorical tongue turn to metaphorical sand in my metaphorical mouth.

The new mantra is strangely freeing.  It didn’t make me nearly as tense or uncomfortable as I worried that it might.  If anything, it allowed a sense of detaching.  I didn’t feel any actual hostility or malice toward the world—there was no weird desire for revenge or destruction or what have you.  I don’t think the world ever even pretended to owe me anything good, and it certainly does not owe me anything good.  So I can’t feel any sense of affront, or wounded pride, or anything idiotic like that.

Don’t get me wrong; I can be and am idiotic in plenty of other ways.  I’m just not idiotic in that particular way.  As for hating my life and hating myself, well, what else is new?  Accepting it, saying it, has its benefits.  If I hate myself anyway, why would I care what happens to me?

I realized that this might not be the healthiest thing to have going through my mind, so I decided to provide a counterpoint by listening to the David Burns book on Cognitive Therapy, Feeling Good.  I’ve read the book before; I was recommended it by a therapist.  I’ve even done many of the exercises therein.

I recognize the value of the ideas in the book, and I know that CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) has been tested well and provides good results for many.  It’s also logical and rational in many ways, and that’s always appealing.  So I started listening to the audio-book, even as I waited for the train and rode on it.

It did help me take a nap on the train; maybe that means some of its messages went into my subconscious.  It was a nice little nap, and I didn’t miss my stop, because I wasn’t sleeping all that deeply, despite my horrendous lack of sleep the previous two nights.

It’s sad to say, but I think my body and my nervous system have sort of adapted to getting very little sleep.  I’m not saying that they’re fine with it.  That would be absurd.  Sleep is clearly crucially important to life in creatures with any kind of nervous system as we know it.  This is obvious, even if we don’t quite know why, because every creature in the world that we know of with a nervous system spends a good portion of every planetary rotation in a relatively dormant and quite vulnerable state.  If evolution were able to allow for function without sleep, one would think it would have cropped up somewhere, at least.

Of course, it’s possible that, way back in the dawn of nervous systems, hundreds of millions of years ago, life went down an accidental blind alley with respect to sleep and nerves.  Maybe the common ancestor of all nervous systems just happened upon a form of function that requires what we call sleep, and every descendant of that nervous system is stuck with a requirement that need not have been the case if some different solution to creating nervous systems had been happened upon, but it wasn’t, and so sleep cannot be escaped except by a reinvention of the nervous system by some life form.  That’s unlikely to happen for reasons similar to why new types of abiogenesis aren’t going to happen in an already crowded biosphere:  anything new would be horrendously outcompeted by life forms that have hundreds of millions to three and a half billion years advantage.

I’m dubious, though, about the possible accidental and fundamentally nonessential nature of sleep.  This is at least partly due to the recognition that even our computers eventually need to be updated and, more importantly, rebooted to function optimally.

Computers bear very little similarly to nerve cells or literal nervous systems; they were never designed to mimic nerves, anymore than an internal combustion engine was designed to mimic muscles and legs.  Von Neumann architecture has very little in common with the way nervous systems store and process information.  The former does storage and processing separately; nervous systems seem to do it as part and parcel of the very same processes.

Anyway, my point is, I don’t think I need less sleep just because for a long time I have achieved less sleep.  I think my body, my mind, my nervous system has adjusted as best it can to keep from completely falling apart—literally—in response to truly chronic insomnia.  But the system is still wearing down and suffering damage; believe me, I can tell.

I’m almost sure that at least part of my chronic pain is related to my insomnia, especially the pains that arise other than where the more concrete source of my pain is located.  And there’s clearly an association between my insomnia and my depression/dysthymia.  It’s difficult to say if one causes the other or the other causes the one or if they’re both caused by some third thing—possibly some form of autism spectrum disorder—but I give very low credence to them being only coincidentally correlated.

In any case, I am proceeding in two apparently conflicting directions at once, now:  I’m repeating a mantra that doesn’t seem in any way to come up against resistance in my mind, but which is certainly not what one could consider positive.  And I’m repeating my exposure and exploration of CBT, starting with Feeling Good.  None of it is new to me, nor are there any revelations likely to come.

I understand the points that are made in CBT, I understand and recognize the cognitive distortions associated with depression that it strives to combat.  I’m open to the possibilities, but I’m not sure it’s the right tool for the job, in my case.  I suspect my depression/dysthymia may be quasi-organic, in the sense of being more truly fundamental to the operation of my own weird little alien nervous system.

But I could be wrong, and I don’t like to jump to conclusions too precipitously.  So, I’ll finish listening to the book, and maybe get one of his other books with this month’s Audible credit.  But I’m also not going to try to extinguish the repetition of “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself” in my head.  If it goes away on its own, that’s fine.  Otherwise, it’s at least something consistent onto which to hold.  And it’s weirdly both freeing and calming, and that’s worth a lot to me.

