Pain

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I’m back, despite my back holding me back

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go in to the office, because the pain I was having on Monday just continued and worsened, and by yesterday morning I was just exhausted.  I’m frankly not feeling a whole lot better today, to be honest (and to be redundant, since I already said “frankly” which means essentially the same thing as “to be honest”).

In case any of you don’t already know, I have a thing called “failed back surgery syndrome”, which seems a bit unfair to the surgeon, who was a colleague of mine.  He did as good a job as science and technology allowed.  I just had a fairly bad lower back injury:  specifically, a ruptured L5-S1 intervertebral disk.

That’s not a bulging disk, that’s a rupture‒it was torn all the way down into the nucleus pulposus of the disk, which is the delicious jelly center from which the bouncability arises.  I had all sorts of investigations after the pain began, because it didn’t first present as back pain but with pain in my legs.  And then once the disk issue was confirmed, I tried a lot of less invasive interventions to treat my pain, none of which did anything much.

Even after the surgery, I tried and was on various medications, of various classes‒including opioids‒which helped some but which caused their own issues over time.  But the pain has never gone away since its onset, over twenty years ago, and which has contributed greatly to things like the failure of my marriage and the ruination of my career.  Still, the surgery did reduce the pain at least to some degree.

But of course, these last several days have been worse than usual, probably partly because I was exercising (low impact) to try to improve my condition and help my pain.  Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, can’t it?

Anyway, I have to go to work today because it’s payroll day.  That was the same reason I kind of pushed to be let out of the hospital early with my recent kidney stone:  I had to do the payroll the next day.  That was unpleasant, I can tell you.

Such is my life now, it seems:  Chronic pain with varying intensity, insomnia, tension/anxiety and depression‒both at least partly (probably) related to ASD‒and work, then going back to the house to lie down to try to recover for the next day.  The only real bright spots are seeing my youngest child now and then (this was started by the kidney stone, curiously enough, so that at least paid for itself) and talking to my sister on the phone once every week or so.

In case anyone wonders why I have suicidal ideation, well, all the above should explain at least some of it.  Of course, I’ve had such thoughts since I was a teenager, long before my chronic pain developed, but I did have chronic depression (AKA dysthymia) starting at that time.  Looking back, this was probably at least partly because of my long-undiagnosed ASD (level 2).

I also had the other kind of ASD‒an atrial septal defect‒until I was 18 and had heart surgery for it.  Interestingly enough, there is a higher incidence of the heart-based ASD in people with the other kind of ASD, according to some studies I have read.  There’s also some increased prevalence of spina bifida occulta, which often has its effects very low down the spine.  I sometimes wonder if I might have had a very slight version of this that made me prone to have the back injury I had, but I may be going through “second year medical student syndrome” again with respect to that possibility.

Okay, well, sorry about annoying you with my medical history and medical/psychiatric complaints.  For the most part, it’s all I have to talk about anymore.  I don’t do anything interesting; I don’t do anything much at all other than work and trying to rest and distract myself.  It’s really quite pathetic and pointless.

I keep hoping that all the aspirin I take (among the other strictly OTC meds I now use) will lead me to have some form of hemorrhage and take this all away from me, but I have had no luck so far.  I guess it’s true what they say, that if you want something done “right” you need to do it yourself.

I don’t know if that’s always true, though.  I think what really happens is that people want to do something in a particular way for personal, often aesthetic, reasons, and want to be able to have some control over something, so they do it themselves.  Then, no matter how badly they fuck it up or how much better someone else might have done the job, they convince themselves that what they did was best, since confirmation bias is one of the easiest fallacies of reasoning into which people can fall.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you feel better than I do, since that would at least be some comfort for me.  I’ll probably be back to write a post tomorrow, Batman knows why.  But he’s not telling.

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Is this my eigenstate? If so, I fear it makes me LESS coherent.

