Personal

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Monday morning…looking up?

It’s Monday morning again, as tends to happen around this time of week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.

I’m starting this blog post at the house, where I’m waiting to see if the Uber prices come down a bit before deciding to take one.  If they don’t, I may decide to walk to the train; it’s relatively cool out, and I feel physically rather energetic.  I may even take the bus, though that’s a circuitous and irritating path.  I’ll keep you posted about what happens.

…

Okay, well, the price dropped an acceptable amount, so I booked an Uber, but the estimated wait is 15 minutes, which is unusually long for this time of day.  That further cements my plan to try to make sure to walk back from the train on the way “home” this evening.  Yes, it will take longer even than waiting for an Uber, but it will cost less, it will have a lower carbon footprint‒though I will make many more actual footprints‒and it will also get me some good exercise.  I hope you can all help keep me honest and maybe even spare some words of encouragement.

I have some good news to share with you today.  It’s not momentous, but it means a lot to me.  I did not start on HELIOS, but I’m happy to report that I’ve started something else.  The prospect of beginning a new novel, even a “light novel” sci-fi story, was a bit intimidating, so on the other spiral-bound notebook, the one on which my cousin recommended I write a zombie story, I thought maybe I would write a short story.  I didn’t intend to write a zombie story (sorry, Lance) since I don’t even really enjoy reading or watching such stories, but it’s still a good basic idea.

I opened up my old collection of story ideas, from which came more than one of my existing works, and scrolled down.  Most of the ideas weren’t that gripping for the moment, but quite a way down the list I found an idea whose time, it turns out, had come.

I won’t tell you much about the story idea here, partly because I don’t have the full thing sketched out, but mostly because I don’t want to diminish my drive to write it.  It’s called Extra Body, and no, it’s not a horror story.  If anything, it’s a sort of lighthearted sci-fi short story, but set in the ordinary, modern world.

I wrote one page of it at work on Friday, and then yesterday‒yes, Sunday‒I wrote another page and a half.  It’s almost, but not quite, unheard of for me to write fiction on a Sunday, simply because I habitually mandate that as a mental break day from writing fiction.  However, since I’ve been on quite a prolonged mental break from writing fiction anyway, I decided to get in an extra day.

Also, instead of setting my usual daily goal of 3 to 4 pages of writing, I just set my goal to at least 1 page.  That takes a lot longer when I’m writing “by hand” than it does when typing‒I can type a full 400 to 500 word page in a very short period of time‒but that’s okay.  I’m hoping this pressure will keep me more concise than I often tend to be.

I must say, it’s good that I’m keeping the target low when writing by hand, because my hand muscles are deconditioned for writing much on pen and paper.  Of course, my writing is also terribly messy, but that is nothing new.  As I rediscovered yesterday, I can always read my own handwriting at least.

This shouldn’t be too long a short story, especially not for me.  It’s not going to be terribly deep or thought provoking, just a bit of fun.  Then, maybe, once I’m done with that, if I’m still around, I can start HELIOS.

Another thing, in closing for the day:  I did in fact look up the chords and tabs for All Apologies only to find that, though it was originally played in a form of the “drop D tuning”, it’s just a 3-chord song (not counting sus-2 and 7th chords, which one usually does not).  I decided to learn it using standard tuning, because I don’t like having to twiddle with the tuning of my guitar so much.  This meant I had to figure out the main riff for myself, since the tabs are not really any help, being all in the original tuning.  That wasn’t much work, though.  It’s a nice sounding riff, but it’s actually quite simple.

So, since I had the guitar out anyway, I decided to look up the chords to Close to You, in preparation for possibly recording my parody, Antichrist.  This song has slightly more chords than the other one, but unless you count the “truck driver” key change in the middle, it’s also really a pretty simple song.

I guess most popular songs are not all that complex.  One can get spoiled when playing around with Radiohead and the Beatles, let alone with having played Bach on the piano (and cello), or having been in pit orchestras playing West Side Story and the like.

Anyway, as may be obvious, I’ve gotten a slight boost in my overall energy, partly from better allergy control, I think, so that’s good.  I hope it continues.  We shall see, I guess.  For now, at least I’m being slightly productive.  I hope all of you are feeling at least as well as I, and that you have a good week.

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“Find my nest of salt”

It’s Friday, in case you didn’t already know, and since I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, it’s actually the last day of the workweek for me.  Oh frabjous day*.

I didn’t write a post yesterday, because I was out sick.  I think that some dip that I used had been in the fridge longer than I had remembered and had gone bad or summat, though it tasted okay.  Anyway, it certainly didn’t want to stay down after a while, so that was unpleasant.  I was worried that I might have caught some upper GI virus, but it was too self-limited an illness for that.

I feel as though I get sick on Thursdays more often than on other days, and especially on ones after a week in which I worked on Saturday.  I’m not sure if this is true pattern recognition on my part or some form of selection bias, but it feels as though it’s at least a slight trend.  I would suspect‒if it’s something real‒that it’s related to me getting worn down mentally (and physically) and becoming vulnerable to random physical insults after having had a longer week and no real recharge time.

This didn’t happen to me in the past, but then again, I was younger then**, and my reserves were deeper.  Also, I had a family to come home to, and a safe environment, and friends, and books that I wanted to read.  It was also reasonably quiet both at home and at school or work, and what noise there was‒even when it was quite chaotic‒was related to what was happening, what was being done, what the work entailed.

Things now are much different, and I need to find a way to recharge myself more rapidly and reliably, at least if I want to avoid total system collapse.  I’m not sure that I do want to avoid that, though.  Some part of me occasionally thinks that, at least if I completely fell apart, people would have to notice, and maybe someone would help me.

I doubt it.  The world is not set up well for doing very beneficial things, especially to and for people who are odd.  And I certainly don’t seem to be the sort of person people like to keep around for very long at a time, not in close personal contact, anyway.  They’ll happily‒or willingly, anyway‒keep themselves surrounded by shallow, lazy, manipulative users, as long as they wear at least a façade of warmth and cheerfulness.  But if someone approaches things differently, and is too mentally fatigued and fed up to bother trying to pretend otherwise or to force smiles all the time, they withdraw, even if that person works hard and tries hard, and is creative and smart and would never willingly betray them.

This is all hypothetical of course, but it does highlight why I think people‒indeed, the world‒are probably not worth keeping around.  Or it’s not worth keeping myself around to be among them.

Case in point:  for at least two days now (and it may have happened yesterday, too, for all I know) the Tri-Rail trains going north and south from my station boarded (with last-minute announcements) on opposite sides of the track from the ones they usually arrive on.  Now, it can make sense for one of the trains to board on its opposite side from usual; track maintenance needs to be done from time to time.  But having the trains switch sides smacks of someone just having screwed up, and then having done so again.  It’s not reassuring for passengers, that’s for certain.

