Pain

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Some words about words to put to music and orthogonal pain

Well, it’s Tuesday, and here’s my blog post.  I’ve had a very rough day and night, I’m afraid.  Not just my back and hips and shoulders and so on, but as I told my boss when he asked me, “Every fucking thing hurts.”  I left the office about 45 minutes early, and got on the really crowded train that I would usually have avoided.  At least at the house I was able just to lay down, but I’d already taken a lot of (OTC) stuff to do what I could about my pain.  But it has certainly not gone completely away since yesterday; it hasn’t completely gone away for a couple of decades.  But it is still worse than usual.

In spite of the above difficulties, I did a little work on Native Alien yesterday morning.  For one thing, I retranscribed the melody onto real staff paper, because the crudely drawn staffs on which I had previously written it were very small and unwieldy.  Then I worked on the chords, confirming that, yes, the song (as I sang the melody when I made it up) is in the key of F major/D minor and indeed the initial chord should be D minor (this implies an overall minor key, but it is not dispositive).  I’m not sure of all the chords yet; I was in too much discomfort to keep working on it.

I also did my coin-flipping binary search for a new song topic/subject/trigger, and that trigger word is:  humility.

That could be quite an interesting take-off for a song idea.  It makes me think of Billy Joel’s song, Honesty.  Of course, I haven’t even begun writing down any lyrics yet, nor even really thinking of them, but I’m sure my subconscious mind is cranking away.  It always seems to be making progress; remember what I said yesterday about how, after a break, I sometimes come back better at something than I was before the break?

I may post here below the lyrics of Native Alien just for your perusal*, though not really for feedback unless you feel a burning need.  Here they are, in the first draft.  Bear in mind, there would/will likely be modifications to the wording in any final version that might one day come to exist of the song.

The planet Earth is beautiful

A gem in outer space

But I feel like a stranger here

As if I’m from some other place.

–

The humans are like aliens

They often make no sense

Their gives and takes and lies and fakes

Make me feel better on the fence.

–

Could I just be some kind of native alien,

Delivered by some ET stork that got its signals crossed?

Is it possible that I

don’t belong beneath this sky,

an entity who’s home but still is lost?

–

Do people that you meet seem strange

And even ones you know?

You study them to learn their ways

But it just leaves you in a daze

Unsure who’s really friend or foe.

–

Could you just be some kind of native alien

A seed that germinated here in unfamiliar soil?

Is it possible that you

Don’t belong beneath this sky so blue,

a mortal wrapped in some mistaken coil?

Again, I’ll remind anyone reading that A) this is the draft form, which may change, and B) the point of this exercise is just to write something, not to try to produce a masterpiece.

I know that not all of the lines quite scan, but that’s something that can be adjusted in the singing process.  Think of how Jimi Hendrix squeezed the words “Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me” into the same musical phrase and length as “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky”.  I’m no Jimi, of course‒for one thing, I’m right-handed, so I don’t have to reverse-string my Strat‒but I do what I can.

I haven’t done any more thinking on my ideas of quantum wave-functions literally back-propagating through time and interfering retroactively with earlier parts of themselves and other waves to set up a potential cause for superdeterminism or something else.  For one thing, as I said, I need to seriously advance my mathematical prowess with QFT and such before I can determine if there’s any real potential to the idea.  Also, it’s hard to think about abstract, four-dimensional complex time stuff when you’re in a lot of pain.

I did log in to Brilliant dot org as I mentioned I intended to do yesterday, where I quickly saw that they had a new course on circuits, and I couldn’t resist getting started on that rather than working toward that other notion.  The basics so far are, well, really basic, but that’s okay.  It’s still better to do something like that in one’s spare time rather than participate in outrage on social media‒even though that outrage is often justified.

Oh, well.  I’m still tired.  I’ll try to work on the Native Alien tune a bit more and probably tweak the lyrics, but I’ll also try to come up with some words related to “humility”.  That could be fun, at least.

I hope you all have a very good, relatively pain-free day.

*It seems I have done so.

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“You’d say I’m puttin’ you on, but it’s no joke…”

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, a more or less deliberate choice, as much as anything we do is truly deliberate.  I was already very tired when I left work yesterday, but now it’s even worse, because I got very little sleep last night, even for me.  I’m quite worn out in general.  By rights, I ought to stay at the house, but Wednesday is payroll day, and anyway, I’m more comfortable at the office than I am in my room.  Or, at least, being at work is as good as my days get.