It’s Monday, and I really am going to try to keep this short.  The only reason I’m writing this post at all is because I don’t want anyone to worry about me in any unnecessary way.  I suppose it’s okay for people to worry about me in general‒I think I would, if I were someone else and if I cared what happens to me.  I’m certainly not in good shape, just as a general matter, and I don’t seem to be getting better at all, so who knows what to say?

But today, I am not taking off work or anything.  I am however in a significant amount of pain, above my usual baseline, and I have been so since last week.  It’s quite frustrating, and it takes the wind out of my sails for getting anything done but the bare minimum.  Certainly I have done no walking or biking.

I did have a lovely day on Saturday, because I got to spend time with my youngest.  That was, of course, quite wonderful.  So you will hear (or read) no complaints from me about that.  It was officially one of the two best days I have had since 2012, at least.

I wish that could make my chronic pain go away, but alas, it does not.  It does take the edge off my depression for a while‒certainly while spending time together‒and that’s obviously good.  If only there were something that could be done in addition to that.

Unfortunately, I’m currently in the state* that I tend to refer to as feeling as if I have already been embalmed despite the fact that I am nominally still alive.  This is meant to convey how stiff and constricted I feel, and how every motion is difficult and painful.  I at least did my dips this morning, despite feeling wiped out already upon awakening.  Yay, me, right?  Huzzah.

It probably comes as no surprise that I continue to have insomnia, and the pain exacerbation doesn’t help that.  Well, in a certain sense one could say it helps the insomnia.  It impairs the somnia, if you will.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, by the way.  I have the mini lapcom with me, but it’s too much trouble to use right now.  So I am using the smartphone.  Using it is, however, also somewhat painful for the bases of my thumbs, but almost nothing I do does not hurt, so there’s little hope of avoiding pain entirely no matter what I’m doing.

It looks like Chrome and Google Docs and everything have updated themselves again, and now it’s causing trouble with the way the computer starts and the way I write this on my smartphone as well.  It’s terribly annoying; they change things that don’t need changing and that seem to work fine, apparently for cosmetic reasons, because they think they need to…I don’t know, keep up with the other software giants?  Anyway, it’s terribly annoying.

Are they really continuously releasing a product that has so many deficiencies that they need to keep updating every other week (or so it seems)?  Perhaps they’re hiding nefarious changes behind these seemingly pointless ones.  How would we know if they were?  How can we know this isn’t the work of some AI that got out of the box, for that matter?

Though, honestly, I think such an AI would do a better job of not requiring so many pointless-seeming updates.  But maybe that would be the perfect camouflage:  artificial intelligence masquerading as human stupidity.

Heavy sigh, as Justine would say**.

Anyway, that’s gonna be enough for me today.  It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m already exhausted.  I am not, however, sleepy.  Talk about a system that needs an update!

Well, have a good day if you can.

*Not to be confused with the state of Florida, though the two states have things in common.

**A character in The Accountant and its sequel.

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The blog and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing my Thursdaily blog post.  There’s not much more to say about it than that.  It’s terribly boring, isn’t it?  Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going on about, here or in the rest of my daily life.

I do, though, have one thing to ask out into the ether (not to be confused with the ethernet):  Does anyone know how to disable (permanently) the default “Aptos” font in the Microsoft Office applications?

I’m not asking merely to find out if there is such a person.  Presumably, someone at Microsoft will know how to disable that moronic and ugly font.  I’m more interested to know if someone among my readers can give me specific and clear instructions about how to do it.  Because if I never see Aptos again, that would be the only satisfying outcome with respect to that font for me.

Oh, also, can we find out how to disable their stupid AI “copilot” until someone asks for it, not make its irritating icon just pop up until you tell it “dismiss until next time I open this document” or whatever?  I don’t want it dismissed until next time.  I want it dismissed until sent for, which is unlikely to happen (but not impossible, which is why I say just to disable it until called for rather than, as with Aptos, permanently deleting it).