Of course, my own reliability is not impressive lately.  I haven’t yet started work on HELIOS, though I have the blank notebook in my backpack (and another one remaining at the office).  I think, oddly enough, that if I were able to find a way to work on that during the day, I might recharge a bit just from that.  Then again, maybe I’m wrong.  I’ve only ever really successfully written fiction consistently early in the morning in near-silence.

Well, I haven’t given up on it yet, but I’m not optimistic.  I guess I’ll let you all know if I succeed in starting.

I also feel like I want to get the tabs to the Nirvana song All Apologies and learn it, and maybe do a recording of it, but I doubt that’s going to happen.  My guitars are just sitting unused.  Despite this, they give me no reproach‒guitars are very nonjudgmental that way.  They merely sit there, fallow, waiting and gathering dust, as is my keyboard (the musical one) and my cello.  It’s a shame, I know.  But, as the song’s lyrics say, “I’ll proceed from shame.”***

For now, though, I won’t proceed any further than this final paragraph.  I hope you who read this all have a good day and a good Saturday and a good Sunday if you’re at all able to do so.  As for everyone else, well, who cares about them?  They’re not like us, right?  We don’t need them.  They are our enemies, and we are theirs.  JK…OAI.

*Was anyone else really, really bothered when, in Tim Burton’s movie version of Alice in Wonderland, they referred to Christopher Lee’s character as if its name were “Jabberwocky” when that was just the title of the poem from which it was drawn.  The creature’s name, or title, is the Jabberwock.  It says so right in the second stanza of the poem:  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”  Yeah, I figured nobody else probably cared.

**Almost by definition.

***I don’t believe that the line is “aqua seafoam shame”, as so many people seem to think.  That’s merely a classic mondegreen.  I think this largely because the mondegreen version is a weird, abstract, bizarre bit of imagery that doesn’t resemble anything else in the words or tone of the song, whereas “I’ll proceed from shame,” follows quite logically from the preceding “I’ll take all the blame”.  Cobain’s lyrics could be cryptic and quasi-nonsensical sometimes, but their tone is more consistent than the whole aqua seafoam thing would be.  End rant.

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Near-catatonic dysthymia with sensory overload and the difficulty they engender in writing fiction at work – a personal case report

Well…

I tried to write some on HELIOS yesterday‒even just a page would have been nice.  I got my clipboard down, put the title at the top of the first page, and I even worked on a few names for characters and places.  I chose a good name for the school in which some of the action takes place, one that I like (this happened before the workday started), and a couple of tentative names for three main characters.  I’m not sure about sticking with any of those.

As I’ve noted before, I made up the rough idea of HELIOS when I was quite young, as a comic book superhero.  I don’t remember what name I had given to the main character, but knowing me, it was probably some ridiculously simple and probably alliterative name.  For instance, I once made up a completely ripped-off-from-the-Hulk character called “the Cosmonster” (!) and his regular, human name was John Jackson.

To be fair to my past self, I was quite young, and I was influenced by Stan Lee, who made such characters as Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, and Reed Richards.  So, there was precedent.

Still, a decent name for the main character is rather important.  “Doofus Ignoramus” is unlikely to be the secret identity of a memorable hero, though it could be an interesting genus and species name for some newly described creature.

Anyway, as I implied, I got no actual writing done on the book.  It’s just too noisy and chaotic during the day, and it’s almost impossible for me to block it all out, since I have to attentive to work matters.

Also, my dysthymia/depression and probably some other things were in full swing yesterday, and I was all but catatonic through at least two thirds of the work day.  I barely moved when I didn’t need to move, I barely spoke‒even when someone spoke to me, except when necessary‒and I don’t think I showed any facial expression before about 4:30 pm, though it can be hard for me to tell.  I’m trying not to exaggerate here.  I really felt more or less completely empty.

I even did a quick Google search for the official clinical meaning of catatonia, to see if I was close to meeting it, as I felt I might be.  It wasn’t quite the right term, but it wasn’t ridiculously far off, either.  There were times during the day that, if I had somehow caught fire, I probably would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of, “Huh.  I’m on fire.  I should probably put that out.  But is there really any point to doing that?  It’s too noisy in this world, anyway…maybe I should just let myself burn.”

Eventually I thawed slightly as the day went on‒I do fit the typical pattern of depression in that my overt symptoms tend to be worse in the morning.  Weirdly, despite that fact, I find it far easier to get many things done in the morning, when it’s quiet and I’m effectively alone.

I’ve always been that way, or at least as long as it’s been pertinent.  Even in junior high, I used to get up and go to school very early, so I tended to be the first student there and have quiet space and time to feel like the surroundings were just mine before everyone else showed up.  I carried this on through high school.  In my undergrad years, I used to set my watch fifteen minutes ahead and then still make a point to get to class early, by my watch, even though I knew it was set ahead.

That would be harder to do nowadays, since all the effing digital devices display time based on local corrections to UTC, getting updates and adjustments through 5G or Wi-Fi or whatever other connections are there.  This is good around daylight savings time, I guess‒it’s harder for people to make the excuse that they forgot to set their clocks forward in the spring and that’s why they’re late for work the Monday after.  But the whole uniformity of time and whatnot seems overrated‒and it certainly doesn’t seem to stop people from being habitually late in the morning and then keeping other people late at the end of the day.

Not that I am bitter.

Going back to writing:  despite my emptiness and disconnectedness yesterday, and my inability to write any fiction, I decided to order two good spiral bound notebooks, thinking maybe I can at least bring them on the train and write on my way back to the house or something.  If I brought the clipboard with the paper in it, the pages would get all shmushed and mangled in my backpack, and that would be very aesthetically unpleasant.

So, I’ll be getting two of those lovely, sturdy “5-Star” spiral bound notebooks delivered today.  They were quicker to arrive and cheaper than if I had bought them in a stationery store, and I had better choices of colors, though I still had to settle for one green one along with the black one to get a one-day delivery.  That’s okay.  One of the nice things about black is that it goes with every color quite nicely.

I guess I’ll let you know how things go today.  I’m not too optimistic, especially given that work is more sensorially overloading and distressing than is even riding on a commuter train, a fact which at first glance might seem rather contradictory.

It makes a certain amount of sense, though.  On a train‒or a bus, or similar‒one is actually much more alone than one is in an office.  There are other people, but they are each also alone.  You are all mutually alone, and there is no impetus to communicate or interact.  It’s much more pleasant than working where people feel they can just come up and interact with you without warning, whether or not you’re already doing something.  And then, they’re all talking and interacting and there’s overhead music, and there’s stupidity, and you can’t even hear the useful, pertinent information that you’d like to hear.  It’s too chaotic and noisy, certainly for someone with constant tinnitus in one ear and other sensory difficulties.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  The forces that brought the world into existence never bothered to get my input when they did what they did.  The morons.  Things could have been so much better than they are, but they didn’t bother to ask me.  Then they give the poor excuse that I “didn’t exist” at the time.  Whose fault was that, huh?  Not mine!

