Personal

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WINTER forward, Fall back just doesn’t make sense.

Well, here we all are again—though I, at least, am not on the Mississippi.  I’m actually on the Tri Rail train, northbound between Hollywood, Florida and Deerfield Beach, Florida*.  But I suspect that most of you are not on the Tri Rail when reading it, though some small possibility of such an occurrence does exist.

There may well even be people reading this while on the Mississippi.  Of course, the Mississippi River is much bigger than the Tri Rail train system, and I think there is quite a lot of shipping of various kinds that goes on along its course, but I don’t know that there are very many people involved relative to the amount of traffic.  Of those people, a very small percentage are likely to be reading blogs (or other matter) relative to the people on the Tri Rail who might do so at any given time.

I’m sure there are legitimate ways to assess those numbers, but I don’t have enough information to do it.  I also don’t have enough interest to try to obtain the requisite information, even if it is available out there in the internet/web.

It’s a bit amusing to me that yesterday when I wrote my post, I was completely unaware that we had done the whole “spring forward” thing last weekend.  Part of the reason it didn’t occur to me is:  It’s not Spring yet, dammit!  What the hell is that, having the “spring forward” part of daylight savings time when it’s not even Spring?  Forget the fact that daylight savings time is a dubious practice to begin with; if you’re going to take the thing with the long-standing mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” and adjust the timing so it no longer applies…well, I can only say that such stupidity must have required an act of Congress**.

Anyway, it was funny, because I got on a train twenty minutes earlier than my usual one, and I noted, as I arrived, that the sun wasn’t even starting to come up above the horizon.  I thought to myself that it was remarkable how much difference twenty minutes had made.  But, of course, it was an hour and twenty minutes, it turns out, so that difference is less surprising.

Then, at the office, I noted that the microwave clock was off by an hour.  At first I assumed someone had just stopped cooking something and left time on it, but seven minutes and twenty-one seconds seemed like a long time to have left.  Still, people do stupider things.  I’m one of them, obviously***.

So, of course, as I reset the microwave clock, noting that no one had just left time on it, it flitted through my mind that maybe it was a daylight savings time thing, but again—it isn’t Spring yet, so I didn’t think that could be the case!

I was wrong, obviously.  It didn’t matter much to me either way, since even with the hour shifted forward, I was up earlier than my alarm by quite a bit, and I finally gave up and left, since I was up anyway, and that was why I got the earlier train.  Today, I just got up earlier anyway, again.

I’ve been walking to and from the train on both ends now.  Just since Friday, that means I’ve walked about thirty miles—twelve on Friday, twelve yesterday, and six so far today (rounded off, and with some loose change left out from the weekend).  I seem to have reached the point where I’m not troubled by new blisters, which is good, and I’ve adjusted my process the avoid such things in the future, for the most part.  I do have some achiness here and there, but it’s not that bad.  Sweat is my biggest issue, to be honest.  But I bring a change of shirt, and I have Lysol and deodorant aplenty, so as long as I rehydrate, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

I am a bit frustrated that I haven’t again experienced the “endorphin rush” thing I had on Friday.  Maybe that was just me being all pleased with myself for having walked so far already that morning, and wasn’t really exercise-induced endorphins.  Over the weekend, and particularly yesterday, I’ve actually been even more depressed than usual for me.

I guess you could tell that much from my post yesterday morning, and I can only say that my mood went downhill from there throughout the day.  My mental energy today feels slightly higher, but then again, I have overdosed on caffeine already this morning, purely because I didn’t want to be quite so glum when I got to writing this post.  It was deliberate.

I’m really not prone to be kind to myself, am I?  In fact, I tend to be unkind to myself a lot of the time.  It’s not without reason that I did a cover of the song Hurt, originally by Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor.  I find that its lyrics more or less literally express my feelings and facts about me…except that, from my point of view, needles are for pansies.