All that, noble readers*, is about as interesting as my life gets for the most part.  I am not walking/have not walked today, because I still feel worn out and terribly stiff and uncomfortable, and my left knee is still sore.  All of this does not help my chronic pain, either (other than helping it to persist and to become more prominent).  At least I have a tighter brace on my left knee today, as well as on the other knee (that would be my right knee, which hopefully is obvious).

I wear a brace on the right knee both to prophylax against it developing pain and to keep things even.  I’ve noticed that if I do that, I get fewer blisters on my right foot than if I walk with a brace only on my left, problematic knee.  This implies (to me) that the brace on the left knee shifts the way I walk overall enough to change the pressure points on my right foot when I’m stepping, and thus there develops increased abrasion in between my first two toes on that foot.

Exciting stuff, isn’t it?

I’m being facetious, of course, but maybe that isn’t clear.  Maybe this is all dull** and it’s hard even to tell when I’m not being serious.  I don’t know what to say, though.  Obviously.  But just as obviously, I will keeping saying things despite not having anything of merit to say.  I’ll even allow myself to use one-word sentence fragments for emphasis, because I suspect my subject matter is too dull to allow merely usual written language to keep the reader engaged, so I must resort to cheap rhetorical tricks of writing to imitate verbal communication in some ways.

I wish I had something more to discuss, some interesting subject, some curious conundrum—or even a conundrum that doesn’t have any interest in learning about anything.  Alas, as far as I can tell, I have no such thing.  I’m very frustrated by the pain that makes exercising so difficult, and by the fact that I have so much trouble with bicycles—though at least part of those difficulties would probably be better if I weighed less.

Okay, here’s a mildly interesting thing:  at the end of that last paragraph (1st draft only, I fear), I had written exactly 666 words.  Those of you embedded in a culture that has historically been influenced by Christian mysticism will know that number to be the one supposedly given by “St. John the Divine”*** as the number of “The Beast”, the so-called antichrist.

Now, Sinjun there made it clear he wasn’t writing blatantly and obviously but giving some kind of cryptic hint—I suppose it’s a good way to keep readers engaged and imagining silly things for at least a few millennia so far.  He wrote something along the lines of, “Here is wisdom.  Let him who hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and the number is six hundred, three-score, and six.”  (This is the English translation, of course.  It was apparently originally written in Greek, which I neither read nor speak.)

However, much to what ought to be the embarrassment of all those credulous bumpkins who have been frightened of that rather banal number for so long, it’s my understanding that in the oldest surviving version of the text of Synjon’s apocalypse****, the number of the beast was actually 616!

How did the beast manipulate the process of translation and get the scholars to mis-record the number as 666?

Okay, well, I don’t think any “beast” actually did that, but it’s a funny fact that so many people have it wrong, considering how susceptible people are to numerology.  At least I can have some sympathy for such a thing, for I love numbers in general, and 666 does have a nice symmetry and charm to it.  It’s not as symmetric as 888 or 000, but maybe that subtle lack of symmetry adds to its grip on the mind.

And, of course, “1 and 1 and 1 is three…got to be good lookin’, ‘cause he’s so hard to see”.

Come together?  Well, don’t do it over me.  And there’s no urgency, so feel free to do it right now or not.  Otherwise, try to have a good day.

TTFN

*I think reading is noble, if the what we call nobility matters at all and is based on anything of real worth.

**It’s a bit weird how “all” and “dull” are almost, but not quite, rhyming words.

***Not the author of the Gospel of John.  I guess “John” has just always been a common name.  Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named either John or Robert, it seems.

****That’s just a synonym for “revelation”, by the way.  It doesn’t specifically mean the end of the world, it’s just become associated with the notion.  And Armageddon is named after a neighborhood near Jerusalem, I think:  Megiddo (I’ve probably misspelled it).  And “holocaust”, which apparently comes from middle English through French and Latin and Greek and even Hebrew, has a meaning that’s fairly plain when you break it down:  “holo-“, meaning everything, as in “hologram”, and “-caust”, relating to burning, as in “caustic”.  So, “burning everything”.  Nifty, huh?