I may or may not go to work tomorrow depending on how I’m feeling.  Even if I go to work, I may or may not write a blog post.  I honestly barely have the gumption to write what I’m writing now.

I haven’t written any of the “Earth” song lyrics for my weekly (or whatever) song yet*, but I have been thinking about them and what approach to take.  I considered doing something that references the idea from Ann Rice’s vampire stories of going into the Earth to rest or escape, but I did a quick Google search and there are already several songs with the title Into the Earth (though I have no idea what the songs are about) which I guess isn’t surprising.  They were very popular books, and the notion of a vampire going “into the Earth” is evocative.

So, I’ll take another approach, perhaps discussing coming up from the Earth or some such.  We’ll see.  I guess I don’t really have to take it too seriously.

Boy, am I tired.  I was already worn out and stressed and tense at the end of the workday yesterday (there were reasons, but I won’t go into them), and now I feel worse.  A person really ought to feel better after having spent the evening and night in their private place in the house, but it’s not so with me in this case.  Honestly, I considered sending for an Uber and just going into the office at about 1:30 in the morning or so, but I decided that would seem too weird; I think the boss gets notifications when the alarm is turned on and when it is turned off.

I’ve been thinking back to when I had my kidney stone‒it’s only been two months‒and about how I sometimes wish it had been some more deadly affliction, or perhaps even that when they did the CT scan they might have found some lesion somewhere in my abdomen or pelvis that indicated some untreatable illness‒cancer or something similar.  Then everything would be taken out of my hands.  I could just find some doctor from whom I could get palliative care when necessary and then wait for the end.  I mean, in a way, that’s what I’m doing anyway‒it’s what everyone is doing‒but it’s vague and indefinite right now.

I’m sorry to be so morbid.  I know most people don’t like to think about death and dying, let alone to “speak” about it.  Then again, the Tao te Ching counsels us to embrace death with our whole being.  It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean that we should worship or love death, à la “we love death more than you love life”.  Quite the contrary.  I read it as saying that you will only be able to enjoy life fully and wisely if you internalize and accept the fact that you are going to die someday.

Once again, we find that Tyler Durden captured at least some ancient wisdom in his “teachings”.

Anyway, my own fanciful yearning for a terminal diagnosis has nothing to do with a healthy and wise attitude toward my own mortality.  No, my yearning is born of simple mental exhaustion, of chronic pain for more than two decades, of chronic insomnia for even longer than that, and of depression/dysthymia with concurrent “anxiety” that is only superseded in length by my recently diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder, which is congenital.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence that any of these things is likely to go away‒especially the latter one‒and I’m just puttering around here in south Florida, accompanied by various arthropods and reptiles and fungi and humidity and rain and heat and one of the most idiotic state governments the nation has ever seen.  And I am just so very tired.

So, anyway, that’s that.  If I write a post tomorrow, it will be here, of course.  If I don’t, it won’t.  If that’s not clear to anyone, please let me know in the comments (I’m kidding, I know you all understand, though you should certainly feel free to leave comments).  If I make any progress on writing a song, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.

I hope you have a good day.

*Addendum:  Between rounds of editing this post, I came up with a possible first verse of a song.  I won’t share it right now, but it’s a start.

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Tuesdays too many

I want to begin with a minor caveat (added here after the first draft):  I don’t feel that I’m writing very well, today.  I apologize for this, and I will try not to make it a habit.

It’s now Tuesday morning, and today I am writing this on my mini laptop computer.  Even though I felt pretty crappy all day yesterday—recall that I was sore all over, and it was particularly bad in my “usual suspect” joints and such—I decided I still didn’t want to write anything on my smartphone today again, so I brought the computer back to the house with me.

The bases of my thumbs continued (and continue) to be sore, and the process of writing on the stupidphone doesn’t get any more pleasant as I go along.  Anyway, today I feel a little less achy all over than yesterday, probably thanks to fairly high doses of three different OTC analgesics/anti-inflammatories.

I still feel vaguely as if I am fighting some flu-like syndrome, except I have no fever that I can detect and no other localizing symptoms.  I just feel blah and bleagh, as though all sorts of cytokines are flowing through my body, all those interleukins and interferons and prostaglandins and the like, making me feel as though I am beset by some infection.

As for everything else—well, the world at large continues to be comically tragic and tragically comical, more so of both than usual, and that’s stressful as well.  And there is no more apparent point to participating in any of it, or indeed in anything at all, today than there was yesterday.