Anyway, that’s getting too revelatory, and so I’ll draw to a close now—just for today, I mean, not permanently.  That may be coming soon, but it’s not here yet.  In the meantime, you can look forward to reading whatever I write tomorrow and the next day and for however long I keep going.  I really hope it won’t be very long.

You can place bets if you like.  I won’t do any match-fixing, or whatever the term is.  As Doris Day sang, whatever will be will be—as it must be, for once a thing happens, there is no way it can ever have been otherwise than it was.

*Actually, it runs between Miami Airport and Mangonia Park, which is in northern Palm Beach County, but I don’t go to either of those destinations.  Indeed, in all the time I’ve ridden the Tri Rail, I’ve never once gone to either of those two stations, though I’ve been to and/or through most of the stations in between.  This is perfectly understandable and predictable, given that they are the two termini of the line, and so one never passes through them en route to anywhere else.

**It is not without justification that Dave Barry once used “act of Congress” as a euphemism for “taking a sh*t”.

***Both in the sense that I do such “stupid” things and that I probably am one of the stupider things that people have done, though I shouldn’t disrespect my parents for bringing me into existence.  They had no way to know how I was going to turn out.

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Sometimes jokes are expressions of desperation.

Well, it’s Monday again.  Welcome to another Monday.

I walked to the train again this morning, as I did on Friday, and since I chose to get up and go a bit earlier today, I’m actually now on a train that will arrive at my destination earlier than would have the one I would have boarded had I taken the bus to the train.

Wow, that was a long and convoluted sentence, wasn’t it?  Sorry.

I think on Friday, after my first morning walk to the train, I started the day off a bit giddy, and I think that affected the quality of my blog post that day, so my apologies for that.  I think I was experiencing my first real endorphin rush from endurance exercise in many years, and it got me rather wired and a bit garrulous and—for me—outgoing for the very early part of the day.

That didn’t last, of course.  By early afternoon my general outlook was diminishing and deteriorating and various other verbs starting with “d” and ending in “ing”.  I don’t know how well that fact came across to others in the office, though.  I seemed to make people laugh a bit more than usual in the morning, and I certainly felt less tense than I usually did, but I can’t tell at all if my personality from their point of view was any different than usual.  Even when I’m profoundly depressed—in my immediate mood in addition to my general state of neuro-psychology—I tend to say sardonic things that people find funny a lot of the time.

I think this actually impairs my ability to convey the fact that I really feel deeply horrible.  People seem to assume that if you’re making jokes and are funny, you must be doing okay.  I can tell you from personal experience, this is not necessarily the case.  Sometimes jokes are expressions of desperation.  Just look at poor Robin Williams, if you don’t believe me.

But by the end of the day I felt tired and frustrated and grumpy and gloomy.  That was me on Friday afternoon, which makes me rather different—according to popular understanding, anyway—from most people.  Friday afternoon leading into a weekend in which I don’t work is not a prospect that meant much good for me.  I just sat around in my room at the house, alone—after walking home from the train, which at least caused another, if less notable, bump up in my mood.

I walked to local convenience stores a couple of times over the weekend, and I walked to Burger King on Sunday, and of course I did my laundry, but that was it.  I didn’t really do anything enjoyable.  I certainly didn’t spend time with friends, since I don’t really have any—though I did speak with my sister on the phone on Sunday evening, and that was very nice.

But really, I have a hard time being at all interested in anything much.  The YouTube algorithm is beginning to fail me with respect to offering me things I’m interested in viewing; but perhaps it’s me failing at the algorithm, in that I simply don’t have anything that interests me, and so YouTube can’t offer me much in the way of stuff I’d like to see.  It does occasionally offer me the little option box of being shown an assortment of things that I’ve never seen so far.  I’ve used that box once or twice in the past, but I don’t remember it being particularly beneficial.  I didn’t use it this weekend.

I wish I could find some longish-form fiction that I could enjoy again, like I used to.  Back when I was reading The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and The Belgariad, and later the Harry Potter books, and even things like The Sword of Shannara, and then The Elfstones of Shannara, or various Stephen King and related books, the books gripped my attention and could keep me occupied for quite a long stretch each.  Also, of course, in between reading books, I actually had a group of friends with whom I did things that we enjoyed.

