Personal

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Vamonos a escuchar mientras caminamos

I am writing this post on my smartphone today, as opposed to my computer.  Though, of course, a smartphone is a computer, and indeed, is far more advanced a computer than any I’d used prior to the turn of the millennium.  It’s a lot more advanced than the computers that ran the Space Shuttle™ and vastly more advanced than the ones used in the Apollo moon landings.  Thankfully, Newtonian mechanics is straightforward enough to be computable using quite simple systems and some smart humans, of which there were many involved in that program, and Newtonian mechanics is all one really needs to get to the Moon and back.

Anyway, I walked to the train station this morning, as was my plan, which was why I did not bring my…my folding computer back to the house with me yesterday afternoon.  I plan to bring it with me this evening, and to take tomorrow morning off from walking, just to avoid overdoing things in the short term. There will be plenty of time for overdoing things; I need to pace myself at least a little bit.

I feel that my sleep has been getting even worse recently than it usually is, and it’s really quite frustrating.  Yet, even though I’m deeply tired, I can’t seem to get sleepy.  I’m not sure what I can do about this, but it’s quite frustrating.

I do have one rather fun thing to report:  this morning on the walk to the train, I listened to a new audio-book I’d ordered with this month’s Audible credit (which hit my account yesterday).  That book was the first Harry Potter book…but in Spanish!  If there’s one set of books I know well enough to be able to fill in the gaps in Spanish, it’s that set.  The only potentially better one would be The Lord of the Rings; all in good time for that!  So, my tentative thought is that I can listen to the whole Harry Potter series in Spanish and this should help me improve my spoken (and heard) Spanish skills.

Audible also has the Harry Potter books in Japanese, and I almost started with that, but I figured Spanish would probably be the one in which it would be more useful to improve my skills.  I am in south Florida, after all.  The other people who share the house in which I live are primarily Spanish speaking, for goodness sake.

There’s nothing that says I can’t do both, of course, and that is my tentative plan.  I mean to do a lot of walking, so there will be plenty of time to listen.  Even in my hour and a half walk so far this morning, I only got to chapter 4 of the first book, and it’s the shortest of the Harry Potter books.  Just wait till I get to book 6!  I read that one seven times between when it came out and when book 7 was released, because I was impatient.  By the time I finish that, maybe, the audio will feel completely natural.

Once again today, I let the 610 train go while waiting for the 630.  I’m glad I did.  Today’s weather was warmer and muggier than Monday, and there is essentially no wind to cool one down, so that time is well used.  The wait is only somewhat effective, of course.  I brought along a second shirt to put over my “athletic” one, just so that I’m not sweating all over the back of the seat on the train.  My shorts are designed to be very good at letting go of sweat, but even so, given the pattern of accumulation, I look almost as though I had wet myself‒though only if I had done so while lying on my belly.

It’s not that bad, I guess, and I have my little “scent bomb” spray to hide any bad odor…and I’ve been told that my initial sweaty smell isn’t too bad.  Far worse (to me) is the odor of mildew.  If it gets going, I feel nauseated.  I hate that smell.

This is probably why I can’t stand to eat pretty much any kind of mushroom; they all smell vaguely like mildew.  Also, their texture is gross.  I suppose if I were to eat a magic mushroom in order to try to treat my depression, I could probably just force a bit down.  But it would have to be in specific, deliberate, and controlled circumstances.  At least I’m highly unlikely to eat poisonous mushrooms accidentally, which is good, because by all accounts of which I’m aware, they bring about a slow, painful, and horrifying death when they kill, and there are generally no known antidotes.

I don’t have much more to report.  It’s been a weird few days at the office, because my colleague is out of town, on his delayed vacation.  It’s a bit hectic and I am slightly behind schedule on payroll, but that is largely due to a region-wide Internet outage we had yesterday afternoon.  The phones in our office are VOIP, and of course, the reports we get, from which I render the payroll, come through email.  We left the office not long after lunch, after waiting a bit to see if the Internet would return.

The irony is that, after everyone had left and I was just getting ready to lock up, the internet connection came back (earlier than predicted by Comcast, who I suspect use a sort of Mister Scot technique when estimating repair times).  It was too late to do anything about it, and I was practically heading out the door already, but it’s both mildly frustrating and rather amusing.

That’s about enough for today.  Tomorrow, I plan to write using my laptop computer, so the flow might be better.  It seems appropriate for what may be one of my final traditional Thursday blog posts.  In the meantime, please have a good day, today.

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Annotations Pending

Well, against my prior intention, I’m writing this on my laptop today—meaning the laptop computer.

God, why can’t I just accept the fact that “laptop” is obviously a word referring to the computer on which I’m writing this, not the top of my personal lap as part of my body when in a particular configuration?  Surely, every person with the savvy to read this online knows what I mean when I say that I’m writing this on my laptop.  At the very least, it is extremely unlikely that they don’t.

And if, by bizarre chance, people are reading this some decades or centuries after it was written, and laptop computers are no longer a common item, or no longer exist at all, there will probably be scholars who will put little annotations in to tell those future readers what we meant back in this era by “laptop” when we’re referring to writing on something.  It’ll be like those side notes when one is reading Shakespeare, notes that let everyone know—who doesn’t already—that “bodkin” for instance, as used in Hamlet’s soliloquy, means dagger, and thus, someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin is killing himself with a dagger.

Somehow, though, I have a terrible time not clarifying that I mean “the computer” when I refer to my laptop.  There’s an actual tension, a feeling of significant stress involved.  I suppose some might call it an anxiety, but that doesn’t feel quite like the correct term.  I don’t really feel worried or in any sense scared or threatened, not even at a social level or whatever it might be.  I feel as though it would be wrong not to clarify when there are multiple meanings of the word “laptop”, in case someone might have the bizarre misunderstanding that I’m writing on the top of my actual lap.

It’s pretty stupid, and it really gets to me sometimes.  It makes me want to peel the skin off my head by grabbing my hair and pulling my scalp apart, it’s so frustrating.

To be clear, I don’t really want to do that.  I don’t know, frankly, that I would even have the strength to do it, since skin is tougher than it seems, and also the skin of the face, at least, is pinned down to the underlying tissue by an intricate and interwoven network of tough fibrous tissue*, causing it to follow the movements of the facial muscles, allowing expression (a resource often wasted on me).

Though, of course, the scalp is much more loosely held to the skull and tissue under it, so that part would be peelable if one were strong enough to make the initial split.

I’m not really that tempted to try, but when I get so tense and stressed out (I almost wrote “sense and tressed out”) I can imagine myself reaching up to grab the sides of my head by the hair and yanking steadily, and it feels as though it would be some form of release.

