Pain

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Celebrate good times? Come ON.

I had a notion this weekend that I would write this blog post on Sunday afternoon/evening and set it up to publish itself‒so to speak‒this morning.  Then, I would use this morning to perhaps review an/or rebegin HELIOS, or maybe to work on Outlaw’s Mind or DFandD.  I even thought I could write any of those‒especially HELIOS‒on my smartphone, since I have them on Google Docs as well as MS Word.

So I thought, anyway.  When I looked, though, I found that I don’t actually appear to have any version of HELIOS on my Google drive, so it must either be on Word or I never typed in the little bit I had of it.  Of course, I could have just decided to restart and bring one of my spiral bound notebooks and write in that.  The only trouble with doing it that way, if I write during my morning commute, is that I eventually have to retype everything into one of my computers or smartphones.

Now, I have never done the thing* of handwriting a first draft and then copying it into a phone, but I have done that with handwriting and computer word processors.  That method has produced some of my best stuff (by some measures), including Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, Paradox City, and even part of The Vagabond, though that last one was written mainly on WriteNow on a Mac SE.  So, maybe the handwritten-to-smartphone idea could actually work pretty well, now that I think about it.

Anyway, all that’s fairly moot, because I did not in fact write this blog post on Sunday afternoon nor yet on Sunday evening.  I am writing it, as I usually do, in the morning, in the midst of my commute to the office, which is so effing early, but which is nevertheless far later than when I woke up.

I’m more than a bit disappointed in myself for failing to carry through with that idea, but it’s easy to think of ideas that seem so doable when you first think of them.  And they are doable, of course.  Not only is it physically possible for me to have written this post yesterday evening and to set a precedent of doing the blog posts in the evening and writing fiction in the morning, it’s banal.  If you told someone that had happened, they would be unlikely to do much more than shrug and say something like a noncommittal “cool”, before going on their way.

But as we all know‒or should know‒it’s much easier to intend to do things in the future than it is to muster the motivation to do them in the moment when one was hoping to do them.  There are many shifting, often conflicting, drives in the human** psyche, and our actions are born of a kind of vector sum of all those “forces” in any given moment.

But not only do those forces shift due to things as seemingly mundane as one’s current state of appetite or fatigue, but they are also affected by what one has done immediately before; for the outcome of that vector sum in one instant feeds back on the system in numerous places, changing the sum (I was going to write “changing the calculus” but I thought that might be mathematically confusing and even misleading, since I am not discussing calculus) with every new iteration.  These iterations and changes aren’t quite happening on the scale of the Planck time***, but they happen quickly‒certainly at least at the “speed of thought”, whatever that might be.

Even the physiological, hormonal, energy state of the body from moment to moment changes those vectors, sometimes a great deal.  If you find yourself needing to use the bathroom while you’re trying to accomplish some task, it can certainly change the state of your concentration.  And if you should suddenly begin to have difficulty breathing, it will distract you from pretty much anything else.

That’s why on airplanes they tell you that, in case of cabin depressurization, if you’re traveling with someone who needs help putting on the oxygen mask, put yours on first, before you help your companion.  If you can’t breathe, your ability to help anyone else is going to tank very rapidly.  We can live weeks to months without food, days without water, but only minutes without air.

On a less extreme angle, if one is hypoglycemic (for whatever reason), it strongly affects all the functions of one’s body, particularly one’s neuroendocrine system.  Less extreme but more persistent issues can sabotage one’s focus upon much else.

I don’t need to tell you, probably, that pain makes it much harder to focus and bring effort to bear on other things.  This is one of the most annoying aspects of chronic pain:  one does not quite ever become accustomed to it, because that would miss the whole biological point of pain.  Making pain something you could ignore would be a bit like making a fire alarm that plays soft, easy-listening elevator music at unobtrusive decibel levels.  It would be less annoying, but being burned to death in a fire is a bigger issue, even if it isn’t very likely.

Of course, if your (typical) fire alarm is stuck on, you may not ever be able completely to ignore it.  You also will not know when there is a real fire. Or at least you will be less likely to know.  And since that can potentially be a matter of life and death, the chronic alarm, like chronic pain, is in its own manifold ways life-threatening.

All that is very tangential to my original point, which was that I am writing this blog today, not writing fiction (at least not this morning on my commute).

Oh, well.  If there’s one day I can let myself get away with slacking a bit, I guess it’s today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*How’s that for clever, descriptive writing?

**Or whatever I am.

***Though the processes that underlie them do.

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I can’t think of an appropriate Shakespeare-based title I haven’t already used

Hello and good morning.

Actually, though, I’m at least starting this blog post on Wednesday evening as I wait for my train.  I will have edited it Thursday morning, however.  I know this for a definitive fact, because this very sentence, and the immediately preceding one, is being/has been written on Thursday morning, while I’m editing.

Right now, though—that being Wednesday evening—I feel like I won’t have the energy for anything tomorrow.  I don’t think I would have the energy to breathe if it were not an automatic process.

All of this is getting too tedious; everything is getting tedious.  It’s the same old stupid thing after the previous same old stupid thing before the next same old stupid thing, and there’s no point and no joy in almost any of it.  It’s just compulsion; it’s just habit.  It’s just the fear that, if I stop doing this, I don’t think I’ll do anything else.

But why should I do anything else?  Why not just stop everything?

It would have no significant impact on anyone or anything.  It’s certainly unlikely to make things worse overall.  The world is as shitty as it’s ever yet been in my lifetime.  Humans have become ever more disappointing—not all of them mind you, but so many have become so disappointing that the good ones seem fewer and further between.