Not so, now.  Now the only fiction that I’ve been able to stick with has been a few select Japanese light novels, most of them centered around high school kids, most of those being loners of some sort or another.  But these books, though I can stick with them, seem just to make me feel a bit more depressed when I’m done, as if they are surrogate friends or surrogate lives, and once they’re done, I’m even more alone than I was before.  And they are all ridiculously short, being light novels.

I have noticed a peculiar and rather amusing effect of reading some of these stories:  When they are written in first person, which is common, I often tend to think to myself in the fashion of the character for about twenty minutes or so after a bout of reading them, almost narrating my actions as if I were writing a first person story.  This goes away rather quickly, but it’s a bit unsettling.  It’s as though my sense of personal identity is so effaced that I just start mirroring the only identities from which I can get any inside view, which are those of first person narratives.

Oh, well, I think we’ve established already that I’m a weird person, so I don’t know why even I am surprised when I find new weird things about myself.  Maybe I’m just irredeemable—you certainly cannot save me up and exchange me for valuable prizes or anything of the sort.  If you save me up, so to speak, I just become wearisome.  Everyone who has ever spent a long time with me on a regular basis has ultimately found me not worth enduring.

I am one of those people.

I guess I don’t have an endorphin rush today.  I hope you have one, if you can.  They’re nice.

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It’s inspiring stuff for an otherwise mundane journey.

I’m starting this blog post a bit later than I usually do—roughly an hour later—because, as I planned yesterday, I have walked from the house to the train station, which is about 4.8 miles, it turns out.  It took me almost exactly an hour and a half, which I guess is a decent pace, though I used to walk more quickly.

I suppose with enough training I shall improve.

Now I’m at the train station (not the one to which I take the bus, but the one from which I always used to set off), waiting for the very train I would have caught had I taken the bus to the train this morning.  So I won’t be arriving at the office any later than usual, but I may be tardy in my posting of this blog entry.

While I walked, I listened to The Fellowship of the Ring on Audible.  It’s a brilliant book to which to listen while walking any distance, because the characters are walking, themselves.  When I started, they were in the Prancing Pony, first meeting Strider (my namesake)*, and by the time I’d gotten to the train station, Frodo had just been stabbed on Weathertop and they were getting ready to repack the pony and head off the following morning.

It’s inspiring stuff for an otherwise mundane journey.

I’m not wearing my Timberland boots today.  I fear that part of the issue with them is that they don’t fit my feet quite snugly enough, and so I slide around a bit in them, and of course, that can lead to blistering.  I’m not sure why the fit is overlarge, though.  I’ve looked at the various reviews and whatnot of those boots, and people generally say that they are true to size, or else a bit small.

Whereas, for instance, the Under Armor shoes I had are actually a bit snug at my usual size, and a pair a half size up seem a more comfortable a fit around my toes.  New Balance walking shoes, such as the ones I’m wearing today, and more or less just right.

I’m leery of trying a pair of Timberlands a half size smaller, not least because they are not cheap.  Though, of course, Amazon does have a try-it-on thing you can do, but if you don’t want to keep a pair you have to send it back, and that’s annoying.  I can’t deal with crap like that anymore; it involves interacting with humans I don’t know and changing my schedule and my routines and all that other stuff, and it’s just not worth the effort.

Maybe I’ll figure something out.  Possibly just the walking itself will strengthen my feet, or alternatively will make them swell enough that they fit the boots snugly.  I will admit, after wearing the boots yesterday, they already feel much more comfortable than they did before, but I did not walk more than about three and a half miles yesterday, total.

I’d like to find something out that is more or less ideal, but there may be no such thing in the real world.  Reality is extremely complex, with all sorts of high order equations interacting with other high order equations all over the place.  It may well be that the possibility of finding something ideally suited in all aspects for any given purpose is functionally impossible.