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“For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning”

It’s Odin’s day now, so…well, have a good day, Odin, or Wotan, or however you prefer to refer to yourself.

I’m on my way to work, but I did not walk today.  Yesterday was a horrible day, pain-wise*, focused on my left knee, which is still sore, so I’m not going to try to do much walking.  I have knee braces and so on, but they only do so much.  I was wearing them on Monday during my walk, and they probably helped.  Maybe the alternate shoes that avoided bothering my blisters made the stresses and tensions produced by the way I walk different than usual, and that’s why everything was irritated.

Oy, I seem to have a hard time discussing anything interesting, don’t I?  It’s just all boring nonsense.  I suppose some of this is the sort of stuff I might talk about with a spouse or a partner or a close friend if I had one.  I guess that makes the blog behave as a kind of talk therapy.

I actually have intended for it to be thus in the past, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any serious positive results.  Of course, I can’t see what I would have been like if I had not been writing this blog.  Perhaps I would have been much worse  Or maybe I would have been healthier, but no one would ever know, and my thoughts would forever be lost to the world.

What a tragedy.  Ha ha.

It’s a weird thought, but what if putting my thoughts out into the world actually makes me worse, but it makes me someone who will, to however small an extent, be remembered in some way (since I don’t have a family with whom I live or spend time to remember my thoughts and my day-to-day foibles).  It’s a bit like Melkor putting his power into Arda, leaving it suffused with traces of him until its end, though he was weakened thereby, and he was defeated at least partly because he had weakened himself so much.  And, to a lesser extent, it’s like Sauron, putting his will and power and spirit into the One Ring.

None of that has any true bearing on reality, of course, there being no real Melkor or Sauron.  There is also no real spiritual “power” of that nature.  At least, there’s nothing that anyone can demonstrate convincingly in a way that makes it clear that it’s not just the wishful thinking of frightened naked house apes who want to believe that they have power and consequence in what is, after all, a very large universe.  At best it’s smoke and mirrors and placebo effects and the happy coincidence (with applicable confirmation bias) of some real processes that humans can influence, albeit not by mere will and vague thought and heart but by actions, by choices, by real thoughts guiding real deeds.

The current state of the world—or at least of the US—makes it clear how rare real thoughts are among the primates here.  One need only study chimpanzees and orangutans and, for that matter, capuchin monkeys and the like to get a basic grasp on most of human behaviors.  Humans just have other notions cluttering up things, and those can sometimes distract one from recognizing what’s really happening—monkey-work from top to bottom, all but unmitigated.

I guess there’s nothing particularly bad about monkeys.  It’s just that humans think they are somehow fundamentally different than monkeys and other primates and other animals.  They are different in more or less trivial ways, of course, as all species, and indeed all individuals, are different.  But they are not a different fundamental type of being.  They just have more memory and processing power in their brains, and their social hierarchies are able to take place at much higher removes.  Thus they need ideas, stories, that bind them together to get things done.

Ants and termites use pheromones and/or other chemical signals, which they produce and use instinctively.  Humans use stories and songs.  But it’s all just spontaneously self-organizing behavior, with little to no deep thought above or behind the scenes, however people like to delude themselves about their puissance and their importance.

Oh, well.  Let them delude themselves and grope through their shallow pseudo-mysteries.  The universe will deliver whatever it delivers to them, and their most fervent beliefs will not change anything in and of themselves.  And most people will probably never even realize that they were shown to be misguided and even deluded.  They will go to their graves proclaiming desperately that they are not in fact even dying.

As I’m fond of saying, whataya gonna do?  I hope though that, for today at least, you’re gonna have a good day.  As for me, well, I’m sure you can believe that no day that someone spends with me is likely to be a very good day, not anymore anyway, and unfortunately, I have to spend every day with me.  So, at least spare me a little sympathy.