Of course, I’m pretty disappointing myself, albeit for somewhat different reasons than most.  So I don’t really have much right to complain.  It’s not as though I’m not a loser, after all.

Yeah, I think maybe I’m pretty much close to done—with everything.  I certainly don’t have any desire to celebrate having lived yet another pointless year in which I produce nothing of value and just wallow in the fact that biological existence has a tendency to continue—at least up to a point—if it’s not actively curtailed.

I’m so tired all the time, and I’m in pain all the time.

Just earlier today (Wednesday), it occurred to me—though I’ve probably said this before—that I feel as though I’ve already been embalmed, because just moving around in any way, just kicking any of my joints into flexion or extension, is difficult and often painful.  I feel stiff and sore; I also feel like my limbs are somewhat out of place, though it may be hard to convey that sense adequately.

I’m uncomfortable in my body and uncomfortable in my mind.  There are very few compensations.

I’m not saying there are none, and they are definitely nice when they happen, but they are few and far between, like tiny oases in a desert.  They are also bits of relief that I certainly do not deserve.

I’m also tired of complaining all the time.  I feel that it has to get really old for the people who read this blog.  But I don’t have much that’s more upbeat or uplifting to say.  I certainly don’t have much positive to say about myself.  I’ve failed at everything that actually matters to me, and at quite a few things that don’t, despite my supposed gifts and abilities.

It’s enough.  I really just ought to die soon.  My birthday is coming up; it would be appropriate for that to be the day I died.  At least it would have a nice faux symmetry.  It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I like symbols and symmetries and timing and so forth.  I just feel…well, I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t feel like putting in any more effort.  It’s useless and pointless and irritating.

Maybe I’ll feel different in the morning.  Maybe I’ll feel worse*.  Maybe I’ll develop enough resolve to take final action of some kind—I certainly have plenty of methods and means available.  I’ve been collecting and preparing such means of egress for a long time—I have nooses, and blades, and flammable liquids, and nonrebreather masks and tubing and regulator valves that could be used to deliver inert gases, and I have rat poison and various other potential toxins, for instance.

Or maybe I’ll develop enough energy to continue for a bit longer, however pointless it may be.

But I don’t know what to do.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  The only thing I have to which to look forward is occasionally seeing my youngest child, which started recently.  That’s always very nice, of course; that’s wonderful beyond easy explication.  But I feel—I must admit this may just be my mental illness speaking—that it’s an unkind obligation I’m putting on them, though I do not want to denigrate them or cast aspersions on their character.  That would be most unjust.

So it’s probably in my mind.  Nevertheless, I feel that I am causing undue trouble for them, and that I am not worth that trouble, not in the slightest.

I don’t know what to do.  I am so exhausted by everything, and I feel that I am nothing but pathetic.  I just want to exit, to escape, to be able to stop trying, even if it’s not truly what one could call “rest”.  I just need to let go—or something.

Whatever.  We’ll see.  I may not even post this post tomorrow morning.  I may just write something else**.  I don’t know.

TTFN

*This is a morning footnote, and it’s hard to say whether I feel different.  I feel slightly more rested, of course; I’m probably not rested enough, since my body doesn’t seem to like to indulge itself in getting enough rest.  I’m certainly still stiff and in pain, but I also nevertheless did my pull-ups this morning, so I have a bit more energy.  Also, I am a creature of habit, but I am not a nun, though I am worth none.

**I have not.  This is just the edited version of the post I wrote yesterday evening.

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Noisy events on the horizon of my attention span

It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?  Well, I guess it may not be Tuesday when you’re reading this, but it’s Tuesday as I’m writing it.  It’s the second day in the latest of a seemingly endless stream of utterly pointless “work weeks”.

Welcome to our world.  Welcome to our world.  Welcome to our world of noise.

That’s a paraphrase of the song that was (and may still be) sung by the dancing animatronic puppets in the main front area of the big F.A.O. Schwartz store that sits just by the southeast corner of Central Park in Manhattan.  I’m not sure why I felt like including it there, but it definitely expresses the sentiment I have that nearly everything in the universe is effectively “noise” in the information theoretic sense.  At the very least, the signal-to-noise ratio in the world is vanishingly tiny.

It’s not zero, mind you.  There’s some info hiding in all the nonsense.

Of course, whether something is signal or noise depends very much on what signal you’re seeking.  If you’re trying to detect gravitational waves, then nearly everything else around is “noise” in the sense that it is not evidence of gravitational waves, and is just going to make that evidence harder to find.  But if you’re an ornithologist, then at least some of that seeming noise might be the birdsong “signal” of a rarely seen species there in Louisiana, which I think is where the first LIGO observatory was constructed*.

And, of course, if you’re a seismologist, what you consider a significant signal would very much be noise to the LIGO people.  If there were a gravitational wave strong enough to be seismically significant, it would have to be from a very close and catastrophically violent event.

We don’t expect there to be such a thing any time soon.  And apart from such events, gravitational waves are so relatively weak‒gravity being by far the weakest of the “forces” of nature‒that so far they can only be detected from things like black hole and/or neutron star mergers, which are ridiculously violent events.

Incidentally, apparently recent observations of one such merger has given confirmatory evidence for Stephen Hawking’s black hole horizon theorem**.  That states that when two black holes merge, the (surface) area of the new, combined event horizon must be at least as large as the two prior event horizon areas combined.

In this, as in other things, black holes and their horizons act very much like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and that is consistent with the Bekenstein-Hawking thesis that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the area of the event horizon, as measured in square Planck lengths.  Indeed, the maximum entropy‒the maximum information‒of any given region of space is that which would be encoded upon an event horizon that would hypothetically enclose such a space.