This is one reason I dislike it when people use the word “perfect”, because in most cases it’s a notion that isn’t even well defined, let alone achievable.  Unless one sets clear and specific and precise criteria, judging anything or anyone to be perfect is just rhetoric, it’s not reason.  Powerful rhetoric can be enjoyable, like watching a boxing match or a martial arts movie, but it absolutely should not be allowed to sway one in important matters that bear on facts of reality or choices of morality.

Should we really let our politics, let alone our judgments of the facts of reality, be shaped by the words of someone who is—effectively—the best name-caller on the playground?  The difference between juvenile remarks—“Neener-neener,” “Your mama,” and “I’m rubber, you’re glue” for instance—and the words in most political discourse and debate is one of degree, not of type.

Imagine if Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem*** had consisted of him saying, “It’s true ‘cause I said it’s true, now what are you gonna do about it?  My grandma knows number theory better than you do.”  Or perhaps he could have invoked the seemingly more mature arguments:  “Of course, my political opponent would be skeptical of my proof, even though it’s obvious to anyone of intelligence that it’s correct.  The members of that party don’t want you to have the freedom brought by knowing that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2.  That’s because it threatens their power structure, and their special interest groups and wealthy lobbyists.  My proof may, like Fermat’s, be too big to fit in the margins of a letter, but believe me, my opponent’s brains, together with his genitals, are more than small enough to fit in such a space.”

Would that be a convincing mathematical argument?  Would it have anything at all to do with the truth of any proposition whatsoever?

Why do people both use and fall for such manipulations?  I know, I know, they’re just a bunch of tailless, nearly-hairless monkeys; why would you expect them to be more reasonable than baboons?  But it’s so frustrating mainly because nearly all of them appear to have the capacity to be rational, contrary to popular belief.

The very use of language itself requires syntax, grammar, logic, all applied at quite a sophisticated and often abstract level.  Almost all humans are capable of language starting at a young age.  They have the wherewithal to be truly reasonable and sharp-minded, almost all of them, with but a bit of effort.  This makes it all the more irritating when they don’t do so.

One doesn’t get angry at a starfish for having no curiosity about astronomy (despite what we call it), or a worm for not grasping quantum mechanics****.  And what does a sea squirt need with philosophy, especially once it’s achieved tenure?  But humans nearly all have the capacity for exceptional achievements.

Though I suppose “exceptional” wouldn’t be the right word if everyone did it.

How did I get on this subject?  I don’t remember.  Anyway, that’s more than enough of a post for today, and as I write this last sentence, having arrived finally at the office (and having now walked just shy of six miles already), I still need to do my editing.  So I’ll call it good.  I don’t think I’m going to be working tomorrow.  It would be good, after my first day of longer walking, to have a day of relative rest.  Then, next week, I shall do my walking, about 12 miles, every day.  That’s not too bad for a start, but not as much as my eventual hope.

We’ll see what happens.

*That’s Aragorn, of course, but for those of you who have only seen the movies, you may not know that his name as king of Gondor, in the fullness of time, was Elessar Telcontar.  Elessar means “elfstone” and refers to the green gem given to Aragorn by Galadriel, whereas Telcontar means, more or less, “strider”**.

**If ever I were to assume a supervillain name of some kind, I might replace my current last name with “Melkor”, because it would lead to possibly the most egotistical concatenation of name meanings ever.  My first name, Robert, apparently means “bright fame” or “bright glory”.  My middle name, Eugene, of course means “true born” or “well born”, as in “eugenics”.  And my counterfactual last name, Melkor, would mean “He who arises in might”.  That’s a heckuva collection of names.  And, of course, I’m a doctor by training and by degree, so that just makes it all even mightier.  “I’m Robert Eugene Melkor, MD.  You can call me Dr. Melkor.  Bwa ha ha ha haaaa!”