Maybe it’s not too late for me to fix everything.  But it often seems hardly to be worth the effort, even if it can be done.  For the most part, life in general does not merit help or protection.  Macbeth had its number:  it’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Speaking of tales told by idiots, I’ll let you know tomorrow how it goes today with respect to fiction writing after my notebooks arrive.

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Whither one goes affects whether the effects of the weather are noteworthy

It’s a bit chilly this morning, at least for south Florida.  As I looked at the weather app when I was getting up, it reported that the temperature near me was about 51 degrees Fahrenheit.  We can take 32 away from that then multiply by 5/9‒so that’s 19 x 5, which is 95, divided by 9‒which gives just over 10 degrees Centigrade (or Celsius, depending upon whom one asks).

I guess that’s pretty cool, though certainly there are many places north of here where people would welcome it as a relatively balmy day for this time of year.  Alternatively, in parts of the southern hemisphere, where it is summer, it would seem aberrantly cold, even more noteworthy than it is in my neck of the subtropical woods.  Going farther afield, on Mars it would be truly a record-setting heat wave, whereas on Venus, such a temperature would be impossibly, unfathomably cold.

The surface temperature of Venus is, if memory serves, around 900º Fahrenheit, or nearly 500º Centigrade, or nearly 800 Kelvin (I am rounding the Kelvin “273” addition to Centigrade because I only have one significant figure in my recalled estimate of Venus’s average temperature in Fahrenheit, and adding other specific digits would be misleading and unjustified).

It’s interesting that Venus, the planet named for the goddess of sexual and romantic love, is the most hellish planet in the solar system.  It’s hot enough at the surface to melt lead.  The atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth and largely consists of carbon dioxide.  The cloud cover is constant and it rains sulfuric acid.

Perhaps Venus, the morning “star” (and the evening “star” too, depending on which side of the sun it’s currently on from Earth’s point of view) is more appropriately given one of its other names, which is:  Lucifer, the light-bearer, herald of the dawn, who in later mythology was associated with the Devil (at least before his fall).

Of course, it’s hard to reconcile Lucifer’s supposed fall with the fact that the planet is still conspicuously up there in the sky.  And I do mean “conspicuously”.  Apart from the sun and the moon, Venus is easily the brightest thing in the night sky.  Sometimes one can still see it even as the sun is beginning to rise; the cloud cover of Venus makes it highly reflective of visible light.

Anyway, I find it sardonically and cynically amusing that the goddess of love is associated with a nightmarish hellscape, but I have a personal history that makes me look askance at romance.  I am, in other words, biased.

Venus is a good object lesson in the potent effects of carbon dioxide’s tendency to allow visible but not infrared light to pass easily through it, and so to create a “greenhouse effect” even in the modest concentration it achieves on Earth.

The physics of this is well understood, relating largely to the resonant frequency of the bonds in the molecule as well as its size and shape.  Smaller, tighter molecules like molecular nitrogen and molecular oxygen, the two gasses that make up the vast majority of Earth’s atmosphere, don’t interact much with infrared light, and are more prone to scatter shorter, bluer wavelengths of visible light‒this is a rough explanation of why the sky is blue (and why the sunrise and sunset are much redder, as that sunlight is going through more of the atmosphere due to the angle at which we see the sun at those times of day, and the blue is partly scattered out of it, leaving relatively more redder light behind).

Anyway, the broad physics of the greenhouse effect is almost elementary, and has been understood for a long time.  The specifics of what precisely will happen in any given set of circumstances can be tricky to tease out, given the complexity of reality‒you might say that Venus is in the details‒but the specifics are often less important than the broad strokes.

After all, when a giant asteroid is heading toward the Earth, it isn’t that reassuring to know that only, say, 75% of species will be driven extinct by its impact, and that life will survive and eventually once again thrive.  How much would someone have to pay you for you to be willing to accept a 75% chance that just you will die, let alone everyone like you on the planet?

There might well be a big enough sum for you to be willing to risk your own life, especially if you got to enjoy the money for a while before the dice were thrown, or to leave it to your heirs.  But for your whole species?  Is there a reward big enough to be able to take that chance?  Let’s assume you’re not a raging misanthrope/panantipath like I am for the sake of this question, since depending on my mood, I’d be inclined to negotiate for a higher chance of extinction.

Also, of course, by pretty much every possible form of ethics you might follow, you don’t have the right to roll the dice on all the members of your own species.   You don’t have any right to roll the dice on the members of your own family, unless they unilaterally and spontaneously and freely grant you that right.

Sorry, I don’t know why I’m writing about these topics today.  They are just what spewed out of me, like vomit from the proverbial drunkard or pus from a squeezed abscess.  I wish I could write something more interesting, or write something that helped my mood some.  Writing fiction did at least help fight my depression, but it’s hard when almost no one reads my stuff.

Maybe I should take to writing at least a page of fiction a day by hand, on the notebook paper and clipboard I have at the office, during downtime, instead of watching videos.  Yesterday I mainly watched ones about spontaneous symmetry breaking and the electro-weak era and the Higgs mechanism.  To be fair to me, it’s very interesting stuff, and it actually would have some relevance to my potential comic book turned manga turned science fiction story, HELIOS.

Of course, that’s named for another mythological figure, one that’s even hotter than Venus.  But I don’t know if I can write it.  Motivation is difficult.  Still, as Stephen King reputedly once told Neil Gaiman, if you write just one page a day, by the end of a year you’ll have a decent-sized novel*.

Once I get writing, I have a hard time stopping at only one page.  If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll probably know this implicitly‒my general target for post length is about 800 words, but I almost never am able to keep it that short.

I guess we’ll see what happens.  And, of course, I’ll keep you all…posted.

*He has also noted that, for him‒as I have often found it to be for me‒writing fiction is the best form of therapy.

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Chaos surfing and the omni-curious mind

It’s Saturday morning and‒as I warned you‒I am writing a blog post today.

I just experienced a tiny little frisson of déjà vu, which is always interesting when it happens.  It involved that seemingly obvious, curious sensation that I could remember dreaming about the process of writing this particular blog post, in the location in which I’m writing it, at some time in the past.  Of course, I have no reason to suspect that precognitive dreams are actual things, except occasionally, by coincidence, due to the large number of dreams that happen and the brain’s capacity to model/predict its world with decent accuracy due to the regularities therein.  But déjà vu is still an interesting and sometimes enjoyable experience.