As for the volume of a black hole within the event horizon…well, that’s harder to quantify.  The apparent radius, as judged from the sphere of the event horizon‒the Schwarzschild radius for a non-rotating black hole‒is almost certainly much smaller than the radius that would be perceived by someone within the horizon, for spacetime is very distorted there.  Indeed, I suspect that, at least by some measures, the volume within a black hole‒or at the very least the radius from the “center” to the horizon‒is infinite, with the “singularity” actually stretching down away forever.

Of course, an asymptotically infinite well of that sort need not always have infinite volume.  There is, for instance, the counter-example of “Gabriel’s Horn”, a shape made by rotating a truncated function (y = 1/x for x ≥ 1) around the x-axis.  This shape has infinite surface area, but it has a finite volume(!).  So you could fill it with paint, but you could never finish painting the inner and outer surface.  Weird, huh?

Of course, the dimensionality of things within a black hole’s event horizon is probably at least one step higher than things in the Gabriel’s Horn comparison, so the finite/infinite comparisons may not translate.

I’d like to be able to do a better job working that out with more than my intuition; that’s one reason why I own no fewer than four fairly serious books on General Relativity.

That’s not the only reason, of course.  I would also like to try to solve what happens to a space ship that accelerates near enough to the speed of light that its relativistic mass and relativistic length contraction puts it below its own Schwarzschild radius (at least in the direction of motion).  Also, how would that figuring be changed if the ship were rotating around the axis of its motion***?

Unfortunately, I rarely have the mental energy to put into pursuing adequate mastery of the mathematics of GR, and so I can (so far) just try to visualize and “simulate” the spacetime effects in my imagination.  That’s fine as a starting place, but even Einstein had to master the mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry and matrices and tensors before he could make General Relativity mathematically rigorous.

It’s almost certainly a pipe dream that I will ever get to that level of expertise.  My chronic pain and chronic depression (dysthymia) combined with the effects of my ASD (level 2****, apparently) and the effort that’s required for me to act “normal” enough to get along just really wear me out mentally.  It’s frustrating.  I have a stack of pertinent texts above my desk at work, where I hope they will entice me.  I even have a copy of my old Thomas and Finney college calculus text there too, so I can do some reviewing in that.

If only I were able to spend some time without pain and to get a good night’s sleep once in a while, I might even make progress.  I suspect that such things are not in the cards, however.

I would love to be dealt The Magician (in Tarot cards) but I fear that I am just The Fool.  Oh, well, that’s all just metaphorical, anyway.  It’s possible to predict the future, of course, but it is difficult, and it’s very unlikely that any set of cards‒however cool they may be‒is the way to do it.

*I remembered correctly.  It is in Louisiana.

**The theorem, being a theorem, is mathematically rigorous, but the question remains whether it describes the way our universe actually works.  That is always a matter of credences rather than “proof” in the mathematical sense.  In the real world, probabilities may come vanishingly close to zero or to one, but they never quite reach them.

***In Special Relativity, when something is traveling around a circle at a significant fraction of the speed of light, length contraction has the effect of “shrinking” the circle from the “point of view” of that which is moving at that speed.

****”Requiring substantial support” according to the official definition.  I do not have such support.

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Is this optimism?

Well, it’s Monday again.  That probably wouldn’t make as good a song title as It’s Raining Again by Supertramp, but I imagine it could be a nicely melancholy ditty.  That’s unlike the weirdly chipper, upbeat impression of that Supertramp tune, which certainly didn’t feel like someone lamenting the rain or a love that was at an end.

Perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention to the deeper meaning of the song.  Honestly, I don’t remember many of the lyrics, and that usually means I never really got into it.  If I get into a song‒assuming I can understand them‒I tend to remember the lyrics indefinitely.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I get a particular song, of course.  I may not really relate to a song, but like it nevertheless.  Sometimes it’s just about the music and the beat.

Of course, my understanding of a song may evolve with time, and it may be different from what the songwriter(s) intended.  This is fair game, as far as I can see, once a song is released for public consumption.  It’s certainly fair for other people to interpret my songs however they wish, for themselves.

For instance there are two Radiohead songs that I interpret differently from the way most people seem to interpret them (based on comments online).  The first is Lift which was one of the OKComputer era songs that was left off that album but released on OK/notOK.  Its tone apparently felt too upbeat for the rest of the album at the time of initial release.

But to me, the feeling the song and lyrics invoke is not of a person being literally rescued from being stuck in a lift, but being rescued from their life (which is close in spelling to “lift”) and escaping into the comparative freedom of death.  “Empty all your pockets, ‘cause it’s time to come home.”  It feels like such a release.

The ending may seem to be slightly against that, but Thom does sing “Today is the first day of the rest of your days” not the rest of your life as the saying usually goes.  I don’t know for sure if Thom intended it as I take it, but given the tone of songs like No Surprises and Exit Music (for a film) I don’t think it’s a huge leap.

I have a similar interpretation of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi which has such lines as “everybody leaves if they get the chance/and this is my chance/I’ll get eaten by the worms and weird fishes/picked over by the worms/and weird fishes” and of course the song’s repeated last line(s), “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

I sometimes feel that Thom has (or maybe had) a similar feeling that life was…well, perhaps not torture but just terribly stressful and loud and full of unpleasant sensations and expectations and that it often becomes too much and one just wants to stop, to escape, to “come home”‒just to cease.

As I understand it, that’s kind of the idea of at least some versions of Buddhism:  the desire* to escape the cycle of karma and rebirth, to stop having to live.  But if you don’t believe in reincarnation‒and I really, really don’t‒then escaping from that cycle is as easy as just dying.  And dying is what happens when you stop taking actions necessary to live; death is the default state.