But, nevertheless* I am going to the office.  What would I do otherwise?  Lie about back at the house, in my little room, and just…I don’t know, try to pass my time somehow?  It’s not as though I can readily sleep when there; I slept quite a bit less than three hours total last night, and it was not all in a row.  So, if I’m grumpy, I hope you’ll forgive me.  If you won’t, well…I don’t really give too much of a shit.

As for what to write today, well, I guess you’re reading it, whatever it is.  I have no specific topic, or subject, other than the general notion that I’m writing and sharing my thoughts, such as they are, as they stream through my consciousness in response to my obsessive-compulsive urge to write this blog every workday, even though I have no overarching subject about which to write.

I would love to be able to discuss some interesting subject in physics or mathematics or biology—or even medicine, which technically is part of biology—but though there are surely many interesting things being explored and discovered and discussed, they all seem pointless to me.  My state of mind is definitely not good if even my favorite sciences (and science-adjacent subjects) are incapable of grabbing my interest.

So, all I have to discuss, if that’s the right term, is that my chronic pain continues, and my dysthymia/depression continues, and my social anxiety continues, as does my general free-floating hostility.  All these latter things are at least partly triggered and/or exacerbated by my ASD, which is something that is never going to stop for as long as I’m alive—which has already been too long.

I’ve done pretty much all the good I’m ever going to do in the world, probably.  And I did do some good here and there.  Of course, the best thing I ever did was to father my children, so that’s one thing.  But I also contributed to scientific advancement in my own tiny little way, and I did a pretty good job of relieving suffering in my patients, and saving people’s lives**.  And I wrote my books, which very few people will ever read, but which I nevertheless think are pretty decent, and I wrote and recorded some songs, which very few people will ever hear, but which I nevertheless think are also pretty decent.

It would be nice if I felt able to write fiction again, I guess, but even the process of trying seems terribly daunting.  There is little expected reward, since probably no one but my sister will end up reading anything I write in the future (fiction-wise, anyway), if there is such writing, which seems unlikely.  And it’s almost laughable to think that I might write and record any new songs.

Also, in the end, I have always failed at everything that really matters to me.

So, I’m pretty much just coasting along, waiting for my momentum to be used up.  It’s annoyingly persistent, but I guess I can only blame some metaphorical translational symmetry for that conservation of metaphorical momentum.  I’m probably pushing the metaphor too far (a process that is itself metaphorical), but that’s what I tend to do.

I’m sorry to be such a downer.  Even worse, I’m sorry to be so boring.  It’s not personal; though it’s also not strictly business, either.  I don’t know what it is.  I’m at a loss.  But that too seems just to be my usual state.  Perhaps I’ve never been otherwise.

I hope all of you feel better than I feel today, and every day.  I hope that, even on days when I feel good—if there ever are such days again in my life, which feels pretty unlikely—that you all still feel better than I do.  Why not?  The bar is set pretty low, but at least that means there’s plenty of room for you to be boosted up.

*Is it redundant to say “but, nevertheless”?  I suspect that it is.

**Though I dislike that expression somewhat; “saving lives” is always just saving them for later, since everyone dies eventually.

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“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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Stupidity make me angry–especially my own

Once again, I am writing this on my smartphone.  Yesterday I didn’t even bother to take the laptop computer back to the house with me.  I was pretty much fed up with everything.  Though we had a successful day at work, there were multiple cases of people not paying attention to our guidelines and rules; but whenever I would bring them up, there was (and is) always an excuse to go around them‒sound familiar to anyone?‒and I repeatedly got overridden, leaving me to wonder why I bother.

I also hit the top of my head hard on the corner of my metal filing cabinet early yesterday, while reaching down to pick up a dropped pen.  It really hurt, and it left a cut, and I had a headache and a sore neck for pretty much the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have developed a subarachnoid hemorrhage, so I have to keep moving.  It sucks.

And, of course, there’s all the idiocy that is actively occurring in America and the rest of the world.  There might be some who would characterize certain things that happen and that people do as “sick” and/or even “insane”, but I don’t like to use such terms to describe the various moronic and submoronic things humans do that are not only detrimental but cause spreading suffering to others.

First of all, it denigrates people who are actually sick/have mental illness and other related disorders.  Such people (of which I guess I am one) rarely do much harm to anyone but themselves‒though sometimes, some of us wish to do harm to certain carefully chosen other people.