It’s a bit like slapping oneself in the face when one does something stupid—though in that case, I do actually slap myself in the face.  The trick is to do it hard enough that you actually get a real punishment for your own stupidity and thus might actually learn something.  It’s not quite as intense as banging one’s head against a wall or against one’s desk (which I also do when I’m stressed out enough), but the latter is not really so much a punishment as it is just a way of trying to overwhelm stress with pain.

Or, well, it’s something like that.  Even as I wrote that, I realized it didn’t quite seem like an accurate description, or at least not the full answer.  Sometimes I think it’s just a form of giving in to my desire to lash out when I’m very stressed, but to do so against the only person I have a right to harm.  I’ve at times given myself actual swollen, black and blue (initially subcutaneously red with extravasated blood) marks on my forehead, but usually it’s not that bad.

I don’t want to give myself a concussion or anything, after all.  My brain is dysfunctional enough, and I don’t want to lose the few good things it can do.  There are other ways I can hurt myself when necessary.

Speaking of the good things, I keep trying to get myself back into writing fiction or something, maybe, just to see if it makes me feel any better, which it had a tendency to do in the past.  That’s a minor part of why I decided to bring my laptop today (the other laptop is with me whenever I sit down, so it requires no effort to bring it).  But I don’t know; I can’t feel any excitement or anticipation about HELIOS or Changeling in a Shadow World, or DFandD, or Outlaw’s Mind, or any other stories, and I certainly don’t think anyone else is excited about the prospect of those stories being written, either.

I don’t know what to do**.

As usual, of course, I have written much more quickly on the laptop computer than on the smartphone, which should come as no surprise.  But I don’t know if it has any effect on my style, or on how good a post comes of it.  I would welcome your evaluations, of course, but I know it’s hard to judge from one instance.  It may be a better or worse post than usual for reasons that have nothing to do at all with my choice of tools for writing it.  There are too many variables at play.

A reasonably controlled experiment could be done, with me writing a long series of posts, randomly (perhaps) alternating between smartphone and laptop and asking readers to evaluate each post for quality without knowing which kind the post was.  But that would be far more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t mind subjective and non-rigorous impressions, if anyone wants to give them in the comments below.

I don’t really have much more to say today.  I just feel stressed and tense and frustrated and angry and just…squeezed by reality.  I feel almost as if there’s some metaphorical, inverted mountain suspended above me that I have to hold up or it will crash down and, I don’t know, bury me, crush me, impale me on its peak…something like that.  I don’t think it will harm anyone else; there’s no one else for my collapse to harm, really, certainly not in any deep way.  So far, I’m just holding it up out of habit, and because people will say that “you’ve got to try to hold on” or things along those lines.  But it’s tiring and it’s stressful and it’s wearing me out at the same time that it’s pissing me off.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  Sorry to waste your time.  I hope you haven’t been too disappointed.  And I also hope you have a good day.

*The skin of the palms of the hand and the working surface of the fingers is even more tightly and intricately bound to the underlying tissue; this contributes to the way one’s fingers wrinkle up when your hands soak in water for a while.  The soles of your feet and bottoms of your toes are similarly tacked down, though it serves a slightly different “purpose” there.  Dissection of the palms to look at the underlying muscle and tendons and so on is a laborious process in Gross Anatomy class.  Ditto with the face.

**Am I always in the dark, living in a powder keg and giving off sparks?  Probably not.  That was a pretty good song, though, wasn’t it?

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Here we go again, it seems

Well, here we go again, as I wrote above, starting another work week against all of our better judgments.  I walked to the train station and arrived relatively early today, but I’m letting the 610 train go‒it’s just now arriving‒and I will get on the 630.  That way I have time to cool down a bit.  I will use the extra 20 minutes to write this blog post, such as it will be, here at the station.

I don’t know what I’m really going to write about‒though I’ll begin with the annoying fact that “what to write about” feels like a phrase that ends with a preposition.  I don’t think the word “about” actually is a preposition, but it acts sort of as one here, and its object is “what”.  I want to write something to the effect of “I don’t know about what I’m going to write”, but even I feel that’s more awkward than the more common alternative.  It does bother me, though.

On a different subject, I think that maybe I should just give up on talking about the fact of my worsening dysthymia/depression and suicidal thoughts that I wish I could escape.  The combination is what I wish I could get away from, I mean.  Either one, even without the other, is nearly just as bad, and it’s honestly not too easy to imagine the latter without the former.

I often present my intermittent desire to die as if it were a philosophical conclusion arrived at merely through thought, but those ideas are at best motivated reasoning and at worst sophistry.  I just happen to be good at such things, so it’s going to be difficult to argue around me.  And though I have arrived at some conclusions through more and less rigorous means, I am open to new and convincing reasoning and discussion and ideas.  Such things don’t appear to be forthcoming, alas.

Maybe, since my depression precedes and/or is orthogonal to my reasoning about the value of my life, I shouldn’t expect any counterbalancing notions to be arrived at by reasoning or conversation.  I’ve undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy before, which is keyed to targeting the disordered reasoning associated with depression, but it was no more successful‒with or without meds‒than other approaches.

However, it doesn’t mean that certain forms of response are welcome or even remotely useful.  For instance:  being berated is not useful.  I once had a former coworker/friend berate me for being depressed and feeling suicidal*.  They even compared my situation to theirs:  they had (and still have) some form of slowly progressive cancer, which remains under treatment, as it has been for years now.

To me it’s a rather foolish comparison, and not one to make to someone who is alone and feeling suicidal.  For one thing, though I would never dismiss or belittle that person’s suffering, that person did and does continue to share info about the course of their treatment on Facebook, with pictures of them at the hospital, for instance.  When they go, they are always accompanied by their spouse, their children,  their grandchildren, and so on.

I’m not saying their situation is enviable in general terms, but in some ways‒sometimes‒I do envy it, reprehensible though that may seem.  I’m fairly certain that, if such a thing were possible, I would gladly take that person’s illness upon myself if, by my doing so, they would be cured.  It would bring me joy to be able to make their life better, and to give them more and better time with their loved ones.

I would not then fight the illness, most likely.  I would simply ask for palliative care, and let the disease run its course.  Maybe‒but maybe not‒if my kids knew I would be dying soon, they would want to see me again.  I don’t know.

Maybe, even if it were possible, I would not actually go through with the disease transference.  It’s easy enough to think one would, but It’s just an idle thought as long as it’s an impossible thing to do.

But it was infuriating to be berated for feeling depressed and actually judged about it, as though I simply had chosen to be depressed and could choose not to be at a whim if I just stopped being…what?  I don’t know‒mentally lazy or something along those lines.

I am not my own biggest booster‒I’m more likely to be my own detractor and even derogator‒but neither mental nor physical laziness have been hallmarks of my life or character.  And failure to grasp simple concepts or recognize facts is not one of my major failings, though I certainly am capable of it.  I try very hard not to fool myself about things, but of course it’s always conceivable that such trying may lead me to fool myself in other ways.