Of course, pushing in the other direction is the eons of natural selection that chose ancestors for their tendency to try to stay alive and thereby become ancestors.  Creatures that had no drive to continue despite pain or fear did not tend to leave that many offspring.  This is true across all Kingdoms, Phyla, Classes, Orders, Families, Genuses, and Species.  Natural selection is a merciless filter; it selects for life, even if life is torture.

So by the time humans (and humanoids) grew minds sufficient to contemplate whether these are worthwhile drives, it/they was/were long since embedded deeply into our natures‒deeper than the level of the nervous system, but also permeating that.

Wow, I didn’t really expect to go off on that tangent.  I thought I was going to mention that there are songs that lament Mondays but also some that seem to celebrate it and then go somewhere from there.  I guess that notion didn’t grab my attention enough.

Maybe I’m just chronically depressed and overwhelmed and stressed out and tired of trying to fight against feeling these things, of trying to want to continue.  There is nowhere that I feel that I “belong”, certainly nowhere available to me now.  I have very little energy for anything beyond stupid basic animal survival, and I’m not doing great at that.

And I’m in pain all the fucking time, even when I’m asleep.  How can I know that I’m in pain when I’m asleep?  Because I fall asleep in pain and the pain is then often what wakes me up, and just as one has a background time sense when sleeping, there is a background awareness of, or at least a background presence of, pain.

I’m very tired of it all.  There are not enough positive things to counterbalance the negative.  There may be plenty of people out there who truly love being alive‒many of the worst people seem to enjoy their lives quite thoroughly, providing strong counter-evidence against any kind of natural justice‒but I don’t.  I am basically alone, sitting around and stewing in my self-dislike.

I must be, in some weird way, the most idiotic optimist I know, because I’m still here, as if I expect at least a decent chance of things getting better at some point in the future.

But really, I don’t expect things to get better.  I can see no good reason to continue with the curve of my mental state so far below the x-axis all the time.  I’m just making the net integral of my life more and more negative with each instant, with each infinitesimal, that I live.

All that being said, I nevertheless hope that you all have a good day and a good week.

*Of course, in the end, as I understand it, the outcome of practice is to lose any sense of desire, and by doing so, one loses the tendency to experience dukkha.  The path ceases to be the means to a goal, but is, if anything, the goal itself…or rather, the concept of goal ceases to mean much.

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“And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone…”

It’s Friday, and I feel as though I’ve recently run an ultra-marathon‒except that, if I were in the habit of running ultra-marathons, I think I would be more physically fit.  I like running, actually; I used to get that famous “runner’s high” endorphin rush, and it made me feel that if I just pushed a little bit extra with my next step, I could take off and fly.

Alas, my chronic pain has made it very difficult to do regular jogging and/or running.  I still like to walk, but I have to be careful.  In any case, pain saps my energy even for walking, and for many other seemingly minor things.

I’ve had a lot of pain this week, in my usual places as well as in my more newly encroached-upon regions, like my right hand/wrist/forearm/elbow.  I wish I could sleep better, just to escape from it, but my sleep has also been even worse than usual this week.

I’m stressed by the laundry machine thing as well, of course.  I’ve had to wear old backup clothes and buy quite a few new pieces of clothing, chewing up some of my savings, such as they are, and that’s so frustrating.

I hate my life, but I’m stuck in a sort of slight local bump in the middle of a huge surrounding value-sink, a kind of one-person Nash equilibrium.  There is almost nothing in my life (my daily life, anyway) that is much good, but to change my life would nevertheless at least temporarily make everything worse, and there is no way of knowing if it would ever get better.

So, I do nothing but what you “see”, waiting here for the branch* to break, which I’m sure it will do before very long at all.  It could be today; I would not be surprised.  I barely had the energy to go back to the house after work last night, and I can barely get going to go to work this morning (though I am doing it).

I don’t know why I do it.  It’s probably more out of habit and training than anything else.  Not only do I find no lasting happiness or fulfilment, I have no even momentary peace of mind.  I just occasionally get so exhausted that I am able to become unconscious, but that lasts a very short time before I sort of start awake, as if I’ve heard enemy troops going through the jungle nearby.

I’ve never fought any wars in any jungles, of course.  But I just don’t ever feel safe**.  And I certainly have no squad, no fellowship, nor even any partner with whom to share the watch or whatever.

Lone tigers can do well, I guess, since that is their nature.  But wolves and humans and humanoids (like me) are not really at our best when alone.  That was why in the ancestral environment, ostracism was such a serious punishment.  A human alone on the Serengeti thirty thousand years ago was a human who was unlikely to survive for long, let alone to leave any offspring.

It’s appropriate for something like I am, I suppose.  If I were worth being around, there would probably be people around me.  But whatever compensations I was able to generate in the past to make my weirdness worth tolerating, I don’t have the energy or the will‒or the skill, to be thorough‒to bring those things to bear.  I’m not even sure what they are anymore.

Oh, well.  It’s not like there’s any reason to suspect that anyone else knows what they’re doing or has many true, deep insights.  There are a few people here and there in history who figure out useful things, but everyone is merely flesh and blood.  Their minds and wills and insights are markedly finite.  One can learn what one can from them, but one can expect no deep, final answers.

There may be no such deep, final answers.  The universe shows no evidence of having been built for us, after all.  We are just epiphenomena.  Don’t let anyone try to fool you with any ridiculous “fine-tuning” argument(s).  The universe is not fine-tuned for us.  There is almost nowhere in the universe where we can survive.  I made a video that more or less talked about this, if I recall correctly.  Even the Earth is largely hostile to us, and it’s by far the most livable place in the known universe.