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I was off sick yesterday. You’re welcome.

Hi, everybody.  I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer.  I brought it back to the house with me on Friday (when I left work early) and it seemed a shame not to make use of it.  Of course, this was my intention when I brought it.  I like typing much better than using the phone, as you all know, if you’ve been reading my blog posts for very long, and I also needed to give my thumbs a rest because of the relatively mild but nagging and persistent arthralgia* they’ve been having.

I am sorry that I did not write a post yesterday.  I was out sick; I have been sick all weekend, feeling quite crappy, I’m afraid.  I’m still far from my baseline health, but I need to go into the office or too many things are going to get into disarray and be terribly backed up.

Also, to be honest, when I’m just sitting at the house, I don’t do well.  It doesn’t help that we had the “Fall back” thing this weekend, but even without that, my sense of time’s passage was really screwed up over this slightly prolonged isolation.  It felt like a surreal sort of turbulent time flow, with me waking up, thinking it must be morning, and realizing that it was only ten thirty at night, and I’d barely dozed off (for instance).  My sleep has been deeply discombobulated.  I definitely got a bit of a feel for the notion of time not being linear but being a “big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.”**

Unfortunately, I haven’t been walking for three or four days, at least nothing of significance.  My back is absolutely killing me.  I can barely reach down to tie my shoes, even when seated.  I feel as though I’ve aged decades over this weekend.  I don’t know if this is partly from coughing a lot, or mainly from lying around so much or what.  Probably it’s multi-factorial.  In any case, though, I feel horribly stiff in addition to having what I suspect is an on and off fever (because I have intermittent sweats, especially after taking analgesics/antipyretics).

It’s interesting to note, as I just did when I pre-saved this blog post, that last year’s post for November 7th was written on a Monday.  So, we’ve shifted to one day later for the same date this year, at least at this time of the year.  I guess that makes sense, since 52 (weeks) times 7 (days) is 364, which gives one extra day in non-leap years.  I’ve probably noted this before, but it still sometimes strikes me as interesting, albeit probably not very important.

It also shows that I’ve been writing these daily blog posts instead of writing fiction most days of the week for at least a year, and almost certainly quite a bit longer.  That’s rather disappointing, at least to me, because these were meant to be therapeutic in some sense; I was hoping to get my mental health into better condition before nearly this long had passed.  Of course, I don’t know what my mental health would have been like had I not been writing these blog posts.  Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse.  Regrettably, I can only imagine the alternatives; I cannot actually carry out any form of controlled test.

I probably would have been better off if I had just either written fiction every day, even if almost no one ever read it, or not having written anything at all.  I don’t think I would have been any healthier, had that been the case.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were already dead*** in that case.  But at least I wouldn’t be facing this same daily grind of nonsense and futility.

The funny thing is, I could write fiction.  I’ve never had traditional writer’s block in the sense of sitting and looking at the page or screen and not knowing what to write.  I’ve just felt utterly unmotivated.  It’s much akin to the fact that I seem unable to say, “I love the world and I love myself” even in my own head.

I just have no will to do anything.  Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that I have no drive to do anything.  I have will in the sense of being able to resist various impulses, albeit imperfectly and not consistently.  The various portions of my frontal lobes that are involved in impulse regulation seem to be functioning reasonably well.  Sometimes I think they’re functioning too well.  Unfortunately, the stress-related parts of my brain have grown stronger over time—my amygdala is probably pretty beefy at this stage, and I don’t think it used to be that way.  I am much more tense and stress-able than I ever used to be.

I mean, I guess I’ve been through a fair amount, and chronic pain (and a stint in FSP) certainly doesn’t help to calm one’s fight-or-flight responses, though it can lead to kind of “learned helplessness” over time.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think.  My mind went wandering for about ten minutes just now, and I sort of forgot what I was doing, so I think I’ve said more than I have to say for today.  I hope you all are physically well, and that you’re mentally exceptionally good.  Why not?  Hope is hope; it’s only a bit more constrained than wishes.  I can wish for world peace to happen today, by some miracle, and I know that’s almost impossible, but I can (and do) sincerely hope for you all to have a good day.

*From athro- referring to joints or articulations, and -algia, referring to pain, as in analgesics.  So, arthralgia literally just means “joint pain”.  But it sounds more impressive in Latin (or is it Greek, or both?), and also, if it’s in a “dead” language, then it can be a term that medical professionals around the world can use without having to learn each other’s many terms for the various things.

**A quote from the 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant) from Doctor Who, Series 3, episode 10, “Blink”.

***Can dead people be surprised that they’re dead?  I suspect not, but it’s quite difficult to know, as we get no actual (reliable) reports from the undiscovered country.