Still, for instance, unless someone is going to perform some convincing miracle that would persuade even a disinterested extraterrestrial, then supernatural or mystical or religious arguments are not going to convince me of much of anything.

I’ve read the entire Bible (original and sequel) some of it more than once (and a tiny bit of it in Hebrew), and I’ve read as much of the Koran as I could get through, and I’ve read the Tao te Ching many times, and various other works of religion and philosophy.  I’ve tried to read both high and low religious apologia and statements and philosophy as much as I could without puking on myself, but even such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins and Descartes seem to lose their grasp on what it even means to have convincing reasons for something**.  If my discussions about depression and pointlessness and death involve motivated reasoning and sophistry, I’m far from alone in those things.

Of course, my depression and suicidal urges don’t really come from reasoning about my situation.  This is clear if for no other reason than that I had them even at some times in my life when everything was going objectively well for me.

It seems they are tendencies baked into the circuit boards of my brain in some fashion, possibly related to possible ASD***, or possibly orthogonal to that possibility.  Rather than a lack of joy or a surfeit of sorrow, they seem to be associated, at some level, with a setpoint issue‒perhaps a defect in one’s capacity to feel or sustain joy, or an overactive solemnity and dreariness perception circuit.  Certainly I have great difficulty with belief (as opposed to being provisionally convinced about something).

Maybe there is no help to be had, given current states of technology and knowledge.  It might be interesting to try psilocybin-based therapy or trans-cranial magnetic stimulation or some such other, but I don’t have real access to those things.  I’m also not able to advocate for myself.  That’s one of my problems.  I don’t like myself, and I have no real capacity to seek out anything on my own behalf.  I haven’t gone to see a doctor of any kind for some years now.  What I need is probably not argument or reasoning but rescue, and that is not forthcoming.  Why would it be, for such as me?

Anyway, writing this blog is about my only form of self-advocacy and help-seeking, but it seems to suck for those purposes.  Oh well.  I guess it’s something for me to do until my time is up‒which, for today at least, it is now.

*As if it were perhaps some form of “lifestyle choice”.

**And Augustine and Aquinas are frankly often embarrassing.  I suppose one must give them some slack given the fact that they lived many centuries ago‒but then again, Marcus Aurelius lived even longer ago than they, and he was able to write things that make a great deal more sense than these two.

***There are strong associations between the two noted in the literature, and people with ASD have much higher rates of depression and suicide than the general population, and an average lifespan, even among “high functioning” individuals, in the 50 to 60 year range.

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“…no one here but me, oh.”

Hello, everyone.  In case you were wondering, no, I did not write a blog post yesterday.  I did not go to the office.  I wasn’t sick, exactly, unless you want to count “sick in the head”, which was most certainly the case, in the sense in which it’s usually meant.  I more or less literally did not sleep at all on Wednesday night, and I was exhausted, but still not really sleepy, by the time arrived for me to get up on Thursday.

I almost wish I could say that I’d gone on some indulgent binge‒alcohol, drugs, casual or even not-so-casual sex, whatever‒or, better yet, that I had been feverishly pursuing some new invention or potential scientific discovery.  Even working on a poem or a song or a short story would have been great; I’ve told you all about how I wrote my short story Solitaire over the course of a deliberately sleepless night, and it is probably my darkest story, though I was pretty happy at the time.

No, I simply could not seem to quiet my mind enough to go unconscious.  There may have been snippets of sleep, such as when I would play some compilation comedy video on YouTube that I’ve seen dozens of times before.  That sort of thing often is able to lull me down into at least a temporary bout of slumber and is much more effective than any rain or forest sounds recordings have ever been.  But Wednesday night they didn’t seem to make me sleep even past the end of the video most times.  Anyway, I was usually too restless even to try one of those.

I don’t know for sure why I had so much trouble sleeping.  I can speculate, of course, and I can come up with hypotheses which are unlikely to be the full story‒for instance, Wednesday was my Dad’s birthday, and I miss him and my Mom (and my former Father-in-law) a lot, I think*, and maybe that was hard to process and kept me awake.  That’s unconvincing, though.

I admit that, in some sense, I often “envy” my parents‒sometimes prosaically, as in admiring the fact that they all had lifelong, successful marriages, but often envying the fact that they are dead.  I’ve said sometimes, mainly to myself, that I want to go be with them, but that’s figurative language.  I don’t actually believe in an afterlife.  To visit them would require a time machine, or a memory that is even better and more concrete than mine is.  But I envy them that they no longer need to try.

I don’t consider death to be a state of rest exactly.  Death is simply oblivion, a final cessation, the end of whatever could experience either rest or toil.  A computer isn’t resting when its power is cut, it’s just off.  Actual rest has a rejuvenating quality, and that would be preferable to mere temporary (or permanent) oblivion.  Maybe if I was able to rest in that way, I wouldn’t feel the yearning for a more final solution.  I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep or relax or let go or rest, so at least oblivion seems like an escape.

It’s not an escape, of course, for escape implies a subject that is escaping, and death makes the subject simply cease to be.

It nevertheless often seems preferable to endless exhaustion without anything else in one’s life to provide a counterbalance.  At some point, there’s got to be a surrender to the notion that, while there will always be momentary fluctuations in the state of one’s well-being, the overall trend is showing no signs of upward movement and, if anything, is sloping downward.

What is one to do, then?  Seeking help, of course, is a major (and probably good) option, but the very thing I discuss in the footnote below seems to make seeking help extremely difficult.  It’s evidently impossible for me to convey to others my sense of true and horrifying (and yet horrifyingly bland) desperation.  I can’t even really grasp how to go about asking, or begging, for help, nor indeed to imagine what anyone is going to be able to do to help me.

I have certainly tried therapy and medications of many kinds, and meditation and self-hypnosis.  I’ve used the crisis hotline in its old and new forms‒once, that led to a very brief hospitalization.  I’ve even tried to find some comfort in religious notions, but the ideas one encounters there tend to be so staggeringly incoherent and manipulative that they make me feel even more depressed.

So, here I go again, “sendin’ out an SOS”, but there’s no one on patrol and certainly no search parties.

I think the worst thing would be if my own kids ceased to be “real” for me.  They are among the only people for whom I have a strong sense of existence, even when they aren’t near or around me.  I think about them every day.  But my son is still, in my head, the young boy with whom I last interacted about 10 years ago.  I’ve seen recent pictures of course, but that’s a form of him that I don’t know‒and I fear I never will.

My daughter is more updated, so to speak.  I interact with her somewhat regularly through texts and emails.  But though I dearly wish I could spend time with them again, I don’t have any idea what I would do if they suddenly came back into my life.  I have nothing‒I am nothing‒worth sharing with them.