The fine-tuning claims remind me a bit of people who say that natural immunity is adequate (or even best) and that we don’t need vaccines.  People can imagine this to be true only because they are the recipients of the world their ancestors created: a world where there are few deadly diseases that wipe people out in childhood the way they used to, because of measures like vaccines.

Or‒to think of other people who speak and act out of ignorance of what it has taken to make the world in which they find themselves‒we have those who decry capitalism as fundamentally evil all while writing on their laptops and tablets and smartphones and driving their electric cars to get overpriced coffee-like dessert beverages from international coffee chains.

Don’t even get me started on flat-earthers.  The frikking ancient Greeks and Egyptians and Phoenicians and all those ancient civilizations knew the Earth was round.  Eratosthenes even figured out how big it was, to within a few percent of our modern measurements, about 2200 years ago.

No intelligent people who paid attention and thought things through (or cared) ever really thought the Earth was flat.  If the Earth were flat, on a clear day you could climb to the top of a high building and essentially see to the edge in all directions.  With a good enough telescope and no interfering mountains, you could peep through someone’s Tokyo window from Chicago.  The Earth is not flat.

I, however, am a flat person‒not in the sense of being roughly planar, but rather in the sense that all my fizz is gone; my pep and vigor are asymptotically approaching zero.

At least it’s Friday.  Maybe next week will be better.

I doubt it, though.

*Or the camel’s back, if you prefer.

**I’m actually not safe, of course.  No one ever is.  But there are gradations of safety, and probability rules ordinary reality.  When risk is low enough, one should ideally feel quite different, much more even-keeled, than when risk is high.  Unfortunately, that’s often not how things are.

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“Broken branches trip me as I speak.”

Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday…I can’t think of any jokes or plays on words regarding this day of the week that I haven’t already done, probably ad nauseam.  That’s my habit, it seems:  perseveration, repetition, all that stuff.  That’s probably related to the ASD thing.  It’s certainly been with me all my life in one form or another, or at least as far back as I can remember.

Speaking of “as far back as I can remember”:  I think my oldest memory‒certainly one of the oldest‒is of having to be carried out of The Three Caballeros in the main street theater in Disney World (currently known as the Magic Kingdom), because they started shooting their guns.  I remember the noise being painful and terrifying, and I remember someone picking me up and taking me out of the theater.  I would have been about two years old, I believe.

I used to be unable to tolerate loud noises such as fireworks and muskets* and the like.  I also hated getting my hair cut, I remember that; but I also really hated getting it combed, especially since it was so prone to tangles.

Enough pointless recollection.  I don’t even know what I was trying to discuss there.

Ugh.  I don’t even know why I’m doing this, he said, inadvertently quoting Luke Skywalker from The Empire Strikes Back.  I mean, I get the nature of habit, but I don’t want to be a creature that blindly follows habit.  I’ve been trying to improve my own habits, to decrease or eliminate bad ones, to inculcate good new ones (or to reinitiate older habits that were good).

But even those objectives, though “good” in and of themselves from the point of view of having better strength of character or whatever, are also pointless in the end.  If I’m just robotically carrying out “good” habits without joy or friendship or love or anything along those lines, it’s just a Sisyphean task, and I’ve never been convinced by Camus on that subject.  I’ve written about this before, but I’m not sure precisely where and when.

I’ve probably written about all of this before.  Everything is repetitive and dull; it’s so irritating.  The YouTube algorithm is even failing to find me videos in which I have enough interest to distract myself for a moment.  The other social media are likewise tedious to annoying; they’re mostly just online forms of distilled human stupidity.  As if human stupidity weren’t concentrated enough already.

I’m not interested in any new science right now, or math, or computer stuff, or philosophy, or even fiction (new or old).  I have no interest in any movies or shows that are coming out; what a joke that landscape entails.  I also have no interest in listening to or writing or playing music, despite my Radiohead quote in the title of this post.

Oh, yeah, and every day, so much of the day, so much of me hurts.  That takes the bloom off many a potential rose.

I’m not even happy about the fact that it’s October and Halloween is coming.  I have no one with whom to celebrate it.  Ditto for the subsequent celebrations.  Holidays are things people celebrate with other people.  Maybe not all possible kinds of people do it that way, but on this planet it seems pretty consistent.

I thought about it recently, as if for the first time, though I don’t see how it could have been:  For the initial long stretch of my life, I was always around other people, even in my personal life.  I was the third of three children, so my parents and siblings were always about; I even shared a room with my brother until I was high school age.

I was in the same house and school system from K through 12 as they say, so I knew my fellow students and had several good friends.  Then, in college, I had a consistent roommate for all four years‒a most excellent one, I may say‒and another core group of friends.

Then, of course, I got married.  That entailed a bit of a rift with my own family‒I won’t get into that cluster fuck, because no one comes out looking good‒but also became a welcomed part of my then-wife’s family.  Unfortunately, with respect to my prior friends, when I’m away from people I have serious trouble maintaining ties‒this is apparently related to autism, but I’ve always just felt ashamed of it but incapable of doing otherwise.

Then of course I went to med school and residency and lived with my wife, and eventually we had kids, and that was wonderful‒they are wonderful‒but then my injury and chronic pain happened, and I guess my underlying ASD didn’t help me deal with that.

Then I got separated and then got divorced**.  And then I made the foolish (however well-intended they were, which they were) choices that led to me being a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years (minus gain time).

Gradually, more and more, I have been alone by myself, and I am not good at taking care of myself***.  It’s odd; I used to be pretty good at taking care of other people, though I don’t think I have that will anymore, but I’ve never been good at taking care of myself.