*In that I had a horrible day because I was in pain, not that pain had a horrible day.  I don’t know whether some personification of pain would have had a good day or a bad one.  I might imagine that the personification of pain would dislike chronic pain because it’s not useful.  It’s not helping to protect against any injuries; the injuries are already done.  It has become, instead of a protective process, an erosive one, something that worsens the status of its bearer.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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True hope is swift, and blogs with swallow’s wings: kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and against popular demand (or at least orthogonal to it) I am writing another blog post.  I don’t know how you feel about that, but you’re reading it, so I guess you can’t complain too much.

I had a rough day again yesterday, pain-wise.  I basically took everything that was safe to take, and then a bit more, but it did not do a great job of getting the pain under control.  However, I did take delivery of my latest attempt at lifestyle change:  a new, folding bicycle, which is quite a lot smaller (and has a smaller wheel base) than my other one.  It’s also lighter, and so it is easier to transport, and starting this afternoon, I mean to ride it from and to the train in the morning and evening‒or, well, in the evening and morning, to keep the order consistent.

I tried it for a little ride-around in the afternoon, and while the smaller wheels make it feel slightly less stable (thanks to a smaller moment of inertia, proportional to the mass times the square of the radius of rotation, if memory serves), it’s still comfortable, and it is also easier to get on for me, since I can step through it rather than having to raise my stupid, stiff old legs and hip.

Hopefully, it will help me get around faster and get stronger/healthier again.  Even my little test ride yesterday seemed to loosen my back up a bit, which was a bonus.  I think the lower-impact movement of a bicycle is much easier on my joints* than, say, running, which I’ve otherwise always really liked.  It’s also just faster to get around on a bike than by walking, but you don’t completely lose out on the experience of being in the midst of the places through which you are traveling.

So, yeah, that’s my reason for guarded optimism today.  I have a hard time being optimistic even at the best of times, though.  It feels like I’m setting myself up to fall into a trap.

That reminds me, I rather like something I heard David Frum say recently.  I can’t reproduce his exact words at the moment, but he basically said he tries to follow the guideline:  think like a pessimist but act like an optimist.  Or,  as Mel Brooks put it in the theme song** for his early movie The Twelve Chairs, “Hope for the best, expect the worst”.

In some ways, I feel that’s almost become my default setting, because when I’m at my current clearest state of headedness, I am definitely depressive and gloomy and neither expect nor feel that I deserve anything good.  But I still keep moving forward (well, if you’re moving at all, then “forward” can be defined as just going in the direction in which you are, in fact, going) and trying new things.

With respect to everything else, well, because my pain flare has been so distracting this week, I haven’t done any music of any kind (even listening, really) nor have I written any fiction.  I also haven’t worked on any lyrics for a song taking off from the word “humility”.  Hopefully, if I can feel better from riding the new bike, it will help me have more energy to do things.  Of course, it will be physically taxing at first, at least a little bit, but that’s okay.

As for anything else, well, I still occasionally toy with the notion of adding a Patreon account or something to this blog, just to see if it does anything at all.  But one is expected to give perks to one’s patrons, and I’m not sure what I have to offer.  Of course, I could write special posts that are only available to patrons, but I don’t know how exciting that would be.

Maybe I could ask patrons to suggest topics or subjects for blog posts, or do some manner of “ask me anything” posts, open to patrons only.  I don’t really know what on Earth people on Patreon could possibly want to learn from or about me, but maybe there would be interest.  I don’t know what else might entice someone.  If any of you out there have any ideas, I would love to hear them.

See what I mean by “think like a pessimist, act like an optimist”?  It’s hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to pay to read my writing, since I barely want to read my own stuff for free***.  And yet, I would consider trying to start making money from even my non-fiction writing, because what have I got to lose by trying that, other than an expenditure of time and energy?

Well, we’ll see what happens.  I would greatly welcome your input on such things, O Reader of My Blog.  In the meantime, please have a good day.

TTFN

*As long as I can avoid repeating any of my two prior major bike accidents, which each did harm to one of my shoulder joints‒first the left then the right, first a connective tissue injury, then a fracture.