Anyway, I got something like my usual three to four hours of (frequently interrupted) sleep last night, and I was still wide awake so early that I decided to take the first train of the day to the office.  And here I am, at the office, finishing this post.  I don’t work this weekend, so I guess I’ll bother you all again on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

*Though perhaps not in the way that most people seem to miss people, at least if you believe their words.  I think I’ve said before that, when I’m not with someone, literally, they don’t feel precisely real to me.  It’s not that I think they actually cease to exist‒I’m far from being such a solipsist.  It’s just that I don’t really feel them when they’re not around.  I can’t imagine what they might be doing, and it doesn’t occur to me to try.  The concept of them is out there, implicit, I suppose, but there’s no “theory of mind” simulacrum of the other person running in the background processes of my brain.  I’ve read some hypotheses that the concept of an afterlife may have arisen from people still having a model or sense or image of a person operating in their mind even after the person dies‒that it still feels to them that the person is present somewhere, somehow.  I don’t seem to function that way.  People are certainly very real to me, and when they’re in my presence they can even be overwhelming, with all their emotions and noise and everything battering away at me; they are all but impossible to ignore or not notice.  But then, when they are not present, they pretty much go away, other than intellectually.  I sometimes wish it were otherwise, but I’m not sure.  This may be part of why I have never wished I could somehow trade places with someone else.  Other people really are other to me, and it’s hard to “feel” them with any depth, though I can write people decently enough.  But then, in a sense, I am in their heads.

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“Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown”

It’s Wednesday now, in case you were wondering.  Yesterday during the day I felt very much as grim and gloomy as my blog post in the morning, if a bit less angry.  In the evening, though, I stuck to my plan to walk back from the train to the house, and I talked to my sister on the phone while I did.  That’s more than seventeen miles of walking in the past few days.  It helped that it wasn’t raining at all, and the evening temperature, while far from cool, was not as hot as it has been.  Also, there was something of a breeze blowing.

My new boots are working well; I had no blistering or worsening of pain or anything of that sort.  Only after I took them off did I feel that there was a very slight irritation in a spot on the ball of my left foot.  There’s no visible sign of anything, and since I’m going to be resting from long walking today, it should have ample time to recover from whatever minor issues it has.  I seem to be having, just maybe, a tiny bit less back pain‒or at least fewer bad exacerbations‒than usual, as I get in better condition and (I think) lose a bit of weight.

It’s a good start, but I’m a long way from being the way I wish I were, in either direction.

We had a heck of a day in the office yesterday, being very busy and with many successful events, so to speak.  That’s always a good thing, at least ceteris paribus.  There were, however, several times when I got stressed out* because of people not following the protocols or leaving out stupid things‒like a customer’s zip code, for instance!  Sometimes they don’t even put down the state, or they’ll write down what’s supposed to be the email address, but it seems to be only whatever must have come before the @ symbol.  It’s as if they imagine there’s really only one email server.  I know Gmail is big, but there are many others.

These people are almost all younger than I am.  They have grown up with this technology firmly in place all around them.  How is it that they can fail to know the basics of email?  It’s frankly astonishing.

I just realized it’s my father’s birthday today.  He knew more about computers than I, right up until the day he died, probably, but then again, that was his profession.  He certainly used email before anyone else I know.

He was a smart guy, and he worked hard.  If he had grown up somewhere other than a blue collar factory town, he probably would have done even more than he did with computers.  Of course, it’s hard to tell for sure; when you change one thing, usually many other things change as well.

He did all right, anyway.  He and my Mom, who had known each other since well before they were married, stayed together until he died.  I think it must be really nice to have one constant, steady and reliable companion for a lifetime.  Of course, in such situations, it’s often the case that, once one dies, the other soon follows‒which was the case with my parents.  That’s not a horrible thing, really, to be able to wind down and cash out, once one’s spouse is gone, because life just isn’t worth nearly as much without them.  In some ways it’s touching.

Living alone, and not having any good skill or ability at making new friends or new connections, is not touching.  Then again, most people are just frustrating and bizarre.  I don’t exclude myself from this judgment, even from my own point of view.  I usually find myself terribly unpleasant.  At least I’m familiar with myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I like me.  Most of the time I don’t.  And yet, as I’ve said before, there’s certainly no one else I’d rather be.  So I’m in a difficult circumstance.

There are, it seems, ways around all that.  But they require some courage, so it’s taking me time and effort to work my way up to it.  I certainly have no interest in trying to maintain the status quo in the absurd and pointless game of my daily existence.

People follow all these rules and customs and mores, but they’re all just ad hoc inventions, just crap that fell together all on its own.  And yet, people treat them as if they are important, just as they seem to think of the people in government as somehow different from themselves.  Would that it were the case.  But the people in government‒making laws, making decisions, making judgments, participating in bureaucracies and the like‒are all just flesh and blood creatures that eat and excrete like every other living thing.

Don’t be in too much awe of any human, or frankly of any other kind of creature, real or imaginary.  You would be a fool, in general, to revere any government figure much.  Most of them are narcissists and opportunists of one stripe or another, because that’s the sort of person for whom roles in government tend to select.  Often they are also self-righteous and hypocritical.  And yet, other humans beings who are no brighter (or dimmer) than their so-called leaders will follow and sometimes come near to worshiping such people.  It’s all rather pathetic.

Humans‒you can’t live with ’em, you can’t eat ’em (too many germs and toxins).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I’ll give you a break after yesterday’s quite long post.  All bitterness aside, I honestly wish you well, and I hope you have a good day.

And Happy Birthday, Dad, wherever you may be, even if you are nowhere but in the past.  You did a pretty good job, and you certainly took what you did seriously, seeing fatherhood as a duty, not as a privilege.  Would that more people would have that sort of attitude.  It wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems, but I suspect it would make many things better.

*I even had minor chest pains at one point.

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Apologies, but this is a much darker and more erratic post than yesterday’s

I did not walk to the train this morning, because I’m planning to walk again this evening, on the way back to the house from the train station, and I don’t want to push things too fast and give myself frustrating negative outcomes.  Of course, I’m quite pleased to note that I’ve appeared to suffer no negative physical outcomes from yesterday’s walk at all.  My body appears to be adapting.

My body, that is, by which I mean everything outside the blood-brain barrier.  I guess I had a sort of negative outcome in that I got a slightly giddy feeling after my walk‒I think you could probably recognize that fact in my post yesterday, which was written starting right after the end of the walk.  It was a low-grade version of a runner’s high, which I used to get quite wonderfully when I was running regularly.  How is that a negative outcome, you ask?  Well, it’s quite temporary, unfortunately.  It lasted a few hours, but then, by the time work had been underway for a short time, it faded and disappeared, and I was left feeling thoroughly down and grumpy and gloomy.