And when, over time, everyone you care about goes away, consistently, then whatever your priors were, your Bayesian assessment of probabilities almost has to lead you to a high credence that you are a big part of the problem.

And by “you” I mean, of course, me.

*For instance, at the musket festival at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan…an immensely cool place, by the way.  Greenfield Village, I mean.  I don’t really know anything about the rest of Dearborn, but I expect it’s fine.

**I deliberately put this in the passive voice, because it wasn’t my idea.  I think I would never have sought a divorce‒it’s not really in my nature‒but I wasn’t going to try to coerce someone who didn’t want to be around me to stay around me, despite oaths freely given and all that.  I could never blame someone for finding my company objectionable.

***As for what “self” actually means, I’m using it here informally, just as a general reference to the person writing this blog and about whom it is being written.  There are no deeper metaphysical meanings; you can infer them if you wish, but that doesn’t mean they were implied.

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“I’m falling down the spiral, destination unknown”

Well, it’s Friday morning, and I’m still fasting.  I’m also, once again, writing this post on my smartphone.  It is so hard not to take the easiest, lowest “action” route at any given time in any given moment, such as when leaving the office to go back to the house.  I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised by that; it’s what the laws of nature themselves do at every time in every place, following the “path” with the least local action.

That is local though.  Nature doesn’t necessarily come out with the most straightforward long-term pathway for things.  That would require it to see ahead, to be able to act at a distance, in a more literal and broad sense than even just the collapse of the wave-function*.  And so, likewise, for instance (please forgive me for being very loose with my analogies) I leave the mini lapcom at the office even though I will regret having done so the next morning.

And so, also, I will snack on and just eat unhealthy foods in too-great amounts, even though I will regret it later, and despite prior experience.  That prior experience can only change my action when its negative effect applies strongly enough in the moment of temptation.  But alas, it’s difficult to get to that point.

If I were somehow to get sick to my stomach‒or, well, even just nauseated‒every time I ate anything but the healthiest food, I would probably rather quickly stop desiring a lot of foods, because nausea is a very strong internal signal that leads to longer-term aversion in the human nervous system, a fact shaped by evolution to prevent someone from eating poisonous or infectious foods more than once (ideally).

Anyway…

I’m tolerating my fast so far with minimal trouble, which doesn’t surprise me.  Indeed, by the end of work yesterday, I felt very upbeat, at least physically.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was euphoric, but it was a feeling in the same genus, if not the same species.

However, I did not sleep well last night, even for me, which surprised me a bit.  I honestly expected I would probably feel sleepier than usual, just as a matter of energy conservation.  Of course, that would fly in the face of my own reasoning about the extra alertness and motivation engendered by food deprivation, at least up to a point.  So I should not be surprised, and if I am, that’s a sign of my own relative lack of thorough and rigorous thinking about what was happening.

Mind you, it’s only been 36 hours since I last ate something.  That’s not exactly earthshaking.  I’m sure that other states of mind and body would/will arise if I continue to fast.  I do feel a little floaty and disconnected already, but then my mind is weird even at the best of times.

One thing that fasting makes clear to me:  food really is practically the only thing that gives me any reliable dose of joy anymore, however transitory and however low the rebound takes me afterward.  There is nothing else in my life‒nothing of which to speak, anyway.

I don’t do anything for fun, I don’t really have any conversations with anyone (except my sister slightly less often than once a week), I don’t go anywhere for fun or inspiration or interest.  I watch semi-random YouTube videos and putter around on a few other social media just as distractions.  I haven’t even watched any sports or any other shows, not after the first regular season football week, because it rapidly got boring.  I don’t even play any of the video games I have.

I still do read some, but I’m running out of books in which I have any interest‒currently I’m most of the way through If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.  After that, I don’t even know what I would want to read next.

It would be best‒not just for me but for everyone else in the long run‒if I could apply enough willpower to stop eating completely, forever.  Goodness knows that’s what I want to do.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it, though.  I mean, I will try, I am trying, and maybe after the first few days it will become easier.

So far, though, dealing with the dearth of activation in my nucleus accumbens is daunting.  I’m a miserable person even when I can stuff my face with food that I like.  Without food or music or creative writing or any other expression, it’s all very much a long, long road with no inn at the end or even any rest stops along the way.

I don’t know what to do.  Perhaps some epiphany will hit me.  I doubt it.  I suspect there is no deep, secret answer.  There’s only transient, pointless existence then a return to nonexistence; so I suspect, though I do not claim to know for certain.

Whatever.  It’s Friday, and the weekend approaches.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ll still be fasting by Monday for my next blog post.  I would like that.  I would also like it if you all have a very good day and a good weekend.

*That is what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance”, not quantum entanglement. 

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The brain may devise laws for the blog, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course, and it is also the 2nd day of October.  Those two things don’t always coincide‒that probably goes without saying‒but in this case (and roughly one seventh of all October 2nds) they do.

It’s also Yom Kippur, and though if I were truly observant of the holiday, I would not be writing this or going to work, I still want to wish anyone out there observing (it’s not really celebrating) the day a very good and positive one (but if you’re observant, so to speak, you’re unlikely to see this until after the holiday ends).

And, of course, I have begun my fast.  That’s not very impressive so far, mind you; I just haven’t eaten anything since yesterday afternoon at about 4:30, which is not too much longer than usual at this time of day.  Of course, I feel fine, energy and hunger-wise, because I don’t usually eat anything by this hour.  I will be drinking water‒fizzy most of the time, but still water, even though it’s not still water, ha ha‒and possibly diet soda, but that’s it.  I have to have water, because I take a fair amount of medicine for my pain and such, and many of those things should not be sitting in an unlubricated stomach.