***Which, to be fair, should be called Wiles’s Theorem.

****Though they are good at tunneling.  Ha ha.

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A turn or two I’ll walk, to still my blogging mind

Hello and good morning to everyone reading this, even if you’re reading it in the afternoon, or the evening, or at night, or if you’re fundamentally not a morning person and so you never see mornings as “good” no matter what anyone says.  Don’t feel bad about that, if it is the case for you.  Even Gandalf expressed his skepticism about the greeting “Good morning,” as we see almost at the very beginning of The Hobbit.

Most greetings are bizarre things, or at least many of them are.  I particularly dislike greetings that involve questions, because I have lost my former hard-earned skill, such as it was, at treating them as the vacuous, ritualistic bird-calls that they are.

If, on a Monday morning, someone asks, “How was your weekend?” I can’t simply reply with a ritual, “It was great,” and then ask about theirs, whether I care about their weekend or not.  I actually have to stop and think about the question*.  Often, I’m sorry to say, I can only shrug and quote Bart Simpson, saying, “Meh.”  This is me trying to avoid being too negative.  But, of course, humans—or at least Americans—don’t want to hear that sort of thing.  I don’t quite know why.

Similarly, some people will ask the rather grammatically suspect question, “How are you doing?” usually with some dropped consonants or strange contractions.  My first instinct, which I almost always resist, is to respond with, “How am I doing what?”  Instead, I tend just to go for the puzzled look followed by a shrug and, again, “Meh.”

The foreshortened version of the earlier question is “How are you?”  It is if anything more bizarre.  It sounds like the beginning of a deep, philosophical discussion, related perhaps to the old “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  How am I?  Does that mean “How is it that I exist?” which seems to be what it means if you take it at face value?

It’s an interesting thing—to me, at least—to think about the same question but changing “How” to various other words such as who, what, where, and when.  The first three make straightforward sense, the last one is an intriguing question calling to my mind the notion that, in GR, there is no time that passes, merely an extra dimension to reality.

They are all better questions and make more sense than the “how” one.  Then, of course, we could take our cue from the improvised, hilarious line given by Drax in Avengers: Infinity War, and ask, “Why are you?”

Okay, let’s move on to other matters besides my steadily atrophying skill at dealing with small talk in anything but a literal (and annoyed) way.

Today is the final valid day for my current bus pass.  These passes are really quite good if you ride the bus more than a few times a week in Broward County.  Unlike the Tri Rail, which charges full price for each calendar month—even if you buy the pass in the last week of that month—the bus passes start ticking (so to speak) only when you first use them, and they expire a minute before midnight thirty-one days later.  That’s it.  Straightforward.  So if you buy a bus pass and “sit on it” for months, you still have 31 days of use once you first use it.

I like it.  It’s a good system.

That being said, I think that after this evening, when I use this pass for the last available time, I’m not going get a new one.  Instead, if I can summon the courage, I’m simply going to walk to and from the train station every day.  That’s slightly under five miles in each direction.  If I can pull that off, counting the walk from and to the station up at work, I’ll be walking eleven or twelve miles a day.

I really ought to be able to do that.  Endurance is not an issue.  I just have problems with still-healing blisters.  But I can’t coddle myself with respect to those.  My blisters are all that’s holding me back, and they are annoying, but I have to push through to the other side of that barrier, because I have a task before me that I want to accomplish.

It won’t be a particularly useful task for anyone but me, and there will no doubt be those who will think it’s not good for me either, but that isn’t really my concern.  I want to try.  As I always say, I don’t want to inconvenience people I care about, so I’m thinking of something that hopefully will minimize “me-related” problems for them, though adjustments will likely need to be made at some level.

At least the number of people close to me personally and physically is small—it’s zero if you’re looking at the combination of the two attributes.  Also, at least my idea shouldn’t be messy or locally problematic.  That’s one advantage, at least.  Or is it two?

I feel that I have to do something though.  I don’t think I can endure much longer with nothing meaningful in my life in any serious way.  My foundations (metaphorically speaking) are crumbling; you can see the cracks widening if you know where to look, and when they give—I keep trying not to let it give as long as I can—the failure will probably be abrupt and messy and will cause trouble for the neighbors, so to speak.  I’d really like to minimize that if I can.  I cause other people enough unpleasantness just by existing; I’d rather not make it worse.