I know that if I had eaten or drunk something with sugar or starch or whatever, it probably would have perked me up briefly‒probably more briefly than the exercise high‒and then I would have felt physically much worse afterward, and my energy would be lower, and I wouldn’t have the capacity to do my walks or anything of the sort for a while.  I know this; I’ve done those experiments, with as much rigor as I could bring to bear.  So, all the good feelings I have at ready disposal are short lived and have rotten side effects or withdrawal symptoms.

It’s quite frustrating.  But then again, nearly everything in my day to day life is frustrating.

For instance:  I’m almost due to renew my state ID card, and I tried to access the online system to do so, but it’s different than it was when I did it last (several years ago).  Though technology has advanced a great deal since then, the website for renewing IDs and driver’s licenses in Florida has become shit.  Anyone out there with any inside input with the people responsible for such things, let them know:  that website is shit.  SquareSpace could’ve done a better website for you 12 years ago, and I know because I used them.

Anyway, it also asked various questions to try to confirm one’s identity, but they were bizarrely worded, making it unclear what the correct answer should be, and also asked about things like what previous address was associated with this ID.  I think my previous address was at the work release center‒I certainly haven’t moved since then except to the house where I am now, because if I move (at least within Florida) I’m supposed to register my new address with the state, since, you know, I’m an ex-felon and they need to know where I am in case I’m prone to further felonies and all that bouncing bullshit.  But I wasn’t sure about the correct address, or the right answer to some other questions, and so wasn’t able to log into the system.

I swear, I am often tempted just to buy a bunch of bottles of charcoal lighter fluid and go to the Palm Beach courthouse, sit in front of it like a good Buddhist monk, pour the fluid over myself and set myself on fire.  Maybe I could livestream it with a message and a protest about things like the extortionate nature of the plea bargain system, and the absurdity of a criminal justice system that allows private lawyers of any kind‒which means that the affluent-to-wealthy will always have a better chance of being found not guilty, while the more or less indigent* are given to the hands of competent and hard-working but overworked and underpaid public defenders**.  Then, to save themselves the trouble of actually having to prove a case in court, the prosecutors offer some “plea bargain”, which includes the threat (yes, of course it is a threat) that if it’s not accepted they’ll pursue the greatest possible charges with the greatest possible penalties they can achieve.

And, of course, if the prosecutor loses this game of chicken, and they somehow fail to convince a jury that even one of their thirty or forty dubious-to-confected charges is true, then what?  They lose a case.  Part of the job.  You win some, you lose some.  Next!

But if the poor (in multiple senses) defendant loses****, well, he could face a minimum of fifteen years, by statute.  He would have no chance to see his kids before they were in their twenties!*****  So, though he has never willfully or willingly attempted to traffic in controlled substances in any sense, but was honestly (if naively and possibly “neurodivergently”) trying to help other people suffering from chronic pain, he decides to take the plea bargain, which will include the extensive time he has already served, and fuck what the legal system or society at large thinks of him.

He knows he’s innocent, that he had no mens rea whatsoever.  He knows when he was in that pain management practice that he even asked the PBSO officer who did inspections if there was anything that the practice for which he was working was doing wrong or what have you, because he didn’t want that.  He just wanted to try to help people who were in pain.  The deputy made no mention of anything.

So he took the plea.  He did it because he was threatened…by the prosecutor.  And prosecutors have terrible power, a great deal of it‒they also work with the police, as colleagues‒and in the course of their business, they destroy countless lives, with little to no risk to themselves.  The only saving grace for them is that, for the most part, I think most of them really do mean well and want to do good.

But meaning well‒believing you are right‒can still be dangerous, often far more dangerous than psychopathic malevolence and selfishness (My own failures while meaning well, as described here, at least mainly blew up in my own face and didn’t do too much collateral damage).

Psychopaths tend to try not to cause themselves too much harm or pain.  It’s people who are moral and tend to moralize, who believe that they are right, who are willing to sacrifice the lives and comfort of others for some imagined “greater good”.  Assholes.  Idiots.  Pathetic, delusional, driverless semi-trucks full of explosives and rotting garbage is what they are.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’m sorry it’s swerved so far from yesterday‒but yesterday’s post doesn’t seem to have been too popular, anyway.  No one much likes to read about relatively pleasant times or thoughts (me included); the dark stuff is much more gripping, and that’s true for good, sound, biological reasons.

So, just to keep my options open, I am ordering and buying a decent supply of charcoal lighter fluid.  It wouldn’t take very much to get the job done.

Have a good day.  Please, if you can’t do anything else for me, please, at least have a good day.  Somebody should have one.  Why not you?

*Which I was, certainly after waiting in jail 8 months before being bailed out.  Remember, I had been working locum tenens after “temporary disability” and chronic pain and failing to be able to keep up with a few other positions, due to my back injury/surgery and pretty bad depression, even for me.  I’d been off work for more than a year and a half, maybe longer, before restarting, and I ended up giving away a fair amount of whatever I brought in.  I was never great at managing my life and finances and stuff like that.  This may be related to my possible ASD, I don’t know.  I’ve never been very good at caring for myself, though I’m okay at doing it for other people.

**Prosecutor’s offices also tend to have much higher budgets than public defender’s offices, a fact which certainly does seem to fly in the face of the supposed “presumption of innocence” hypocritically spouted by Americans who have never had the experience of a misfiring justice system***.  Imbeciles.

***The fact that private defense attorneys are allowed in the criminal justice system, by the way, contributes to  the fact that there are far more black men in prison than is predictable by population rates.  It is well known that the mean and median wealth (not to be confused with income) of black people in America is much lower than that of white people, for clear and obvious historical reasons.  Well, wealth is what you dip into if you need to hire a top-notch defense attorney‒very few people have the income to afford such things.  So, the criminal justice system, by allowing private defense attorneys, stacks the deck even further against the economically impaired, which disproportionately includes all minorities, and particularly black people on average, even if there is no active racism in any of the people or in the system itself.

****Because when a prosecutor throws all sorts of counts of things at the defendant, charging any prescription someone writes, for instance, as a count of “trafficking”, then jurors are going to be inclined to think that, if there’s so much smoke, there must be at least a little fire, no matter how much it flies in the face of the character the defendant has shown his entire life (jurors don’t know about the stage-effect smoke machines working behind the scenes).  And when the defendant has a bit of a wooden face and a monotone voice and isn’t good at expressing his emotions or even recognizing them in real time, but tends to be analytic and logical and rather esoteric, he’s unlikely to elicit sympathy from jurors.  So I was told even by my own attorney and her supervisor, among other things.

*****The idiotic irony here is that, despite the plea bargain, he still hasn’t seen his children so far since then, anyway‒by their wish and request.  So, he (I) might as well have just gone to trial, even if it might have meant spending fifteen or more years in prison.  What’s the difference?  Prison was not significantly worse than my current life.  I might even have written more books and stories there.  Maybe they wouldn’t ever be published, but that wouldn’t do much to change the number of people who have read them.  It would be no loss to the world, certainly.