In case you haven’t noticed, mine is very much a stream-of-consciousness kind of blog.  I sometimes wish I were writing something more useful or informative or thought-provoking.  Then I could imagine I was contributing to the world in some way.  I have a wide range of knowledge on lots of topics‒science in general, some physics and cosmology, biology and medicine, some mathematics, a tiny bit of computers, and of course some philosophy (and psychology).

I sometimes regret not having explored philosophy more at an earlier age.  There was a philosophy class in my high school; it was one of my favorite classes, and the teacher was great, but I avoided philosophy in college deliberately.  I had little understanding of how good and useful it‒as well as pure mathematics, not solely for use in physics‒is in improving one’s ability to think about all subjects.

At its “worst” it’s at least analogous to doing calisthenics to get stronger and more fit.  One doesn’t do push ups in order to become a world champion at push ups‒usually‒and one doesn’t do push ups because one expects to become a professional pusher up and to make one’s living that way.  As far as I know, there is no such profession.  One does it to keep one’s body fit so it is more capable of responding to any of a functionally limitless number of specific challenges throughout life.  So it is with the mind, but the mind is far more capable of growth and strengthening than even the greatest athlete’s body has ever been.

I get so frustrated when I hear people whining about, say, the fact that they never use the Pythagorean Theorem in their daily lives, or haven’t used algebra since they left school.  My first reaction when I hear such moans is to think, “If that’s true, then too bad for you; you’re missing out.”

But I also find it noteworthy that most people don’t complain of the fact that they’ve never played kickball or tag or used their sandlot baseball skills in their later life.  Similarly, very few people get jobs playing video games‒there is a vanishingly small few who make at least temporary livings playing video games competitively, but that’s not a reliable long-term strategy for almost anyone.  Such skills are, for the most part, far less useful than those of algebra and calculus‒though I understand that there is some evidence that playing video games can make people better drivers by improving their alertness and response times.

Breadth and depth of knowledge are ends in themselves; they are their own reward, one might say.  When one learns something new, one makes oneself “larger” without taking anything away from anyone else*.  Information can be shared without loss, and one can contain whole universes‒real and/or imaginary‒in one’s mind.  It’s remarkable.

But also, knowledge, even of esoterica, is of practical, basic value.  Insights gained from having studied epistemology or Boolean logic may become useful, unexpectedly, in a business negotiation or a plumbing emergency.  Who knows?  The world is too complex for one to be able to predict the specifics of local events very far ahead of time‒and even the precise knowledge of that fact is based on an originally obscure branch of mathematics and information theory, and was formally born of the use of a “primitive” computer weather simulation.

You cannot fundamentally alter the chaotic nature of reality.  You cannot effectively steer the chaos‒but you can learn to surf on it.  And the more you know and the greater the breadth of your mental skills, the more likely you are to be able to catch the right waves and ride them to someplace you’d like to be.

Anyway, back to what I was saying earlier:  I sometimes imagine myself doing a more informative or exploratory blog, a discussion of sorts, albeit one-sided.  When I leave it to my stream of consciousness, my blog is often depressing (or at least it’s often depressed).  But I don’t know what people might like to read my thinking about; I have a great deal of difficulty understanding what other people find interesting or engaging, let alone why.  So, if anyone has any general subjects they’d like me to explore, whether truly broad or regarding current events or science news or anything within my relative wheelhouse**, feel free to let me know in the comments…or, I suppose, via Facebook or Twitter.  I don’t like to encourage such things, but these “social media” can be entertaining and even useful in certain rarefied situations.

In the meantime, have a good weekend if you’re able to do so.

*Apart from the tiny, tiny increase in overall universal entropy that all learning entails.  But that’s going to happen anyway, and the entropy created by a lifetime of astonishing erudition is unnoticeably small next to, say, that produced every day simply by the Earth absorbing sunlight, warming up, and releasing higher-entropy heat back out into the cosmos.

**My wheelhouse walls are made of rice paper, so I can easily knock them down and expand that chamber as desired.  I dream of my wheelhouse eventually being as large as the cosmic horizon‒or even larger!  Why not?

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Salutations on a Friday

I don’t have much to say, today‒or much to write, I guess, if you want to be precise.  Honestly, I don’t think I have much to say in the literal sense, either, but it’s harder to tell since I don’t tend to talk to anyone at all before nine or so in the morning.  Often, I would prefer not to say anything even then, but people will insist on saying things to me, like “Good morning,” and so on.

I guess I don’t really mind the “Hi” and “Good morning” type greetings*, though it is often irritating that one is expected to return them in some ritual fashion, for no particular purpose that I can discern‒other than, I suppose, that of primate hierarchical, dominance, and coalitional signaling between members of the same flange of naked house apes.  I doubt most people think much about it.  Still, a “Hi” is okay.  I can return it with a word and a nod, though often my voice is apparently too quiet for other people to hear when I reply.  I also will often give a Vulcan salute, which is good because it is silent and distinctive.

I gave one of those to a young man on the train who had asked me which stop was next because he needed to get off at a particular one.  I gave him useful information, he got off at his desired stop, and as he left, he thanked me.  I said a somewhat befuddled “you’re welcome” and without thinking did a low-key Vulcan salute.  I’m not sure he noticed it.

It can be amusing to greet or say goodbye to people using the American Sign language “love” gesture, with the index and pinky fingers and thumbs out but the middle two fingers down, as if you were Spider-Man shooting webs straight up into the air.  It’s not that I particularly like telling people that I “love” them‒generally, I don’t (love them or want to tell them), and I think the whole “I love you, man” kind of thing is very much overused, and bastardizes and cheapens the word and the very concept of love.

On the other hand, if you fold your thumb in, the “love” sign turns into the heavy metal sign of the devil (supposedly), so for people toward whom you have the least affection, it can be a good way to slag them off without them even realizing you’re doing it.  I know, it’s petty and rather unsatisfying, but it’s not as though you can act on your real impulses.  If you set them on fire with a homemade flame-thrower or beat them to death with a baseball bat, you’re liable to get arrested, even‒and this is the galling point‒if everyone else in the office agrees that the person is annoying.

This is all hypothetical, of course.

Anyway, I will be working tomorrow, so I suspect that I’ll be writing another blog post in the morning.  Yippee.  I don’t know why, but I have not yet been able to break that habit.

I am tempted just to sleep in the office tonight rather than go back to the house.  It’s a bit pointless, all the going back and forth.  There’s no one and nothing waiting at the house for me.  Even the neighborhood cats are coming around less often; someone else must be putting out better food than I do.