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Please use caution; this blog post MIGHT be “triggering”

It’s Saturday, and I’m at the train station, having walked here again this morning, as I did yesterday.  It’s a bit interesting that my pedometer reads as me having walked about 5 and a half miles, when the Google Maps distance from house to station is just barely shy of 5 miles.  But, of course, that assumes more or less direct travel and my walking may meander a bit, and I take up my waiting spot at the very farthest end of the platform (to board near the front of the train).  Train platforms do tend to be long, because trains are long.

I had a very difficult day yesterday, as you may have been able to predict, if you read yesterday’s blog post.  I felt pretty horrible, despite having done my walking in the morning‒no endorphin effects, it seems, were available, or they were swamped by other forces.

During most moments of the day I felt angry and sullen and, especially, hopeless.  I frequently thought about things like dousing myself with a mixture of lighter fluid (2 kinds) and rubbing alcohol and setting myself on fire, or taking blades from the supply of replacements for my box cutter and just cutting my wrists or neck open.  It was a bit like the way one feels when one stares over the edge of a high cliff or bridge:  it would be so easy just to jump, in many ways easier than not jumping.

And it was enticing, though not in any exciting kind of way.  It was a curiosity and a sense of despair combined with a dark feeling of compulsion, and I thought of the possibilities frequently, imagining what they might be like, how it would feel and all that, without any fear, though I recognized that I would not want any pain to endure long.  Despite that, at one point I contemplated just smearing my face with charcoal light fluid and lighting it, or alternatively splashing it with Drano or similar, just to ruin what’s left of my visage, because I don’t like how I look or feel, so I might as well just take the final step of ruining how I can ever possibly look, so I no longer need even to bother imagining that I might be able to recover some of my past health or strength.

Of course, I didn’t actually do any of those things, though I brought the lighter fluid and the blades and everything out and got them near at hand, so that at least I could really feel the salience of the ideas.  I don’t really know how close I actually came to doing any of the things I contemplated.  Maybe I was not close at all; or maybe only the slightest nudge of the wrong kind would have been enough to topple me over the edge.

I certainly didn’t feel very hesitant or resistant, nor did I feel afraid.  I did not, however, want to inconvenience or frighten (or traumatize, let’s be honest) the people at work.

I also don’t want to “trigger” any potential readers who might have similar urges or self-hatred or depression or proneness to such thoughts‒that would truly be terrible.

I am likewise not trying to tell lurid and shocking tales just to get a reaction or attention‒except in the sense that I want to make it clear, in a way I’m not readily able to do face to face (so to speak), that I’m really not doing well at all, and that I could probably use some serious help.  I am not good at seeking help, though.  I hate myself too much to want to save myself, at least unreservedly.

I feel like someone who has swum or been stranded so far out to sea that land is no longer in sight‒I’m not even certain in which direction it lies‒and the prospect of swimming back to shore seems so daunting and exhausting and hopeless that the idea of just giving up and drowning seems easier (and perhaps better).

And, of course, one occasionally wishes for sharks to come.  But shark attacks are much fewer and farther between than fear and popular culture would lead one to believe.

Oh well.  It seems that I can tread water for a very long time, to push that analogy farther*.  But I am very tired in many ways and I never can seem to get enough sleep‒which I guess makes sense when one is treading water.  I don’t know which way to go, or how I would possibly be able to reach shore even if I did.  Maybe the Coast Guard or some friendly fisher-folk will come along and happen to see me and rescue me.  Or perhaps I’ll just go under.

Whatever happens to me, I hope you all have a good remainder of your weekend.

*This analogy at least helps to explain why it’s so frustrating when well-meaning people say things like, “Hold on, keep going, don’t give up.”  Imagine a suspense movie in which someone is stranded out at sea and is treading water but they have a radio or phone or whatever, and someone says to them (over the phone), “Just keep treading water, keep swimming, there are people who would be sad if you drowned.”  And the swimmer, optimistically trying to complete the speaker’s sentence, might say, “Is a rescue party on the way?  Are you in a boat or a search plane?”  And the caller says, “What?  No, no, nothing like that.  I don’t have a boat or a plane or anything.  I just don’t want you to drown.”  And the swimmer asks, “Well, have you called the Coast Guard or the Navy or the Police or something?”  And the phoner replies, “Oh, no, I haven’t called anyone or tried to get you help or anything.  I just don’t want you to drown.”  Such a swimmer might be justified in finding the exhortation to keep swimming a bit presumptuous and irritating, perhaps even maddening and disheartening.  I’m not saying this reflects the actual attitude of such “callers”.  I’m quite certain that they have the very best of intentions.  But this is the way it can feel for the person who is struggling, and who is told to try to hold on, but given no material help in doing so.

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How can one walk in such a State?