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“Walk this way…THIS way.”

Well, for the first time in a few weeks, I walked to the train station today.  The weather is perhaps ever so slightly better for such things because it’s been raining a lot and it’s slightly cooler.  Maybe.

I’m sure that all the people up north are unimpressed by my grousing, thinking such sardonic things as, “Oh, poor baby, is it too hot for you in the first week of October?”  But I’ve said before, as someone who grew up in Michigan, I like the cooling off that happens in Autumn.  One can always put on a jacket and so on, or wear a sweater (or both) when it gets cool out.  Down here, even if it were okay to go around with no clothes, there are times this would not keep you cool enough to avoid potential overheating and dehydration.

Also, during the day, you could be prone to some truly unfortunate sunburns.

Anyway, I had a pretty decent walk this morning.  I must have been going at a good pace in my new boots, because I arrived in plenty of time for a train twenty minutes earlier than the one I had intended to take.  I’m writing this on that earlier train, since I only had a few minutes to wait before the train I usually just miss arrives.

While I walked, I listened to the Audible version of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  But here’s a surprise:  I was listening to the Spanish version!

I used to speak Spanish pretty well, after taking a couple of years of it in college, including a literature course, and when I was in residency, I had a fair few times to use it, since the Bronx has a large Spanish-speaking population (like most of the Western Hemisphere).  However, it has now been ages since I’ve used it regularly, and I find that when people speak to me in Spanish, I have a hard time understanding much of it.  That seems like such a shame, especially since, by the time of my last college course, I was thinking partly in Spanish.

So, I decided to get that book in Spanish (audio), and listen to it to try to reinvigorate that part of my brain.  I’ve read the book in English, so that makes it a bit easier.  I can’t say that I was honestly following everything that was being said (or read) but I caught quite a few words and sentences and concepts, and I think that will get easier as I go along.

I also recently got an audio book of a Japanese light novel in Japanese (I had to go looking for it on Amazon), and even recorded the audio‒or rather, imported the audio‒for several anime I have watched many times, figuring to do something similar with Japanese, of which I have only a smattering.  But it seems better to focus on Spanish first.  Spanish is all but ubiquitous where I currently live.

But I also want to go for the Nihongo on some of my walks.  I think that learning and using foreign languages helps one understand one’s own native tongue better, and also to recognize the nature and importance of grammar and careful communication.  I’ve said before that language is crystallized thought, and having more ways to crystallize it may at least give one different and more sophisticated ways to think.  Seeing the differences (and commonalities) of language is very interesting, also.

All European languages (as far as I know) have lots of evolutionary history in common.  Some, of course, are more directly related than others; Spanish and Italian are obviously close cousins, while English and Russian are less so.  But when one gets to the “Far East” things are much more divergent from the West (and vice versa), and though there are words imported from Europe (e.g., the Japanese for “bread” is “pan”, as the Portuguese introduced bread to Japan), the roots of the languages appear to be almost completely separate.  This makes it all the more interesting when one finds grammatical structures in common, especially when they do the same thing, but in different ways.  It makes one think Chomsky really was onto something with his notion of a universal, inherent human grammar.

I learn by hearing pretty well, almost as well as I do by reading.  In fact, when I read, I always subvocalize‒i.e., I say the words in my head.  It makes my reading slower, but I read more deeply than most people I know, and I tend to remember what I read better than many.

So, I’ll do some Spanish for now, but maybe I’ll intersperse it with Japanese as well.  It should be interesting, at least.  We’ll see how long this intention lasts.

Before I close, I figured I’d share with you a bit of what might be interesting trivia regarding my walk.  Before starting off, rather than using an “energy drink” replete with high fructose corn syrup or other carbohydrates (which I’m trying to minimize overall and even completely avoid when I can), I drank a few swigs of olive oil!

Ha ha!  That surprises you, I’ll bet.  But it makes sense.  At aerobic exertion levels, the muscles (like most of the rest of the body) “prefer” to run on fatty acids, not glucose, at least when insulin levels are normal.  And, of course, olive oil is all fat, which is a much more efficient form of energy than carbs.  One can’t drink much olive oil in a swig or two (and I did not try) but at least it doesn’t lead to any rebound drop in blood sugar and consequent fatigue.

I don’t know if I will continue to do that, or even if it had any effect on the speed of my walking (there were too many variables to make any credible determination of specific causation), but it certainly doesn’t seem to have impaired my abilities.

That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day, and a good week, and what the heck, have a good month.  It’s one of the best ones of the year.

walk this way

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Apologies in advance for the subject matter

I’m writing this at the office this morning, because I came in quite early.  I had a bad night, secondary‒apparently‒to having eaten something that didn’t really want to stay in my GI tract any longer than it absolutely had to, so I’m kind of wiped out.  I decided to take the most expeditious, if not most cost-effective, way in and just kind of take it easy here while waiting for the day to start officially.

I don’t expect I’ll make this post very long, and I’m probably not going to write it all in one sitting, because I feel very tired.  Probably I’ll intersperse it with a nap or two.  I seem a bit dehydrated and volume depleted after last night, but at least I have what appears to be an effective dose of Imodium in me, and that’s good.  It’s a very clever product:  an opioid that doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, so one doesn’t get high from it, and it has no real abuse potential*.  It is, however, particularly prone to produce one of the inevitable side-effects of opioids‒shutting down (or at least turning down) the motility of the GI tract.

So, I’m feeling a bit poorly on the physical level, and my mental level is blunted by a combination of worse sleep than usual and the loss of some of my fluids.  The latter are, at least, easily enough replaced.

The schedule for my coworker is more or less set now.  He will work next weekend, then he will take his trip on the following Monday through Wednesday, the ninth through the eleventh.  Unfortunately, I will be working the weekend of Friday the 13th (though, to be fair, I enjoy the day and its subsequent weekend, as I think I’ve mentioned) but the following Friday is a personally significant one‒though one that, in many ways, I had hoped not ever to see again.

Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that I have some more dangerous GI bug than seems to be the case‒I give this very low odds‒and that will take the whole situation out of my hands.  That would be okay, as I think I’ve said before.  In many ways, it would be nice to have something happen for which I could not, in practice, be blamed or held responsible.  It’s at least not too terribly painful.  In fact, it mostly is just slightly unpleasant but very fatiguing, in that I really want to try just to go back to sleep.  I think I will take a brief nap before finishing the first draft of this blog post.

***

Okay, I haven’t taken a nap yet, but I think I’m going to draw this to a close.  I don’t really have much to write about today.  I certainly don’t have much to say that’s new and/or interesting.  I apologize.  I would just add, by way of exculpation, that I really didn’t expect to be writing this now, today, or this last week, and so on.