It’s not really that hard for me to hold off on eating once I commit to it.  Throughout high school at least, and part of college, I never ate breakfast and rarely ate lunch.  I was skinny, but my mind was as sharp as it’s ever been (though of course I am “smarter” now than I was, because I know a lot more, and that’s not just knowledge, but skills and habits as well).

I also had plenty of energy back then.  I’ve spoken before about how this makes biological sense.  In our ancestral environment, a lack of recent food would be associated with the need or urge to seek food out, and that requires alertness and motivation and energy for a hunting species or even a gathering species, and certainly for one that does both.

Anyway, I really hope not only that this fast helps to clear my mind a bit and to calm my “spirit”, but also that it helps reset my body somewhat.  At the very least, it would be good to get back to that high school (and college) tendency of spending less of my time eating.  It’s gotten to the point that what I do in my “spare time” is often just eating, for momentary pleasure, for distraction, for avoiding boredom, for escape, etc.  But, of course, that tends to lead to a negative cycle, and I feel physically worse and worse about myself afterward.

So, hopefully, I will cross the activation-energy barrier today and head on through towards a more stable plane (or plain) of mentality, and of metabolism.  I don’t know for sure how long the journey will last, or where I will end up, but I will probably keep you all posted.  Watch this space, as they say.

It would be very nice if I successfully get some degree of spiritual insight from this fasting process‒whatever that even means*‒but whatever happens, until the end, I will probably continue to post here every work day.

In the meantime, I’ve at least put in some absurd footnotes as tangential thoughts struck me while writing.  I even did one of my footnote-within-a-footnote thingys, which is always fun (for me, anyway).  But you have to be careful with such digressions;  it’s a bit like writing a computer program with lots of subroutines embedded within other subroutines embedded within yet other subroutines.  The potential for errors that confound your logic (and that make your program freeze, in the programming case) is quite high.

Anyway, G’mar chatima tova, everyone.  I hope you have a good day.  I think I will, too.  And if I uncover any special psychic powers though this fasting process, well…I probably wouldn’t say anything about it.  But who knows, I might.

TTFN

*I’m referring to “spiritual insight”, not “this process”.  I’m pretty sure I know what “this process” means in this particular case**.

**Actually, that’s a pretty unambiguous term nearly any time you might use it.  You might not understand what this process is, but you probably understand what “this process” means in most cases, assuming a decent command of English***.

***That’s a command of the English language, not command of the English.  Commanding the English, and the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, has historically been a tricky business, including by the English themselves.  Even the Romans had issues with the “English” and when it came to Scotland, well, Emperor Hadrian just said, “Screw it, put a wall up to try to keep them there up North, I don’t wanna have to deal with those crazy bastards”.  He probably said it in Latin**** though.

****I can’t even imagine the nightmare of trying to conjugate all the Latin verbs and so on in my imaginary quote from Hadrian.

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

Well, I did bring the mini lapcom with me when I left work yesterday.  Nevertheless, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone.  There are specific, calculated reasons for this, but I’m not going to bore you with them, because they are only relevant to me.  But please, do tell me if you notice that this change has affected the quality of my writing, for better or for worse.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.  Now, on to more interesting things.  It’s the first day of October, my favorite month, although the reasons it has always been my favorite month are almost all effaced here in south Florida, in the current state of my “life”.  Still, it is the month of Halloween, and of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and all of that, so it still holds its position as number one month, as well as being the eighth and the tenth.

A few years ago‒it feels longer‒I set myself the task of writing a “short” story to honor the month of October (though the story didn’t have to be set in the month of October).  That led to Hole for a Heart, which is not my darkest story*, but my sister says it’s my scariest story.  I’m sure that’s pretty subjective, but it warms my own heart-shaped hole at least a bit to have written a quite scary story.

I wish I had the gumption to write something new again for this month.  If I did, the lapcom would be better for writing fiction than the smartphone, though the latter might keep me from going too ham on the whole thing, i.e., writing too much.

But I have a sort of feeling of learned helplessness about writing fiction, as well as about music (writing it and even just playing it) and art and science and everything else I do.  I put a lot of energy into things with almost no return, certainly not one commensurate to the effort involved.  Eventually, I just feel like an exhausted rat lying in the bottom of his cage, knowing that no matter what choice he makes or action he takes, he will be randomly shocked and otherwise tormented.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about the pain or the other stuff, he just knows the pain will come no matter what, and that has taken almost all the possible joy from being creative.  This is especially so when the creativity goes almost entirely unnoticed, like a sculpture made on the ISS and then promptly launched from there into deep space without anyone having seen it but a handful of astronauts.

I don’t know what it might take to rekindle (no pun intended) my writing or other creative sparks.  Maybe if I just had less pain it would do.  Unfortunately, the pain seems just to add new flavors and textures to itself over time; it doesn’t diminish.

I guess maybe that could be considered creative in a sense.

It’s a curious sort of irony, but I know that writing fiction seemed to stave off my depression, at least a little.  One might think it would be exhausting, writing 1400 to 2000 words every workday (except when editing/rewriting, which was its own grind).  Maybe eventually it was, and that was what led me to stop finally, since there was no real reward to it after a while, since almost nobody buys the books and/or reads them.

I don’t regret having written my stories, of course, nor my songs, nor any drawings I’ve made, nor my blog(s).  But over time I’ve had rapidly diminishing relative returns on the fiction writing and on the music and such.  The returns on this blog, relative to the effort, are shrinking more slowly, and occasionally there seems even to be an uptick, but the overall trend of basically everything except my personal knowledge** is downward.