But also, it dignifies the idiots.  After all, insanity is a legal term that indicates someone does not know right from wrong or lacks the capacity to control their own actions.  Now, at a deep level, it is almost certain that none of us has free will, at least not in anything but the vaguest, most hand-wavy, compatibilist sense.  But there is a real difference between someone who has OCD and cannot help but wash his or her hands until they bleed and a person who selfishly and arrogantly assumes that they have the right and the power and the competence to try to run other people’s lives but who then don’t accept responsibility for the horrific messes they make.

Stupidity can be defined as doing something in such a way that it is worse than just random action‒like trying to get to the airport by driving around one’s residential block over and over again ad infinitum*, or to try to solve a Rubik’s Cube by just spinning one side over and over (again, ad infinitum).  And this is so often the distillation of so many things that humans do, especially when they group together in significant numbers.

It reminds me of a post I saw on Threads or X or Bluesky or one of those.  The person said that people are selfish when isolated, but that such selfishness doesn’t really work, that we only survive and thrive by drawing together and supporting each other, working together, caring for each other.  This is true, as far as it goes‒humans are the most social of the social primates, and their greatest power comes from their ability to work together, to cooperate, to communicate.  This is why written language is the wellspring and lifeblood of civilization.  And yet, I am also reminded of the line from the original Men In Black, which I will only paraphrase here:  a person can be smart, but people together are stupid, reactionary, panicky, dangerous animals.

Both of these things are true, at least within certain contexts.  This probably explains at least part of the appeal of Ayn Rand’s** focus on rational self interest‒which, in a large society, is going to, in its limit, come to be the same thing as rational altruism.  But it is strange to have those seemingly at least partly contradictory facts both be true, at least in a highly simplified outline of the social nature of naked house apes***.

It is terribly frustrating.  Even the most well-intentioned people, like the person who made that point about humans being social and needing each other (or at least many of those who agree with those sentiments) will often virulently demonize those who are on the opposite side of a given political spectrum or argument, not even trying to show compassion or empathy or understanding for those who disagree with them.

Likewise, those on the “other side” who seem to wallow in self-righteousness and yearn for authoritarianism will nevertheless seemingly believe that, for instance, they follow the teachings of a very socialistic, compassion-loving rabbi from 1st century, Roman-controlled Judea.

These are some of the things that make me angry, not just the persistent headache and my other, never-ending body pains and mental divergences.  And although anger can be energizing, it is also unpleasant and, as Radiohead said, “it wears me out”.

I can endure a lot, it seems, whether out of stubbornness or willpower or just my own form of stupidity, but there’s no clear reason to keep enduring when there’s no evidence of any available relief or any joy that lasts more than a few hours at a time before leaving me alone to stew in my own, solitary, odious juices again.

I really do hate the whole universe a lot of the time, and that time proportion appears to be growing as that time goes by, like the product of some perverse Dark Energy in my own psyche.  I don’t know what to do about it in my almost entirely empty life.

I say almost entirely, because there are just enough little rays of light to keep me fooling myself that I might one day return to a satisfying, mutual daily existence with people I love, only to have those hopes draw away like a will-o-the-wisp, keeping me eager and even desperate to follow them, but leaving me lost and stranded in the marshland of my mind instead of just escaping into oblivion.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  No shit, Sherlock, what else is new?  Further clichés as thoughts warrant.

I hope you lot are in better mental states than I am, and that you each and all have a good day.

*To borrow an example, though I cannot right now recall from where.

**Do you think Ayn Rand might have been an undiagnosed autistic person?  Discuss.

***It reminds me of the “Riddle of Steel” as described in the movie Conan the Barbarian.  Early in the movie, Conan’s father tells him that you cannot rely on men or gods, but that you can trust steel.  But then, later, Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones) reveals the punchline of the riddle:  Steel is not strong, flesh (i.e., a person) is stronger.  These contradictory truths engender and represent the vortex of seeming paradox through which people must try to navigate, to find the eye of the storm, the balance point at which effective action is possible.

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Dogmas are a disease, a cancer of the mind. Avoid carcinogenic thinking if you can.

I’m going to try to keep this brief this morning, so even though I brought the mini laptop computer with me when I left work on Friday*, I am writing this on my smartphone.  It does make my thumbs sore, or at least it highlights their inherent soreness and stiffness, but that’s part of what makes me tend to write less.  Or at least, I write more slowly; it is not always easy to get me to write less.