Tomorrow begins October, which has often been my favorite month for various reasons.  Even in my current mental state, I can’t completely resist the appeal of the Month That Used to be the Eighth and Is Now the Tenth.  I’m hoping that the weather will soon begin to cool down a little, or at least to become a bit windier.  It would be nice to be able to walk without becoming more dehydrated than I am right now.

I guess I can tolerate my delays of time when I think of the fact that, though Frodo left Bag End on his birthday, he arrived at Rivendell on my birthday (which he rudely neglected to celebrate).  So perhaps the latter can make as decent a boundary point as the former.

Anyway, it’s all silly and pointless when you get right down to it.  In reality, every day is like every other, and the differences between them from a human point of view are trivial, arbitrary, and inconsequential.  Any day will do.

I hope you all have a good one.

*Except rarely, very desperate addicts to some forms of opioids‒so I have read‒will sometimes take ridiculous amounts of Imodium, sometimes ground up into a kind of milkshake, when they cannot get their drug of choice.  I can only imagine how constipated they must get.  Well, no, I can more than imagine it, because I’ve treated people with bowel obstruction/shutdown due to opioid abuse.  They’re often very skinny people, but their bellies are bloated and distended by way more digested and partially digested material than they were ever built to handle, but which cannot be expelled correctly because the whole GI nervous system has been stunned into somnolence.

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It’s a day more poached or boiled than fried

First, the latest updates on the work situation:  it looks like I am going to be working tomorrow, as previously scheduled, because my coworker’s wife is still sick, but they can’t get next weekend rebooked or some such, so he will be working then and doesn’t need to ask me to switch.  Of course, there apparently exists the possibility that they will be going instead sometime during the middle of one of the upcoming weeks, but you know what?  I can’t keep worrying about this crap.  I haven’t had a “vacation” since I went up north when my mother died a few years ago, so it’s not as though I’m not due, anyway.

Vacations are something people in general enjoy with their families or significant others or some such, and I have no one around here with whom to go on a vacation.  And being just off work and being by myself around the “house”‒or more specifically, the one room in which I live‒is in many ways worse than going to the office.  So I don’t tend to take time off except when I’m sick and/or in an exceptional amount of pain.

I know, it’s an exciting life, right?  I shouldn’t share such titillating tidbits too much or people will shrivel up with envy.

Ugh, it’s sooooo muggy and humid and the air is so still today.  I’m dripping with sweat so much that it’s fogging up my glasses and it’s getting in my eyes, even though I’m just standing on the platform waiting for the train.  Oh, and the announcement says the train is boarding on the opposite side from its usual one, so there are roughly twice as many people.  At least they’re all quiet at this time of day.  Of course, the northbound and southbound trains arrive at very close to the same time, for this pair of morning trains, but presumably‒and based on past experience‒the people running the system are on top of that coordination problem.  I’ve never heard of any train collisions since I’ve been using the system.

However, apparently they’re more than capable of screwing up in other ways. My usual train arrived just now on its usual side of the tracks, and everyone who had thoughtfully noted the announcement and waited on the other side‒which included me‒had to scramble to get over to the train quickly.  Thankfully, the train waited, but it’s really bad that they did this.  I had to rush down the stairs after riding the elevator up to the bridge with about eight or so other people.  I thought it might have been good if I had tripped and fallen on my way down, but such a fall would be unlikely to be fatal; it would probably just hurt a lot.  I suppose if that happened I might have been able to sue the Tri-Rail people, but that’s not the sort of thing in which I’m interested.

I’m so sick of my life.  This is it; you’re reading about the most interesting things that happen to me.  In fact, this blog is the most interesting thing I do.  But it’s not very interesting, is it?  The stuff in between is worse.  And, of course, I could try to find other things to do and with which to distract myself (and I still do try to read books that keep my attention, almost desperately) but there is nothing that makes me feel like I want to do it.

I guess I should stop writing about this stuff, huh?  My psychological/neurological issues are pretty dull.  Yesterday’s blog was longer than usual, because I was dealing with a lot of weird and highly personal and distressing subject matter, but I think I’ll leave off on things like that.  No one really wants to read it or hear it, there’s nothing anyone can do to help me with it, apparently, and I’m tired of beating that stupid dead horse.  I’m tired of metaphorically shouting into the void with this blog.  When you shout into the void, it seems, the void shouts back at you, and when the void is shouting, you just get emptier and emptier yourself.

At least the shout of the void gives an inviting hint of pure silence that might be waiting there for you‒silence not just in literal noise, but silence in the mind, in the heart, in emotions and thoughts.  Oblivion is preferable, eventually, to cacophony.

Of course, as Sauron (in a vision of the eye) said to Frodo in the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring, “There is no life in the Void‒only death.”*  This is a bit contradictory, depending on one’s definitions.  Can there be death without life?  Was the universe “dead” for the billions of years that passed before life came into existence?  That doesn’t seem coherent to me, at least not the way I think of “death” as coming after life.

Mind you, if you define (or, rather, use) the word death simply to mean “lacking life” then I suppose the universe was dead, and in fact, almost all of it still is and probably will always be.

Maybe Sauron (as reimagined by Peter Jackson et al) just meant you can’t survive in the Void?  Perhaps he meant it was like a wasteland of sorts, a place barren of food and water, that holds only death for creatures that wander into it.  But no, that doesn’t make sense.  Sauron is one of the Maiar, and knows that he literally cannot die, though he can be reduced to a powerless, miserable spirit until the end of days (as he is).  Likewise, in Tolkien’s world, all men and elves and dwarves and hobbits and all those that are “kindled with the Flame Imperishable” do not die completely, though their bodies can die.  I assume that means that even orcs have an afterlife.

Anyway, enough.  Sorry to waste your time with my brain squeezings.  I should find something better to do, speaking of the Void.  In the meantime, I’ve got a headache from clenching my jaw, and I’ve written too much already.  Have a good day and a good weekend if you can.  I’ll be writing again tomorrow, probably.  More’s the pity.

*There is no comparable notion or connection in the books, and it’s hard to see why Sauron would speak of the Void.  Melkor spent much time in the Void both before Eä was even made and after, but he had been alone, and that was why he started to “think different” as they say.  Sauron, on the other hand, was originally a Maia  serving Aule; he wasn’t off in the Void with his eventual new master.  And, of course, Melkor was in the Void by the time of LotR, so there was life in the Void by then.

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…or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, against almost everyone’s better judgment, and so it’s time for another Thursday edition of my blog post.

I had a subjectively bizarre day yesterday, or a disquieting day, or a disheartening day…something along those lines.  Outwardly, it wasn’t that strange, I suppose.  Inwardly, I’ve been feeling increasingly weird and disjointed.  I don’t know if that’s showing itself in my writing at all or not; there’s no good way for me to tell.