**Which, yes, he wrote himself, both the song and the movie.

***Okay, that’s a lie.  I tend to enjoy rereading my own fiction quite a bit.  Is that narcissistic?  If it is, I’m a very peculiar kind of self-hating narcissist:  I think I’m the most annoying, disgusting being this side of a palmetto bug, and yet I think my stories (and my songs) are pretty good, and I enjoy them even if no one else does.

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I have no title today (other than “doctor”)

I don’t think I’ll probably write very much today‒though I’ve been wrong about that many times before, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see.  I feel particularly tired already this morning, but that didn’t let me sleep uninterrupted for more than a few hours.  So far today I’m not in as much pain as I was the previous two days, but then again, on neither of those two days was my pain as prominent in the morning as it became during the day, so I cannot be too optimistic.

I am, of course, trying all my various adjustments and interventions and so on to try to improve things, and they have limited and temporary success in general.  But I will keep trying, until the day that I finally give up and/or die.  I suppose, of course, that I might even get better.  It’s physically possible.  But I’m not going to hold my breath, because I’ve tried many, many things to improve my pain, and they have not had much success.

With that in mind, unless you have something truly esoteric that you think I, a physician with a broadly curious mind and with chronic pain, will not have encountered or considered, I don’t encourage recommending or suggesting pain treatments to me.  You can of course, and I truly appreciate the sentiments involved in such offers, but they are often frustrating.  Also, when people recommend things that I know are just woo, it’s additionally frustrating to have to remind myself not to respond impolitely.  Good intentions aren’t enough to make good things actually happen, but they are worth taking into consideration and appreciating.  You shouldn’t be rude to people who are trying to help, even if they aren’t succeeding.

Anyway, my new thing that I mentioned yesterday did not arrive; it’s supposed to arrive today, now, having been delayed.  I won’t get into it yet, but I maintain my stupid pseudo-optimism, which I cannot explain nor justify, except to say that I’m stubborn.  But I have my limits.

It’s been a string of rather frustrating days, lately, and though none of the frustrations are catastrophic, in some ways that makes them more pernicious.  With major setbacks, one is allowed and expected to need a real recovery process, a bit of time, a bit of rest, or maybe just some sympathy.  One gets a break.  With more minor setbacks, one gets no respite, but they can nonetheless pile up, especially if one has chronic issues already.  But one will gain little ease from others with respect to them.

For instance, when I mentioned to a coworker that I was having a lot of frustrating things happen over the past several days, I got a reply that everyone was having a rough time‒based on what data, I don’t know.  His rough times apparently have to do with taking his daughter to the doctor for a thankfully not too severe issue and his wife being sick and so on.  I would give almost anything possible to have such “problems” again, or just to be able to be with my children in a significant way again.

Anyway, I was not terribly pleased, and in response to his statement about the claimed recent local preponderance of irritations, I said, “Well, that makes everything all right, then, doesn’t it?”

It wasn’t the cleverest of replies, but at least I was channeling the Toymaker a bit.

Anyway, I’m sure few or none of you readers are particularly sympathetic, either.  Why would you be?  I’m no one and nothing, just a weird little “voice” on the internet/web.  I’m a wisp of marsh gas, a flicker of movement in the corner of your vision, an occasionally annoying afterthought, like the water that gets on your shirt at the waist from doing the dishes, but that you don’t notice until you’re done.  I’m a tiny little grain of rock that gets on the bottom of your foot inside your shoe; it’s not quite bad enough to force you to stop, take off your shoe, and clear it out, but it’s there all the while, and you end up with a blister and other aches at the end of the day, from changing the way you walk.

So, yeah, that’s me.  That’s how I feel today.  I know, it doesn’t matter to anyone, but there it is.  Maybe today will be better than yesterday.

I wish I could say it couldn’t be worse, but that’s never true.  Reality has no lowest level.  Things can always deteriorate.

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A random, walk-in blog post

It’s Monday again, despite popular demand, and I am here writing another blog post‒not necessarily against or by popular demand.  It’s really more or less orthogonal to such things.