I’m choosing this partly because I am just very tired.  On Friday nights and Saturday nights, I can take a couple of Benadryl and so on to help me sleep‒I know it’s not truly good sleep, but just being unconscious for more than an hour or two at a time is such a relief‒but on work nights that’s no good.  So, especially after the artificially extended sleep on the weekend, I tend to have a bad sleep on…well, on every other night, really, but Sunday is the first such night in the work week.

Another problem, and part of my reason for worse sleep, is that I am having a bit of a flare-up of my back/hip pain, and that makes nearly every effort feel that much harder, including simply trying to sleep‒although that’s a somewhat different type of effort than many others.

So, yeah, if there’s anything noticeably different in my writing style today than in my last handful of blog posts, it may be because of the fact that I’m writing on the smartphone.  It may also be something else entirely, of course, or even a combination of things (this seems most likely).  Just because one idea seems to provide a good explanation‒a good story, if you will‒doesn’t mean it’s right.

That’s a common trap into which I frequently see people fall, and it always annoys me (especially when I’m the person).  Some situation will happen, some occurrence will occur, and someone will propose‒perhaps just to themselves‒some reason, some explanation for the event(s), and it will seem at least somewhat plausible, and at least physically possible, and it doesn’t have any glaring logical inconsistencies.  And that’s where they stop.  In their heads, that will be what they think of as the actual explanation for whatever it is they’re explaining.

Unfortunately, this is actually‒at best‒a hypothesis.

Now, if people just recognized that fact and kept the notion in their heads as a hypothesis, then this would be no problem.  All knowledge about the world is, in principle, provisional**.  There’s nothing wrong with having a hypothesis that you recognize as such.  All good science proceeds from speculation (first triggered and then confirmed or denied by observation and testing).

If one has relatively non-crucial concepts to address, one need not even be particularly bothered about confirming or denying one’s little hypothesis.  One can simply have it, tacitly implied, sitting there in potentia in the process of one’s mind.  Then if, quite by chance, one should encounter data or concepts or arguments that bear on the likelihood of that hypothesis, one can‒sometimes quite unconsciously‒adjust one’s hypothesis, or one can discard or replace it or even find oneself more confident in it.

This is all well and good.  But all too often, humans take their first plausible seeming notion and decide that they must now have the answer.  And then, depending on their emotional connection to the idea, if they encounter disconfirming evidence or argument, they twist away from it, dismiss it, seek out only pseudo-confirming ideas and evidence or even (shudder) just the company of other people who share their epistemologically suspect ideas.

These are such things as conspiracy theories are made on, or even religions (literal or figurative ones, including cultish forms of economic theories and philosophical ideas).  And when one does not update one’s ideas, when one is not aligned with reality, sooner or later, one will collide with it.  When one collides with reality, it’s never reality that is damaged.

If it were only the person who persisted in self deception that got hurt in the crash, it would still be tragic but at least at least it would be tolerable.  But as with literal crashes, the innocent are all too often harmed and made to suffer as a consequence of someone else’s poor judgment.

This is part of why I despise all dogmatic thinking.  I even coined an expression in relation to it:  Spay and neuter your dogmas!

Do not let them propagate.  Dogmas are among the most perilous of meme-plexes because they are so stiff and brittle and they tend to have sharp edges.  But even when they don’t, there is still the problem of going against reality.  One can imagine the real nature of the world as a kind of tunnel or pipe or tube‒in places it is very wide and in places very narrow.  In some regions, a fair amount of variability in course is tolerable within it, but sooner or later, if one is not moving parallel to the course of reality, one will hit a wall.

How bad the collision will be can depend on many factors; one can have a mere scrape, or a glancing blow, or one can have a true “crash and burn” situation.

Those are generally worth avoiding.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I feel a bit grumpy and curmudgeonly right now, largely because of my pain and poor sleep, but sometimes it leads to decent writing.  Whether that’s been the case today, I’ll let you be the judge.  I am not impartial.

Have a good one.

*In case it wasn’t clear, I did not work on Saturday.

**Even the old cogito ergo sum.  And don’t get me started on cogitum ergot hatto.

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Uttering such dulcet and harmonious blogs, that the rude sea grew civil at her song

Goodo and hell morning.

I’m pretty sure I’ve used that pseudo spoonerism before in a Thursday blog post opening, but I guess that’s okay.  I would be the only one to complain about such copying (and perhaps some imaginary, truly obsessive reader) and I’m okay with it as long as I am also the copier.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, because I had a very bad pain day yesterday*, and even the small extra weight of the mini laptop computer was something I wanted to avoid‒probably purely for psychological reasons, since I doubt it affected the level of my pain directly.