There have been two closely spaced opportunities to have palindromic number sequences in the 8-digit recording numbers this week.  If it seems strange to you that there should be two that come close together, just think about how, up until a number sequence is centered on “99”, the stepwise increase in those middle two numbers to keep them the same is 11, 22, 33, 44…and so on.  Then, right after 99, it immediately flips over to “00”, and the sequence restarts.

Anyway, we passed the 99 one earlier this week.  I think it was Tuesday.  Then, yesterday morning, it turned over to 00 and then it was just a matter of the last 3 digits being a reverse of the first.

It was getting close, and the numbers were increasing only slowly, because it was early in the day.  Then, there was a long break between deals, and I took a moment to dial the verification line just to see what number we were on.  It was only 12 shy of the palindrome!

Then, I had to use the restroom, and during the half-a-minute while I was in, a new deal closed and my coworker went over to begin verifying it.  Shortly after I came out, he sort of waved me over.  I thought he was going to give me the paperwork so I could begin processing the deal, but he pointed at the recording number:  26500562.

He knows I’m into number patterns, and he figured I’d like that.

Afterwards, I asked him the (probably strange) questions, “That’s really what the number was, right?  You didn’t just write it down that way because you knew I’d like it?”  He chuckled, obviously understanding at least some of my wish to confirm the result.  But no, it was real. It was a palindromic number.  I should have been pleased and even thrilled.

All I really felt afterward was a deep and profound worsening of my feeling of depression.  I didn’t feel like I’d gotten a message from the universe, but even if I did, it was way after the “due date”, which would have been last Friday at the very latest (and that was a date that had been pushed back repeatedly).  I could think of excuses to invalidate it, like saying I had skewed the results by calling the recording line earlier.  But that’s all just a silly way of messing with oneself.  What it really came down to was:  the number wasn’t enough to give me motivation.  It was definitely cool, but it didn’t mean anything deeper to me.

I’ve experienced similar phenomena before.  From time to time, I’ll be slightly torn about a particular course of action‒nothing momentous, just usually choices of a meal, such as whether to eat something healthy or something indulgent‒and I’ll flip a coin about it, usually one of my collection of dollar coins.  Sometimes I’ll flip three or five or even nine of them, as if taking a vote.  Then, when I have the outcome…well, I’ll often realize that, no matter the result of the coin flips, I want to do something other than what the result directs.  And so I ignore that result.

It’s a psychologically interesting phenomenon.  The coins don’t act as a true decision maker, but they do clarify, for me, what my real wish or inclination is.  So it’s useful in some ways.

The palindromic number is similar.  Maybe if I did have some kind of stupid, quasi-mystical idea of what the numbers symbolized, I would find it more compelling.  But, of course, I have no actual belief that the universe is sending me any messages.  In a way, it’s good that one turned up‒way after my original deadline and idea‒because now I know that it doesn’t give me any more reason or drive to live at all.  Rather, it just highlights the fact that I have no such drive or reason, and it was absurd to think an eight-digit number sequence could provide it.

Yesterday it also turned out that my coworker’s wife‒who is also a coworker‒is coming down with a cold, and so it looks like they aren’t going away this weekend but are going to reschedule to go next weekend.  This would have me push any plans or tentative ideas back yet another week.  I almost started to cry in the office, and just had to sit and look at my computer screen or down at the top of my desk for a while.  My coworker asked if I was okay, and I said, honestly, “No.”  He then asked what was wrong and all I could reply was, “Nothing new.”

Anyway, since then I’ve acclimated slightly to the schedule change.  I know that the palindromic numbers don’t actually mean anything to me, and that realization made me feel even more depressed.  And the timing of the date pushback is also more depressing.

But, on the other hand, this coming Sunday is October 1st, and when the first of a month falls on a Sunday, that always means that there will be a Friday the 13th in the month.  And that will begin the weekend after my planned-to-be pushed back work weekend.  So, if I want a good day to take some special action, and I can’t use Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, then after a Friday the 13th, especially in October, is at least mildly ominous.

Well, okay, not really.  Not to me.  I like the number 13, and Fridays the 13th are good days, especially in October.  Also, both my niece and my daughter were born on the 13th of their birth months, albeit different months and widely separate years, so I can’t feel that the 13th, Friday or otherwise, bodes ill, and I never have.

Really, I see this coming Friday the 13th and related events as potentially…well, not good, maybe, but at least as good as things are going to get.

In the meantime, I must say I’ve been having a lot of bizarre sensory impressions recently.  It’s not that anything particularly strange is happening‒I myself am the strangest thing in my own life, to be honest‒but I keep having this odd feeling that things aren’t actually the way they seem to be, though they seem “normal”.

It’s not a feeling of déjà vu, but it’s almost similar in character.  It’s as if the familiar things I’m seeing and doing and feeling are actually simulacra or illusions‒or perhaps that the memories I have of having been in these places before is an illusion, a false memory.

Also, the flow of time feels a little off.  For instance, when I’m waiting for one light to turn green after another turns red, it seems to take several seconds, way longer than usual, to the point where I find myself looking around impatiently while at the crosswalk.  It also seems that drivers are taking longer than usual to start moving after a traffic light changes.  Things all around me seem to be moving more slowly.  This does not, however, really give me any advantage; I am moving slowly too.  I can only observe the phenomenon, not act more quickly than usual, relatively speaking.

I think there has been an increased frequency of me thinking I see movement out of the corner of my eye, or I hear a noise of movement just beyond eye-shot.  When I see such movement or some shape out of the corner of my eye, I first suspect that it’s a bug of some kind, but that’s not new.  This is south Florida in the hot and wet part of the year.  Seven times out of ten, such movement really is a bug.

I’m also feeling the need to check my pockets even more frequently than usual to make sure that I have my wallet and keys and phone and all still with me.  I never feel secure about that.  I’m not sure that I want to feel secure about such things.  I’d rather be anxious than overconfident and wrong about keys and wallet and phone, etc.

The tension does wear me out though.

Anyway, I don’t feel that reality is illusory, though I feel increasingly distanced and separate from it.  It’s more as if, perhaps, I myself am an illusion.  It would be an elaborate illusion, of course, since I would even have illusory thoughts and experiences and dreams and all that, but hey, according to some Hindu beliefs, all of reality is but a dream being dreamed by Brahma.

It’s reminiscent of something Stephen King described in Danse Macabre, and which was quoted in the Vsauce video about “creepiness”:  Imagine coming home and realizing that everything you own has been replaced by an exact duplicate.

It’s not that I actually think that.  I don’t.  But it almost feels vaguely that way, only it’s all of reality that feels like it’s a replica…perhaps including me.

I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway.  Our experience of reality is always a form of constrained dream.  It shouldn’t make a difference if it sometimes feels more like a full-fledged dream even while awake, especially for someone like me, who has such bad and long-standing insomnia.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t really know what, if anything, my point has been‒here in this blog post, or the point of my existence in general.  I hope you all have as good a Thursday as you can.

TTFN

dagger of the mind merged down