I had a weekend full of little setbacks, and it was quite frustrating.  I had committed to riding my bike four times this weekend, and I started in good form.  I got out relatively early and went riding.  It felt pretty good, pretty comfortable, but I decided not to push too hard, only riding out about 3 miles.  Walking 3 miles is relatively far if it’s hot, but biking 3 miles is not bad at all.

Then, of course, just after I turned around, my rear tire lost pressure.  I don’t know where the puncture was, but I had to walk the bike back to the house.  And 3 miles walking a bike is much more unpleasant than riding or even walking without a bike.

I ordered some Slime brand tire repair stuff for same day delivery, but then it got delayed till Sunday (it actually arrived very late Saturday night).  Then, on Sunday, in between loads of laundry, I tried to repair the tire (so to speak) but at first I had trouble getting it to work, and it wouldn’t stay inflated.  Finally, though, it seemed to stabilize, at least without my fat ass on it.

I was going to go for a short ride to test it, but I couldn’t stand the idea that I might have to walk it back again.  So I went for about a 2 mile walk instead, which is really not very far, but then overnight and into now my back really flared up and is annoying the heck out of me.  Also, my right ankle is sore again.

So I’m frustrated in my attempt to develop better habits and health.  I also had some failures by Uber Eats that were annoying, but that’s a minor issue.  Then yesterday my internet went out and I had to deal with their customer service people to help get it going again, which took way longer than it should have taken.

I suppose all this is really minor stuff, so-called first world problems.  But things accumulate and interact with each other, especially when you don’t really have any outlet for anything and nothing to counteract them.  It might be better if I had someone with whom I could just hang out on a regular basis, but I feel like a different species than the people around me, and no one is offering, in any case.

This is all boring for all of you, I strongly suspect, so I apologize.  It’s bad enough for me to be unpleasant to myself, but I should try not to bring misery upon other people, especially people who are kind enough to read my blog.

Last week was certainly a miss with respect to getting anything done on any music or songs.  I didn’t so much as sing or play keyboard or play guitar at all last week, not once.  I did some reading, including finishing rereading The Chasm and the Collision, which is the book of which I am proudest.  If anyone out there knows people who enjoy fantasy/sci-fi adventures involving middle-schoolers, you should consider suggesting that they check it out.

I don’t know how this week is going to be.  I’m starting it in well-above-average pain, for me, and with worse sleep than usual (though that was the case most of last week as well).  I don’t think this guarantees that it will be a particularly bad week.  The world is complicated, and small things can make relatively large changes, and large things can sometimes be surprisingly ineffectual*.

Maybe I would get started writing fiction again and do it better if I did the first draft of a story by hand (as I did with CatC as well as Mark Red and the title story in Welcome to Paradox City).  As long-time readers will know, I go back and forth about this all the time, and I think I’m probably just chasing my tail.

I have all these dreams and ambitions, and I know I have the ability to carry them out, in some sense, but it’s very hard to keep the will, the motivation.

I’ve said before, I’m sure, that depression itself seems almost to be an illness of the will, a sort of muscular dystrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of the mind, though I think its causes and complications are much more intricate and multivariate than at least the first of those two comparisons.

I think for a fair amount of those who suffer badly from it, depression makes them want to kill themselves, but depression is also what keeps them from killing themselves; they cannot bring the effort to bear.  This is part of why the beginning of antidepressant therapy in a depressed person with suicidal ideation can be dangerous.  Such a person may begin to feel capable of getting things done, but not optimistic enough to avoid suicidal ideation, so they can sometimes use that new energy to act to kill themselves.

In any case, that’s not really the subject on which I was focused during this post.  I don’t think I’ve really been focused at all in writing this.  I don’t really know what subjects and topics I’ve raised.  I suppose you will know, more or less, having read this far.  And I guess, by the time I edit this, I will know.  But I don’t know right now.

It’s not important.  But one thing that is important is that I hope you all do your best to have a good day.