Anyway, I’m not in as much pain today so far, though it’s early doors, of course.  Still, I can’t change my mind and conjure the laptop computer at this point; if I could do that sort of thing, why would I bother going to the office?

Well, today I have one reason other than exerting effort necessary to maintain my job**:  my black Strat is back.  I asked my boss to bring it back, since it was just sitting in his garage, and yesterday he did so.  I even took a bit of time near the end of lunch to change to low E string, though I had brought my electronic tuner back to the house, so I had to tune the guitar afterward by ear***.  I’m pretty good at that, though.  Tuning a cello is much trickier, and I’ve done that a lot in my time.

I diddled around a little bit on it during a brief lull in the afternoon, and it was definitely nice.  I could still play Wish You Were Here and The Man Who Sold the World and Nothing Compares 2U, but I’m embarrassed to say that I had to look up the 5th (or was it 6th?) chord in Fake Plastic Trees****.  Once I got that chord back, though, it was as if I had never forgotten it.

My boss said that he thought my desk area looked better now with the guitar back in place.  Or maybe he asked me if I thought that was so.  Either way, the general message was the same, and I agreed with his assessment (or just answered his question in the affirmative).

I’ll probably do a bit of strumming and plucking this morning before work (and of course I will sing along).  One of these days, maybe I’ll do one of my videos of me playing and singing one of those songs above, or maybe One Headlight, or something like that.  I wonder how the acoustics in the new office would measure up when recording music.

We’ll have to see if I can still sing okay‒though, really, I do sing occasionally at the house when the housemates are out, and as far as I can tell my voice is still tolerable.  I don’t think I sing as well as I used to, but then again back in the day I used to sing more or less constantly during every daily commute, so I got a lot of practice.  I’d play and sing along with the Beatles or Elton John or Billy Joel or the soundtrack from Les Mis or (my favorite) The Phantom of the Opera.  Then later, when I had really long commutes after my divorce, I’d sing along with Tori Amos and Pink Floyd and Radiohead in addition to the previously mentioned artists.

Is it weird that, talking about how (or whether) I can sing, I cannot help but think of the old Simpsons  episode in which Troy McClure stars in the Broadway show Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off?  Specifically, I remember when the famous “Take your stinking paws off me…” line leads into a song in which the surrounding apes repeat, “He can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk, he can talk…” and Troy belts out, “I can siiiiiiiiiing!”

I haven’t watched much of The Simpsons since Phil Hartman was murdered.  He was never a main character, but he was always awesome.  I once read that he claimed, “I can do a thousand voices…and they all sound like Phil Hartman.”

Well, I suppose that’s enough gobbledegook for today.  For those of you who prefer talk of music to talk of mathematics and physics and their relationships to prosaic, daily matters:  You’re welcome*****.

I hope you have a good day today‒though as you should know by now, it will inevitably be the best possible day you can have, so don’t fret too much.  Reality is what it is.  And as John Mellencamp might have said (though he did not, as far as I know):  “When I fight reality, reality always wins.”

That’s one of the ways we know that it’s reality.

TTFN

I like this picture because David Gilmour’s Strat here looks JUST LIKE mine.

*Unless you prefer to say that, because of how much pain I was in, it was a good day for pain but a bad day for a person who would rather not be in chronic pain.  Raise your hand if that describes you.

**This is a bit peculiar, but without intending to do so, I initially wrote, “…exerting effort to stay alive” (emphasis added).  That hadn’t been the conscious idea or intention in my head as I was writing.  I wonder what a Freudian would say about that off slip of the typing thumbs.

***No, this is not going to be a stupid “by ear” related dad joke.  I just wanted to point out that I did use a video on YouTube where the proper guitar notes were played, just to get the sound for my low E.  After that, the rest of the tuning is pretty easy.

****It was a Dsus2, if memory serves at the moment.  [Checks the chords]  Yes.  Yes, it was a Dsus2.  And it was the 5th chord in the song, if you count the little Asus4 temporary life as a chord that’s separate from the A major chord from which it arises and to which it returns.

*****It’s not “your welcome”, which would seem to refer to a welcome that belongs specifically to you‒it’s “you’re welcome”, with the contracted form of “you are”, meaning, yes, you are welcome to the boon I have provided in the form of not writing about physics and mathematics today******.