This is probably just as well.  I only started feeding the cats because my housemate used to do it, and he said he was going to come pick up the really skittish one.  He has not yet done so, and it’s been a few years now‒I don’t recall how long‒and I’ve been spending money on cat food that I could…I don’t know, that I could use as washrags to wipe the bathroom sink, something like that?  Nothing that I spend money on is really beneficial, other than books, perhaps, but I have oodles of those, and I still haven’t read much of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible, or Spacetime and Geometry, or Classical Electrodynamics or any of those books that I keep meaning to read.

It’s all very boring, but at least I have chronic pain and depression and insomnia to keep things from being too peaceful.  It’s too bad I don’t have drug or alcohol problems‒at least those keep life from being predictable.

I was being tongue-in-cheek with that last sentence.  I don’t want to have drug or alcohol problems, though they are enticing routes to self-destruction.  It was bad enough when I had to take prescription pain meds for so long.  And my favorite alcoholic beverages are the ones I imagine drinking; the real ones are always a disappointment, and they leave me feeling unpleasant.

I mean I feel unpleasant internally in that situation, meaning that I feel uncomfortable physically, that I feel unwell.  I know that I’m always relatively unpleasant to other people.

However, although my mind is not my friend, there are and have always been aspects of it that are the most treasured things about reality for me, and I don’t want to endanger those.  My love of learning and understanding, of reading, of horror and science fiction and fantasy, of music, all those things are treasures, even when my depression makes them inaccessible to me.  I don’t want them to go away permanently, at least not while I’m alive.  I guess that means that, if I were to get cancer, I wouldn’t want a brain tumor.

Of course, that would mean that I would be most likely to get a brain tumor, if the universe dealt in irony, which as far as I can tell it does not.  As far as I can tell, all instances of seeming “karmic” irony are cases of selection bias or recall bias.  We remember the time the guy who refused to fly died in a train derailment, or when the exercise guru died young of a heart attack, not realizing that we remember them precisely because they are unusual and atypical.  They are cases of “man bites dog”, which is news, according to the cliché, while “dog bites man” is not.

Talk to you tomorrow.

*On the other hand, I have great trouble with “How are you doing?” and related greetings.  I almost always freeze up for at least a moment when met with such inquiries.  I don’t know what to say.  Most days I feel that I am not doing well at all, but I don’t necessarily want to say that to others, nor are they likely to want to hear it, and I feel irritated at being put on the spot, especially when people don’t seem really to care much how well or poorly I’m faring.

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Did you know that the official name for February 15th is “Chafing Day”? Now you know.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my laptop computer, but I’m already at the office.  I really didn’t feel well when I finally gave up and got up this morning, and I was sorely tempted not to come to work.  So, I forced myself to come in very early—at personal expense—since I didn’t want to leave things hanging for other people at the office.  I hereby send out a “you’re welcome” to those people whose day I will be making slightly easier by my choice.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, though I didn’t mention it in my post, since it’s a day with little personal relevance to me.  Now, it’s the day after Valentine’s Day, which as far as I know has no “official” name.

In the UK and, I believe, in the rest of “the Commonwealth”, the day after Christmas is known as Boxing Day.  I have been unable to locate a reliable explanation of that term, but I personally imagine it referring to collecting all the boxes and other discarded packages that are a consequence of Christmas gift-giving.

I therefore now hereby propose that we all call the day after Valentine’s Day “Chafing Day”, because it’s mildly humorous, at least to me, and for some people it may even be accurate.  I doubt it will catch on, but maybe I can post a “tweet” or a Facebook message saying “Happy Chafing Day” to everyone, and see if the idea spreads.  Maybe I’ll title this blog post “Happy Chafing Day!” or similar, just to try to encourage the term.

If I’ve elected to do so, you readers will already know.

I felt pretty low at work, yesterday—even for me, I mean.  I told my coworker, the one with whom I’m closest, that I didn’t think I could keep doing this much longer, that I felt like I was going to hit the skids soon.  He misunderstood me at first, saying that he would miss me if I left for another job, but that I needed to do what I needed to do.  I clarified that I didn’t mean that I was thinking I would need to leave the job, but that I would need to leave—period.  By which I meant “to leave reality”, “to leave the world”, however you prefer to euphemize it.

He expressed his concern and said that he didn’t like to hear me talking that way, but of course, he had plans for the evening with his wife, and I didn’t feel like burdening him too much, so I put on a comparatively cheerful face afterwards.  Weirdly, I felt mildly relieved and more relaxed after that.

People seem not to take such expressions of emotional rock bottom as seriously as they might, but having at least gotten some word of my distress out to someone—other than regular readers of this blog—is something of a minor relief.  That way, if I go through the final exit door relatively soon, it will not be a complete surprise to everyone at the office.

I can’t keep feeling responsible for not causing inconvenience to other people at the expense of my ongoing misery, especially since so few people seem to return the favor.  My relationship with reality is an abusive one, and since reality is unlikely to change, I probably should just get out.

Another coworker, with the best of intentions, gave out some candy to everyone in the office, which was certainly a nice gesture.  However, being the weak-willed fool that I am, I ate mine, and then, after finally leaving the office quite a bit later than our supposed closing time—see my comment above about other people not being worried about inconveniencing their coworkers—I got some junk food on the way back to the house, and I ate it last night.

It was not very satisfying, and it probably contributed strongly to my ill-feeling this morning.  I need to take that as relevant feedback from reality and just avoid all such things from now on.  Snacks used to give me one of my only reliable sources of pleasure, or at least distraction, from the discomfort of life, but even they seem to be losing their power, though their costs are not likewise diminishing.  Today, I mean to put up a sign above my desk reminding others not to offer nor for me to accept such well-meaning “treats” in the future.

This situation is another example of the simple but hard-to-swallow fact that good intentions are not anything like a guarantee of good outcomes.

Often, once a person is secure in their good intentions—and I am provisionally convinced that most people who do such things really do mean well—they cease to assess the likely consequences of their actions.  If they mean well, they presumably think that they cannot do harm.  This, unfortunately but  clearly, is not the case, as anyone who has ever paid any attention to the nature of reality in any serious way will know—which is not very many people, I fear.

So, anyway, I’m physically tired and mentally tired, and I don’t feel well at all in either sense, either; I feel ill, both physically and mentally.  Alas, I have no reason to suspect there is any cure, though for certain aspects of things there may at least be some treatments, even if they are only palliative.

I told another coworker—one who is difficult but without meaning to be, because of his own life-long issues—that I more than half-wished I would get cancer, and that if I did I would not wish to be treated other than with palliative medicine to control pain.  Why would I want to prolong my life?  I’ve been undead for years already, and it’s not pleasant, and I see no reason to think that anything good will come along to change that.

It’s physically possible, in principle, of course.  I’m not so foolishly and superstitiously fatalistic to think that it’s utterly outside the realm of chance for my life to turn around and get better and remain better.  But as far as I can tell, the odds are very low.