 *In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel says to Frodo that even the smallest person can change the course of the future, espousing a sort of rudimentary Chaos Theory.  But what does it mean to “change the course of the future”?  If the future has a course, it is defined and determined by the laws of physics, and any seeming “changes” were part of that process, so the course of the future is not “changed”, it is merely instantiated in whatever way it always is.

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O, that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth! Then with a passion would I blog the world;

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and if I were still writing fiction, this would be the only day of the week on which I would write a blog post.  On every other workday, I would be either writing or editing my fiction.

I haven’t been doing that for a while.

Part of the issue is that I don’t think very many people had any interest in it.  Apart from my sister, I hardly got any feedback on my books, and very few “ratings” on Amazon.  I know of two people who have given reviews of my books on Amazon, and one of those people subsequently died.

I don’t know that liking my stories had anything to do with that, but I do have a weird history of a surprising number of people dying after expressing the fact that they really liked something I did‒in most prior cases, specifically, my singing.  No fewer than three people who expressed enthusiastic appreciation of my singing died shortly afterward.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to think that people suffered and/or died because they liked something creative that I had done.  It’s not just unscientific, it’s actually verging on frank delusion.  People just die, I know that.  It happens to us all at some point.  Sometimes, by chance, it coincides with certain other things, and that can seem spooky.

But what if…?

As a matter of principle, I cannot rule out with mathematical certainty the possibility that liking my books or my singing or my music or my other creative stuff might be dangerous.  It’s a pretty freaking low probability*.  But is it worth the risk?

I mean, sure, if I thought I had that power and it was reliable, there are certain political (and otherwise) figures I would try to get exposed to my music or writing in hopes that they would love it and so seal their doom.  But that’s a fantasy that’s not even good enough for one of my stories.

Coming back to that topic, even the stories I’ve started (or completed) and shared here** have gotten almost no feedback, and I doubt that anyone other than my sister has read any, let alone all, of them.  If I’m forgetting anyone’s feedback, I do apologize; I did not mean to insult you or dismiss your input.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, here today.  Obviously, I wish more people had read and responded to my stories and/or my songs‒though I no longer sing as well as I used to sing, I think.  But, as you may know, I am not good at promoting myself.  I don’t really like myself, and I certainly don’t love myself.

Anyway, this is all nonsense.  I don’t know what I would do even if I were an international best-selling author or beloved star musician or whatever.  I would probably still hate myself.  Nothing really brings me any durable joy or well-being, let alone anything deeper.  Even the foods that I like seem uninteresting, as do most of the books I could read or programs and videos I could watch.  I can’t sleep (much), and I’m always in pain.

Also, right now, I have a bruise on the inner surface of my right upper arm that looks horrific‒it’s about two inches across‒that just appeared yesterday morning (at least that’s when I noticed it), but I don’t know how it happened.  At least it doesn’t hurt much.  I think I’ve had bruises there before, so perhaps I’m in the habit of slamming things I pick up into that area from time to time.  Or, perhaps I have an AV*** malformation in that region that occasionally bleeds.

It’s almost certainly not a sign of any impending life-threatening illness, unfortunately.

Oh, I also haven’t worked any on either the new song or the last song (Native Alien) so far this week.  I haven’t played any music at all, nor have I listened to any.  And I certainly haven’t been singing.  I haven’t been doing any significant walking, and I haven’t been able to whip myself into a bike-riding habit.

Part of that latter fact is because it’s summer in south Florida, so it’s very hot and very humid.  It’s discouraging, though.

Anyway, sorry about being such a bummer and a downer and all that.  It’s not you; it’s definitely me.  I’ll let you all go and have a hopefully better day for now, I guess.  Meanwhile I’ll go play in traffic or something.

TTFN

*Though I think I would not give it as low an estimated likelihood as I gave the possibility of the Earth and Moon abruptly quantum tunneling to the Andromeda Galaxy.

**Outlaw’s Mind, The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and of course Extra Body.

***Arterio-venous.

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Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).