******And though I’ve never seen it written so, it’s also not “yore welcome”, which would seem to be some reference to the way people used to be welcomed in the old days.

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Lost then found thoughts about lost connections

While I was getting ready to go this morning, I thought about writing this blog post.  I thought about my usual starting point of saying something like, “Well, it’s Wednesday morning again,” or some other such inanity.  But then, as I was thinking about that, another, more interesting beginning and an actual, rather interesting, topic occurred to me.

Then, by the time I got ready to start writing—i.e., now—I had completely forgotten what I meant to write.

That’s terribly frustrating, but it is par for the course.

Oh, wait!  Maybe what I was going to write was about my realization regarding the effects of having a very uncomfortable crisis, but one that is inherently finite*.  It’s probably pretty obvious to you that what made me think of this was my recent adventure with a kidney stone.

Of course, while it was happening, it drowned out everything else, especially in the acute stages.  If that had been something without an endpoint, and if there were not sufficient medication to control the pain, then death would have been the only feasible alternative.  Even later, with the stent in place and the literal, constant, burning feeling that I needed to urinate for two weeks, things were pretty harsh.  But though it did not truly drown out my depression, and it was thoroughly exhausting, it did rather overshadow much of my chronic pain.

The day the stent was taken out I felt a fair amount of relief, of course.  But before long my usual existence asserted itself, with all its emptiness, and of course, with all its chronic pain.  And I remembered that, really, I have nothing going on in my life at all, nothing to which I look forward in any kind of long-term sense, and I have no further clue about or hope for my future.

It’s a bit reminiscent, on a shorter time scale, of what happened when I was a “guest” of the Florida Department of Corrections.  Though I was/am innocent of the charges that were created against me, I took a plea bargain for three years (toward which time served applied) because it was tolerably short and I didn’t want to risk the possibility of the much longer sentence with which the prosecution threatened to try to get, risking the outcome on the potential of a jury of my peers to see past my (apparently) not terribly endearing personality and the simple fact that I was a doctor and thus, to those who might be in a typical jury, a generally hated “elite”**.

I think it was the best available choice at the time.  And while I was “up the road” I was able to console myself with looking forward to seeing my children again once I got out—and to see them before they were adults, which would not have been the case otherwise—and that gave me the optimism to write first Mark Red and then The Chasm and the Collision and then Paradox City while I was at FSP West.

But then, of course, once I got out, it turned out that my kids didn’t really want the discombobulation of me having visitation or anything of that sort.  While I was heartbroken, I didn’t feel that I had a right forcibly to disrupt their lives when I had already fucked everything up, first with my personal health problems, then with my misguided attempts to help other people with chronic pain that led me to be arrested.

So, I bit the bullet and kept on writing at least, on my own, though I think my stories grew steadily bleaker and darker over time.  And I learned to play guitar and wrote and recorded a few songs, and did some covers and everything.  But I still didn’t see my kids, and haven’t even communicated with my son other than to receive his email stating that he didn’t really want to have a relationship with me (“right now”).

At least I got to see my youngest when I was visited in the hospital with my kidney stone.  That was a gift that was well worth even that much pain.  But now I’m back to my nosferatu existence, and like Vermithrax***, though I don’t feel pain as severe as the kidney stone, I still feel constant pain.

There may be people who can have chronic pain without getting depressed about it, and indeed, without losing their zest for life, but I fear I’m only left with the squeezed dry pulp of mine.  It seems to be just the way I’m built neurologically.

I suspect that most people who keep their spirits up despite chronic pain and disability do so because they are surrounded by a local support system of some sort****, and they probably do better at connecting with and getting along with other people than I do.

I’ve only ever really been close to specific, core groups of people, and with ones nearby, that I saw nearly every day.  I’ve never been good at connecting over long distances, and I have a hard time even picturing people when they’re far away.  I mean, I can “picture” them in the sense that I know what they look like, and I will be able to interact with them if and when I see them, but I cannot in any intuitive sense “model” their existence elsewhere.  I cannot really get a feel for what they might be doing and certainly not for what they might be thinking.

When even the people I love are far away from me, they really exist more as concepts than as people whose reality I can feel.  They are missing in a bleak and rather horrible way.  I feel terrible about that fact, and I hope it doesn’t come across as insulting—though it has probably hurt the feelings of people about whom I care on more than one occasion—but it seems to be just the way my brain works.  It’s also probably related to the fact that I never have for an instant imagined wanting to be someone other than myself, even though I hate myself; I just cannot even conceive of what that would mean, let alone wish for it.