I don’t know when the y-axis overall will cross the origin‒for many particular things, I think it has long since done so‒but I suspect it’s a finite distance, and I’m not decelerating, so I will cross it eventually.

Sometimes‒indeed, pretty much every day and twice on Sundays, ha ha‒I think to myself the metaphorical equivalent of “Where is that fucking x-axis?  It’s time for this to be finished already.”  If I had a goal, or anything significant toward which to look forward, things would probably be different.  But I don’t, and they aren’t.  That’s logic for you.

Well, anyway, this evening begins Yom Kippur and my fast.  Whatever you all are doing, I hope you have a good day.  I expect that I will be writing to you again tomorrow.

*That would be Solitaire.  I’ve told the story of that tale’s origin here before, I think, so I won’t get into it now.  If I am misremembering, let me know, and I’ll try to tell you the curious but not very exciting tale of a very dark tale indeed.  Oh, and if you want to read either of those stories but don’t want to do the Kindle thing, they are both featured in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is so far my only work you can get in Kindle, paperback, and even hardback!

**I do think that I am always learning new things and improving my understanding of things I knew from before, and I have a good memory, especially for things in which I’m interested.  That’s all well and good, and I’m glad of it, but knowledge in my head is only as good and as durable as my head is.  Eventually, as Roy Baty said, all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.

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“I’m coming down fast, but don’t let me break you.”

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, following the lesson of my own reflections yesterday on how my thumbs and whatnot are getting particularly sore and tender while writing on the smartphone, and it’s just easier writing with the “laptop” computer.

Of course, I don’t know what subject on which to write, but that’s typical, even usual for me, though I probably wouldn’t call it “normal”.  It’s just my personal, weird way of approaching this blog.  I suppose my subconscious is probably working on some of it ahead of time.  But I don’t really ever plan the posts, though occasionally I think about a general, vague kind of thing that I will discuss, like “What is that flat, circular thing that they throw in the Olympics called, again?”

Sorry, that was a really stupid joke.

There are some imminently upcoming matters that are of at least personal interest to me.  For instance, this is the last day of September in 2025.  Tomorrow begins October, which is generally my favorite month, though down here you can’t readily tell October from any other month.  But it’s still a good month, and it culminates in my favorite holiday (which is Halloween, in case that wasn’t clear).

Tomorrow at sundown also begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Now, I clearly am not “observant” in any serious way, and I have no local (or other) community of any kind, but pretty much every year, unless I am physically sick, I fast for Yom Kippur, from sundown to sundown (at least).  One is supposed to fast from food and water, but since I’ve been in south Florida, I tend to skip the water fasting part; even at this time of year, it’s too easy to get dehydrated, and I sure as hell don’t want any more kidney stones if I can help it.

I may try to extend my fast this year, beyond just one day.  I’ve done it before.  Once I get past a certain point, it becomes comparatively easy just to continue not to eat, and for me, at least, that point of ease arrives pretty quickly.

Clearly one cannot fast indefinitely.  Or rather, if one does it for more than a certain length of time, one is likely to cease to eat permanently (if you take my meaning).  That’s not so bad a thing, really, and it doesn’t seem like a terrible way to die, to me, though I know a lot of people seem to think it especially horrible.

But the thing is, ketosis (which happens when fasting) is fairly pleasant, as I know from personal experience; the brain prefers to run on ketone bodies (in the sense that it runs better on them), and one’s hormonal status, such as one’s bouncing stress hormones related to insulin and glucose zooming up and down, at least become steadier when one has gone without food for a bit.

It’s not a mere coincidence that many religions and spiritual practices make use of fasts.  Up to a certain point, going without food for a while keeps one clear-headed, less emotional and distracted (once one gets over the initial hump of habit).  There are hypothetical biological reasons for this; an animal (such as a human, or even me) needs to be clear and sharp when food has been scarce, because they need to seek it.

I wouldn’t mind achieving some type of epiphany because of a fast.  I also have a (slim) hope that fasting might help some of my pain symptoms, at least the more recent ones.  I have a slight suspicion that maybe I have some form of psoriatic arthritis (though it certainly could be a “second year medical student syndrome” type of thing), since my fingers are particularly getting more painful and swollen lately*, and I have new tendonitis-type symptoms and even a proximal interphalangeal joint in my right middle finger that’s popping in and out as I move it.

The left hand is not as bad, but then again, I am right handed, so the right hand gets more use and stress—not least from controlling a computer mouse.  But I also get a lot of pain that has become more localized to my ileo-sacral region, shifting from side to side (and various other joints, not quite symmetrically) which is a common spot for psoriatic arthritis to affect.  So, it could be a somewhat atypical presentation of psoriatic arthritis (I do have a long-standing psoriasis-like rash).

More likely, though, all of these symptoms are merely part of my chronic pain syndrome, which leads to awkward postural adjustments that cause irregular strain on various joints and tendons, and it’s all made worse by the fact that I am way too fat (because I often eat for “comfort” when the pain is acting up, which is likewise often).  So, whether by one mechanism or another, perhaps fasting would help reset things.

I would not hope to get carried away and fast forever, but at least it would be nice not to die a fatty.  I guess we’ll see how everything goes.  But I am at least going to fast tonight until tomorrow night.  I have plenty of internal reserves on which to live, but I will keep taking my vitamins and pain medicine, of course.

That’s pretty much it for now.  I hope you all have a good day, and by tomorrow night I’ll have begun my fast.  If I keep it up, you’ll be able to follow my progress here.  It probably won’t be very interesting, but it might be.

Talk to you soon.

*That’s discouraged me from playing guitar very often, which is annoying in itself.