I’ve waited things out for a long time, nevertheless, not wishing to be rash in drawing conclusions.  But if one is going to venture the capital of one’s continued time and discomfort and despair on some possible future upturn, one wants odds that justify the investment.  I don’t see any routes that carry such odds.  I have looked, and looked very hard, for them.  That doesn’t guarantee there aren’t some that I’ve missed, of course, but I’m not a stupid or unimaginative person—not in that sense, anyway—and I can only work with what I have and what I am, paltry though such resources may be.

So, anyway, I hope you all had as happy a Valentine’s Day as you could, and that you have a good Chafing Day today.  Spread the word about that title, if you like it.  Make memes and videos about it if you feel so inclined.  It wouldn’t exactly be legacy for the ages, for me, but it would be amusing, nevertheless.

TTFN

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The enemy of my Self is Myself

I mean to try to keep this post relatively short today, and only partly because I’m writing this on my smartphone and don’t want to make my thumbs feel worse.  It’s mainly that I just don’t have much to say or talk about, and certainly nothing uplifting.

I tried to do a few relatively upbeat posts‒for me, anyway‒on Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I don’t think they’re as popular as my depressed and nihilistic posts.  It’s rather ironic; one might imagine that upbeat posts would be the ones people would prefer to read, but I guess that may not be true.  I shouldn’t be surprised that it surprises me, probably; people often make very little sense to me.

Anyway, I’m just tired.  I left work slightly early yesterday with a bad headache and just feeling horribly stressed out and tense and angry.  I don’t know if it was that things were particularly frustrating at the office, or if it was the usual fact that I cannot escape from the person I loathe most in the world:  me.

I often say that I hate the world and I hate my life‒at least, it feels as though I often say it, because I say it in my head a lot.  Maybe I don’t say it aloud or in writing as often as it feels as though I say it.  I haven’t kept track, and I don’t mean to do so.  That would be truly boring.

But of course, the reason (one of them, anyway) I don’t just change my life‒or try to change the world‒is that I cannot escape the common denominator that is the single biggest contributor to the fact that I hate the world and hate my life:  I hate myself.

I wish it were otherwise.  It would be nice to love myself, I guess.  I wouldn’t have to be narcissistic or anything.  It doesn’t require a delusional or overinflated self-worth to love oneself, any more than it need be irrational or delusional to love one’s spouse or one’s children even when one can see and knows their imperfections.  No one is perfect, after all‒I’m not even sure what the term could mean when applied to a person.

One can love another person even when angry at that person.  One can punish one’s children when they misbehave, and one can choose not to indulge all their wishes precisely because one loves them and hopes to guide them toward being the best people they can be.

So love doesn’t have to be stupid or delusional.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean one can simply choose to love someone.  I’ve tried to train myself to love myself, with positive self-reinforcement, with cognitive therapy, with auto-suggestion, with written lists of my positive attributes, and even with self-hypnosis.  Obviously, I have not succeeded.

Even when I’m stressed out and irritated by everything that happens at the office‒by the noise, by the overbearing “music”, by the stupid little rituals, by the personality conflicts, by the frequent interruptions when I’m doing one task and people just come in without preamble and start asking me about something else entirely*, as if I were a machine just waiting for them to give me work‒even when all these things are happening, the thing that bothers me most is that I am with me.

That’s what I feel, and it’s what I’ve been fighting and it’s the fact in spite of which I’ve been trying to be positive, at least in my writing, but that’s not really working.

When I was writing fiction, that seemed to help at least a bit‒and sometimes a lot‒but there’s only so much fiction one can write that almost no one reads before one feels as delusional as if one believed one had magic powers.  But it is true that writing fiction is good therapy, as Stephen King has pointed out on more than one occasion, and if I could do it full time without other commitments, I might again find the energy to do it.  Unfortunately, if I want to stay alive‒which is a rather big “if” a lot of the time‒I have to work, like everyone else, and my mental energy is used up and more than used up.

Anyway, that’s that.  Yesterday I was very stressed out and had a headache and yelled openly at my closest friend in the office and came within a hair’s breadth of breaking my tablet and my back Stratocaster.  I banged my head on the wall a few times to release some of those destructive urges, and that didn’t help my headache.

Yet I didn’t sleep well at all last night, even for me, despite going back to the house somewhat early.  I don’t feel rested; I almost never feel rested.  The very air through which I move feels like viscous, heavy smoke, burning my eyes, poisoning me as I breathe, impeding me as I try to walk, pressing down on me as I try to stand up.  I need to stop.  I need to rest.  I need to sleep.

*This is a bit akin to people who will come up and start talking to one when one is reading, as if someone who is reading must be unoccupied and just waiting to be of service to other people.

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Monday reflections and a song parody

It’s Monday morning, the morning after the Super Bowl, in case you pay attention to such things.  It was a pretty good game, I guess‒I watched it‒but it never felt very exciting to me at all.  Not much seems very exciting to me, honestly.  I had gone for a couple of long walks and bought some snacks and ordered a bit of indulgent food for the game, but I’ve ended up throwing most of that away.  I guess that’s probably good, in the sense that I don’t need the extra junk food calories and whatnot.  But it is a shame to waste the food.

Still, food waste is not the biggest problem.  Even in the places in the world where there is starvation, the problem is not that there is no capacity to get the people food.  The problem is political‒local and geo‒in addition to economics that are born of twisted politics.

At least food waste is, more or less by definition, biodegradable.

I haven’t written any new fiction, of course, but I did something slightly creative yesterday morning.  Somehow, the Carpenters’ song Close to You got in my head.  As its lyrics passed through my thoughts, I again had the impression‒which often happens with this song‒that the person being described seems to have sinister, supernatural powers, or at least is surrounded by supernatural portents.  Then it occurred to me that the words “close to you” and the word “antichrist” have the same number of syllables and the same (rough) stresses.  So, inspired by these two facts, I wrote a parody of Close to You called, of course, Antichrist.

As someone who has long enjoyed horror fiction and who at an early age familiarized himself with the “Revelation of Saint John the Divine” as it is sometimes known‒the last book in the standard Christian Bible‒the lyrics came rather easily.  I’ll share them below.  I vaguely entertain the notion of actually recording my parody, doing all the various parts and whatnot, but since I haven’t been practicing or playing guitar more than once every few months, and have done the keyboards even less, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

I also thought once again yesterday about some slight tweaking to the plot of my “super hero” story HELIOS.  This is an idea that took root originally waaaay back in my childhood, and was one of the “comic book characters” I used to draw, and for which I made some partial comic books and even an arch-enemy.  But the more current version of the idea isn’t really a superhero story, certainly not the type that would involve costumes and secret identities and whatnot.  I even thought, for a moment, that I just might start working on that story soon.