Oh well, whatever, never mind.  I’m back on the train, yeah, and here I go again, on my own…alone again, naturally.

(I do like to quote things, don’t I?)

I hope you have a good day.

*Of course, as far as we can tell, pretty much everything is inherently finite, but some things are much more constrained and contained in time than others.

**This is based on what my attorney, and my attorney’s supervisor, said to me.  I don’t think they were trying to be unkind, and though their judgement was and is fallible, it was likely better than mine would have been.

***I know, I’m mixing fantasy metaphors and similes.  That’s okay; I like them.

****And most of them are probably not “ex-cons”.

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“Ain’t no big surprise”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you got it in one:  I am working today, so I’m writing a blog post.  Not only am I working today, but my coworker, who shares some of my duties, is moving to a new apartment this weekend, so he won’t be in.  We are also supposed to be having people from the “other” office come and work with us, so there will be more to do, but less help, and I’m still just wiped out.

Oh, yeah, and the room air conditioner that I ordered did not arrive on time.  Now, depending on which automatic message one believes, it will arrive sometime today, or it will arrive by June 5th…and if it doesn’t arrive by then, I can then ask for a refund.

As if a refund would be useful!  If I had wanted the money more than I wanted the air conditioner, I wouldn’t have ordered the air conditioner.  I ordered it based on the delivery time range that they posted, which was barely soon enough, and if there had been a similar unit that could be delivered sooner, I would have ordered that.

It’s so frustrating.  This has been a really long couple of weeks, and as with most of what I do, so much of it has gone wrong‒not least of which, of course, was the fact of the kidney stone, which was probably helped along by my attempts to exercise despite the heat and humidity.

I’ve also had a bit of a persistent headache on the left side of my head for the last few days, which doesn’t help improve my mood.  It seems to be sinus related; there’s no clear sign of infection, but my nose is stuffy on that side despite decongestants.  It may also be related to the fact that I tend to clench my teeth fiercely a lot of the time, though I don’t mean to do so.

Because of the short time frame, it’s quite unlikely to be a brain tumor or a growing aneurysm, more’s the pity.

I’ve been following several depression support and suicide awareness accounts on Instagram, in addition to the usual jokey accounts (today is apparently the last day of “Mental Health Awareness Month”).  It’s a bit funny how often they post things that say something like, “Someone is glad that you’re still around.”  I’m never entirely sure that’s true.  I suspect that, if I were not making audible noises (so to speak) most such people would have all but forgotten that I ever existed.

I mean, I’m sure that there are people who are glad that I’m not dead, some in more of an implicit sense, others in a very specific sense.  And that’s very nice, of course, and I would not for a second want to criticize such people.

But what good does that do me*?  They cannot give me a portion of the gladness they have to boost my spirits, and unfortunately, the person who most needs to be glad that I am around is not glad (that’s me by the way).  I am not glad to be alive.  Why would I be?  All I do is spoil the party for others, so to speak, like in the Beatles song.  “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”

Anyway, sorry, I know this is boring as shit and as pathetic as pathetic can be.  I apologize.  I really wish I had something insightful and/or edifying and/or entertaining and/or at least interesting to say.  But look not for positivity from me.  To paraphrase the ghost of Jacob Marley**, it comes from other regions and is conveyed by other writers to other kinds of readers.

That’s not to imply that, like Scrooge, you who read this are somehow culpable for the fact that I am such a downer and write only gloomy and depressing shit.  That would not merely be unjust, it would be inexcusably rude.  I truly appreciate you, my readers, though I often wonder at your patience and interest.  But to me, like most things I do, my blog feels as though it is a net negative for the world.  Everything about me, except for my children, feels like a net negative for the world.  Just by existing, I make everything around me at least a little bit worse.

Okay, that’s more than enough of that for today.  I’m sorry.  I hope I didn’t make anyone have a bad start to their day or anything.  Please accept my sincere thanks for reading and my strong wishes for you to be healthy and joyful.  And have a good weekend if you can.

*I am deeply sorry if that seems churlish and dismissive or even contemptuous.  It’s not meant to be any of those things.  I respect and appreciate the positive feelings and intentions of those who express such sentiments, and I think those people are truly wonderful.  I merely wish to say that while it’s “nice” to have people out there who are glad you’re alive, that doesn’t actually translate into you, yourself being glad to be alive, that’s all.

**In A Christmas Carol.