Well, here we all are again.  I’m at the train station, having walked here this morning.  The weather’s not bad for walking; it’s warm, but not terribly humid, and there’s a good breeze.

I fear that the following conclusion is inescapable:  I will have to dispense with my boots for any serious walking, and possibly indeed for simple, day-long wear.  Though I walked a total of less than two miles yesterday, and had on knee supports and whatnot, my left foot and my right Achilles tendon, and my hip and back all were quite uncomfortable by the end of the day.  They were all still rather stiff and in pain this morning as I started out (now wearing my New Balance walking shoes) but by the time I’d gotten close to the station, that seemed to have been mostly wobbled out.

So…I feel better after 5 miles in these shoes than after just a physically idle day in the boots.  It’s very sad, and I’m probably far more disappointed than makes any sense at all.  I like those boots a lot.  But I have too much chronic pain already through which to fight to try to get anything done, so I really cannot expose myself to that extra damage.

I really ought to get rid of the boots just to eliminate the temptation to use them, lest I wear them in a fit of unjustified optimism and set myself back significantly.  It would be good to be able to donate them to someone or something, but I don’t really have the wherewithal to do so.  I have no usable vehicle, nor a driver’s license* to drive to an appropriate place for donation, nor anyone to drive me there, and I don’t want to take an Uber for such a purpose, and certainly not to renew my state ID.  If I’m not going to seek medical or psychological/psychiatric help for my much more serious concerns, then I’ll be damned if I’m going to supplicate myself to the bureaucrats of one of the most benighted states‒ironically so, given its nickname‒in the US.

I arrived at the station in plenty of time for the 610 train, but I let it go, as I did the last time I walked here, to give myself time to cool down and dry off a bit before the 630 train.  Also, of course, I’m writing this blog post.

I’m reading Robert Sapolsky’s new book, and it’s quite good and interesting, though so far it’s made no points nor discussed any facts with which I wasn’t already familiar.  I almost “flipped” ahead to the last chapter, because Sapolsky says he’s going to be discussing some esoterica about depression there, and I know he is both personally and professionally interested in that subject.  I hope‒not much‒to maybe learn something new, though I don’t expect it to help me at all.

I also listened to Sean Carroll’s latest podcast yesterday, and it was interesting, but quite short.  I took note and sent myself emails about 2 books, one that the guest recently wrote and one that he mentioned, about which I’ve heard before.  In that moment, I thought they sounded interesting, and I’m sure they would be.  But now that I’m past that first instant of intrigue, I know that I’m not going to get them.  Nothing is particularly interesting; even nothingness itself is not terribly interesting.  I’m reading Sapolsky’s book because I’ve been waiting for it for months, and I liked his earlier book, Behave, and I enjoyed his “Great Courses” course.  He’s an interesting individual.

But there’s only so much I can do to maintain engagement.  I don’t have anyone in my day to day life with whom I can talk deeply about pretty much any of this stuff, and my own company isn’t adequate to keep a conversation going.

I don’t really watch any TV shows or movies or anything‒I mainly just watch “reaction” videos on YouTube, because that’s almost vaguely like watching the movies or shows with a friend who hasn’t seen them before…but not really.  There’s no back and forth, obviously, unless one counts the comments sections, which I don’t.

Also, I have to face it, pretty much none of the people whom I enjoy watching react to various movies or shows would probably want to hang out with me.  They all would surely have better things to do with their time, and certainly better people with whom to do whatever they do.  I’m not just making a snap judgment here; this has been my consistent experience in life.  Most people get tired of being around me before too long, even if they like me (or love me), and in all fairness, I have to admit that I find being around most other people quite stressful and tense much of the time, even if I like them.  A big part of that is, of course, born of fear, and the fact that I sense and recognize how much they think I’m weird and unpleasant, but it’s not as though I can just choose not to fear and sense and recognize those things.

It’s a conundrum indeed, to want to have friends but to have such a peculiar character and  such specialized and rarefied interests that like minded people are hard to find and that in any case one has difficulty maintaining relationships with other people even in the best of circumstances.

Oh, well.  Life is shit, but the world never promised that it would be kind or fulfilling or just or fair or pleasant.  It promises only one thing.

On that note, I’ll bring this post to a close.  It’s already overlong.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Also, my state ID expired Friday, and the stupid website for renewing it has been dysfunctional for as long as I’ve been trying to request a renewal.  I will probably try once or twice more, but I have no desire to try to make an appointment to go to the offices‒none of them are anywhere near where I live or work, and I obviously cannot drive to them.  There’s not really any point to getting the thing renewed, anyway.  It’s not as though my identity itself was granted to me by the state of Florida (AKA America’s syphilitic penis).  The whole state can drown for all I care…and before too very long, much more of it will indeed be underwater than already is.  I’d rather see it burn, but you can’t always get what you want.