That didn’t last long, though.  I just don’t feel any motivation to do it.  If five living people, total, have read any or all of my books or stories, I would be surprised.  So, writing them is a bit like taking all the pages of the finished works and scattering them into a hurricane.  They just all go off somewhere and become mere parts of the detritus of reality, their information lost to all but Laplace’s Demon.  And, presumably, He wouldn’t appreciate them as stories, even though He could keep track of each and every force and particle they entailed.

Maybe the fact that these thoughts and stirrings happened on the weekend, and after one full day off, means that if only I had some regular mental rest, I might find the energy to start writing fiction again, or playing music, or some other, similar creative endeavors.

I doubt that will happen, though.  I’m in the middle of the ocean treading water as it is.  How am I supposed to locate a place to rest?  The odds of me happening upon some Gilligan’s Island type of refuge are pretty low.  I’m just biding my time, waiting for fatigue and hypothermia to get the best of me.  In a real ocean, that would have happened a long time ago.  Unfortunately, metaphors are not as lethal as one might like them to be.

Anyway, there’s not much more to say.  I guess I’ll close by giving you the lyrics of my parody.  Here it is:

ANTICHRIST

A parody of Close to You (by the Carpenters)

–

Why do crows suddenly appear

Every time you are near?

Seems to me

You’ve got to be

the Antichrist.

–

Flaming stones fall down from the sky

Every time you walk by.

Plain to see

You’ve got to be

the Antichrist.

–

On the day that you were born the demons got together

And forged a waking nightmare built for strife

With storm clouds heralding your birth and armies of the dead that came to life.

–

Businessmen and others who want power

Before you now will cower

They just know

It must be so

You’re the Antichrist.

–

When at last the time arrives to show your true dark nature

all of those who bear your mark you’ll pierce

With fire and brimstone in your breath and ten horns on your seven heads so fierce!

–

Then the world meets its final end.

Into Hell it descends.

There awaits

Your dismal fate,

Antichrist

–

Seems to me

It sucks to be

The Antichrist.

–

Waah, Antichrist

Waah, Antichrist…

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Late-arriving, futile “justice” and reminders of a life that has been all but annihilated

I read the news yesterday, oh boy.  And yes, it was about a lucky man‒luckier than I am, anyway, at least in some ways.

There was a doctor in the heartland of America somewhere, I don’t recall where, who had been convicted of, apparently, inappropriately prescribing very large amounts of pain meds, the report quoting the number 500,000* (It seems unlikely that there were 500,000 prescriptions**, so it probably was that number of pills).

Anyway, his conviction was overturned on appeal, because apparently, in 2022, the SCOTUS handed down a ruling that the prosecution had to prove in such cases that there was “intentional or knowing” inappropriate prescription for it to rise to the level of a crime, and the jury hadn’t been appropriately instructed regarding that fact.

I looked up the case, and I’ve even downloaded the PDF of the case.  Although I haven’t read through it yet, the summaries make it clear that, yes indeed, this is a new and specific requirement.

Silly me, I had always thought that mens rea was a crucial requirement for nearly any criminal case, certainly one that rises to the level of a felony charge.  I brought that up with my (public) defense attorney, trying to point out that I shouldn’t be convicted of a crime since I literally had never intended to do anything but treat patients who had chronic pain‒which I did because I had chronic pain, and it had already severely harmed my life.  I knew how hard it was for even a physician, who at the time had good health insurance, to be able to get adequate treatment and even to get his prescriptions filled by often-judgmental pharmacists who looked at him as if he were a criminal just because he wanted to try to mitigate his pain with the most effective medicine that was available.

But no, apparently, according to my attorney, the prosecutor didn’t have to prove any such thing specifically; it could just be inferred.  And apparently I’m not exactly the sort of person to elicit sympathy from a jury in south Florida, because my voice tends to be monotone and my face tends to be expressionless and I don’t look like someone who is frankly worthy of sympathy.

All the charges against me were created by the PBSO, who sent in undercover people with (evidently) faked MRIs and fake complaints, who complained of chronic, severe pain and said they were in pain when I examined them***, and whose own secret recordings and records showed that there were often only one or two other patients in the whole office when they were there‒hardly what one would call a “pill mill” I should think.

Anyway, I was offered a plea bargain and I took it, because unless you’ve got a lot of money or you literally have nothing to lose, you will take a plea bargain in the right circumstances, even though you know you’re innocent.  I’ve written a blog post about how the plea bargain system is an extortionate game slanted against especially the underprivileged.

The statutes involved in my charges were designed by that <sarcasm> bastion of intelligentsia and morality, the Florida State Legislature </sarcasm>, to give judges no leeway, and to grind away maximally at anyone charged with “trafficking”.   If a jury decided that they should convict on at least one charge, since the state had created so many charges against me (each prescription being a charge, and twenty something having been conned out of me by various lying police officers over time) and the number seems impressive, I still could have faced a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

In retrospect, I think I would have been little worse off if I had, given the mockery and shambles my life has become.  But at the time, I hoped to see my kids again, perhaps sometime before they were adults.  Three years was better than fifteen (or potentially the rest of my life), and I had no one else to help me with a legal fight, and certainly no reservoir of money, so I took the deal.

The way things are now, though, I might not have been charged, or might have been offered some misdemeanor plea deal.  Or I might have gone to trial and won with relative ease, since the fact that I never knowingly or intentionally mis-prescribed medicine was a fact I knew for certain, at a Cartesian, cogito ergo sum sort of level, since it was a fact about my own mental state.

I may be naïve, and I often do not understand humans.  I am often easily misled and manipulated and used and misused and probably abused, because I am socially and emotionally very clueless and believe in giving other people the benefit of the doubt (to hold them innocent until proven guilty, in other words).  But I have never been greedy or unscrupulously opportunistic, and I took the practice of medicine and my duty and goal to relieve suffering very seriously.  I was never into making a lot of money, though it was good to be able to buy books I wanted and to take care of my kids.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and drove a ten-year-old Toyota Sienna.

Before yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d bothered thinking about what my life might have been like if things had not gone the way they did.  There didn’t seem to be any point.  I was a lost cause and that was that.  But this has made me feel acutely once again the cut of all the lost time with my kids and my lost ability to practice medicine, and all the other losses I’ve experienced as part of this debacle of a life.

What’s more, there’s been salt and vinegar rubbed into the wound by the fact that it took a Supreme Court dominated by many justices who’d been appointed by The Donald to require courts to require prosecutors to prove something that was supposed to be a necessary element of almost any serious criminal charge:  actual criminal intent.

That’s all leaving aside the un-ethics and illogic of the government of the “Land of the Free” dictating what people can put into their own bodies when it doesn’t directly harm other people in the first place.  I won’t get into that because it had no bearing on my medical practice‒I was not in the business of dealing in euphoriants, I was trying to relieve actual suffering.

One cannot really apply new jurisprudence to old cases in which a sentence has already been carried out and finished, and when the consequences thereof are already irrevocable.  I cannot regain the time I have lost with my children or the time I have lost when I could have been practicing medicine, or the time I spent at FSP West or in the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, where even the people who worked there frequently asked why the hell I was there, or still there (I spent 8 months in the place, on the mental health floor, because I couldn’t make bail, but finally my former girlfriend’s mother helped secure it‒at least she got all her own back after I was sentenced, and I appreciate her very much, though I might as well just have stayed in jail, since at least the whole sentence would have ended earlier given “time served” and I was basically homeless when out on bail, having lost everything I owned and relying on the generosity and kindness of friends/former coworkers).

So I am stuck with a ruined life and a twisted mockery of myself.  The fruits of a considerable number of years of time and effort and thought and creativity on my part**** were all taken away by the mindless grinding of a huge stupid machine of “criminal justice” that has little to nothing to do with the latter part of the term.  I don’t claim not to be stupid or foolish or not to have ever made mistakes in the whole situation.  I make many mistakes.  But it is maddening to see how misapplied the law can be and to experience it for oneself, especially when one is now by oneself, partly thanks to that misapplication, and then to learn that now the law is changed (or correctly applied) such that I could have been in a better situation had that change come sooner.

I often consider the possibility of going to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in various flammable liquids, and turning myself into a “bonfire of the unsanities and inanities”, to bring attention to some of the costs of misapplied “justice” and to bring an end to my own mis-called life.  I even have two gallons of paraffin lamp oil and six liters of charcoal lighter fluid and a big enough backpack to carry them all, in case I decide to do it.

Death by fire is intimidating, though‒I am no Buddhist monk by any means.  And I also dislike causing inconvenience to other people, even those involved in an institution that had no qualms about recklessly “judging” me and ruining my life.  But it is tempting, and I feel right now even more than usual the utter pointlessness of continuing, even while stupidity in the office in which I work grinds away at me further (though, to give him credit, my boss tries hard to keep things as sane as he can).

I feel rotten enough and alien enough even at baseline, and all this doesn’t help.  I have lost almost all that mattered to me, and I live alone in a stupid one-room (plus bathroom) “in-law” suite that is smaller than many hotel rooms.  All my previous friends are far away, and most are doing much better with their lives than I am and don’t really have much in common with me anymore.  In any case, I don’t really talk or otherwise communicate with them, though it would be nice.

There are also plain few people where I am now who have anything in common with me.  Very few people have much in common with me:  a disgraced physician unable to practice, with a love of math and physics and biology and of Shakespeare and horror fiction and science fiction/fantasy (reading and writing it) and of science and rationality-oriented podcasts and books and videos, who wants to learn or relearn more about modern physics at a deep level and whose brain doesn’t seem to run the same operating system as most of the people around him‒a Linux in a world of iOS, or worse.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Knowing me, I’ll probably just grind along until I’m worn to a nub and then tumble into the trash can, unmarked and largely unlamented.

I know that I won’t be sorry‒not about that.

*This sounds like an awful lot of pills, but it’s deliberately chosen to sound that way in a manipulative, rhetorical tactic as used by reporters and prosecutors alike.  Let’s run the numbers, as I am wont to do, to see how impressive they really are.

Now, if there were one patient, taking one pill per day‒perhaps the person only takes one prescription, say an antidepressant or a cholesterol med or a long-acting antihypertensive‒it would take nearly 1400 years to use that many pills.  Plain few patients live that long (see my recent blog post), and most pills would long since have expired and become inactive before the end of that time.

Still, the average physician is responsible for the care of 2,000 to 3,000 patients (see here and here), meaning that if, on average, their patients each only took one prescribed pill a day, they would go through 500,000 pills in 6 to 9 months.  But many prescriptions call for more than one pill per day, and uninsured patients cannot tend to afford the long-acting pain meds that claim to allow for steadier doses and thus slightly less risk of rebounds and escalations and all the horrors involved in that.

Now, presently, I take three to nine aspirin a day, sometimes more, and I also take two naproxen and some supplemental Tylenol as well, all of which are more directly toxic to the body than opioids, but are nonetheless over the counter (as they should be).  If I averaged ten total pills a day, then it would take me only 137 years or so to take 500,000 total pills.  That’s longer than I’m likely to be taking pills, but I’m only one person (that, as Dave Barry said, is the law).  An average practice of patients who took only six pills a day would go through 500,000 pills in one to one and a half months.  Many ordinary, non-pain-specific patients, especially those middle-aged and older, take that many and even more prescription meds a day.

In any case, an ordinary general practitioner with a light patient load of two thousand patients, each taking only an average of two pills a day, would prescribe 500,000 pills in 3 to 5 months.  So don’t be too impressed by the carefully curated numbers that prosecutors and media choose to elicit your alarm and disgust.

**Even 500,000 prescriptions, in a modest 2000 patient practice, would require only 250 prescriptions total per patient.  That would certainly take quite a bit longer than 500,000 pills would take, but given an average of only one prescription per patient per month (counting refills) it would only take a bit over 20 years, a decently short length of practice.  Many doctors see more than 2000 total patients and many patients get more than one prescription per month.  And, of course, one cannot even apply refills on “controlled substances”, they have to be literally re-written every month, and patients have to come to the doctor’s office to get them, assuming they can even get them filled.  Monthly doctor’s visits can be hard for someone trying to work a regular job while dealing with chronic pain.  Thus, the whole “mill” part of the “pill mill” trope is created by the law itself, leading to greater costs in time and fees for the patients who are trying to survive after job-related and other injuries or conditions that have caused them chronic pain and make it difficult for them to find consistent, gainful employment or to sustain health insurance.

***Pain is a symptom, not a sign, in medical terms.  We have no reliable ways of testing it, beyond patient report.  We try to find physical correlations when we can, often to see if we can find some treatable cause, but even Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine (I think it was on page 80 or 81 of the 14th or 15th edition, whichever one I had at the time) has clearly stated that, for instance, back pain does not correlate well even with specific injuries noted on MRIs and the like.  As large a number of people without pain will have nerve root impingements and bulging discs and the like seen on spinal MRIs as do have pain.  NO ONE KNOWS all the wherefores of this situation, but there is no serious doubt that such pain is quite real.

****It did not all happen during medical school or residency‒one does not coast along from K-12 and undergraduate college and only then start to work hard in med school, especially if one grew up in a blue-collar, factory town outside Detroit.