Of course, I’d rather do good for other people, especially the ones I care about.  I’d rather try to relieve suffering and cause joy, or at least to entertain.  I like to make people smile if I can, but I’m not good at it, and I don’t smile very well myself anymore.

I used to practice smiling in the mirror all the time, to try to get it right, but I’ve kind of stopped bothering with that anymore.  My smiles are usually façades and charades, at least in recent years.

Anyway, my bus will be here soon.  I’ll try to keep you all posted, and I’ll probably write something tomorrow again, whether you like it or not.  Have a good day, if you can, but you don’t have to have a good morning if you don’t feel like it, no matter what I said at the beginning of the post.

TTFN

Gandalf_the_Grey

*Lately I’ve considered simply replying, “It was about sixty hours long”, but I always forget to do that when the time comes.

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Though it’s Wednesday morning again, I’ll avoid quoting from She’s Leaving Home…

Though it’s Wednesday morning again, I’ll avoid quoting from She’s Leaving Home, or referring to my tied-for-favorite of Charles Addams’s characters.  I’m back at the bus stop, just as I was yesterday and the day before, of course, and I still feel very tired.

In fact, I feel a bit more tired than I did yesterday, though I had a nominally better sleep last night—almost five hours (it wasn’t uninterrupted, though).  For me, that’s middling to decent, but it’s very clear from the inside that it is not the amount of sleep my body requires for optimal, let alone maximal, function.  It may, however, be the most sleep my nervous system is able to accomplish without pharmaceutical intervention.

But, of course, with such interventions, I always feel more tired even after a long sleep than I would normally.  Actually, come to think of it, last night I took half a Benadryl™ before going to bed, so I did have some slight pharmaceutical influence, perhaps accounting for the fact that I got all of five hours of sleep.

Jeez, that’s all really boring, isn’t it?  I’m so sorry.  My life is boring, unfortunately, so if I talk about my life, things are generally going to be boring.  I appreciate your patience.

I also appreciate the people who commented and responded and so on to my previous two blog posts.  You’re greatly appreciated, I want that to be very clear, even if in supporting me I fear you are throwing pearls before swine.

I’m considering going back on Saint John’s Wort, which is an “antidepressant” that worked for me in the past, when I first took it (along with therapy, so it isn’t easy to separate variables).  I wouldn’t expect much from it.  I’m actually almost hoping to get that little bump in motivation that sometimes comes at the beginning of antidepressant treatment and puts a depressed person at increased risk for suicide, because before, they were too crippled by lack of energy to take action, but now that the will is growing, they can do it.

The last time I took it, though—which was far from the first—I just felt worse overall in general, even after several weeks, so I don’t even know that it’s going to do anything if I take it.  I can hardly be certain that the first time I took it the beneficial result was anything more than a placebo effect.

I’ve been on other antidepressants, of course, from Paxil to Celexa and Lexapro, to Effexor and Wellbutrin, as well as more old-school ones like Amitriptyline.  They clearly had effects (including benefits), of course, but I don’t know that they were for the better.  Coming off Paxil led me to experience the only two episodes of sleep paralysis I’ve ever had, which were utterly terrifying but still quite fascinating, at least in retrospect.  So in that sense it was worth the course of treatment.  The side-effects weren’t good, though.

I can’t really take prescription antidepressants now, though, because I don’t have a doctor to prescribe them, ironically enough.  I have neither a general practitioner nor a psychiatrist (nor psychologist or social worked, either, but they can’t prescribe anything, anyway*).  I don’t even have a dentist.  My only interaction with any medical care since 2015 or so has been the time I went to an urgent care place with a respiratory infection/complaint and was sent to the ER and admitted because I was de-satting, and they thought maybe my congenital heart defect had reappeared a bit (based on an echocardiogram, not just my symptoms and the drop in oxygenation).

That was maybe five or six years ago.  They wanted me to get follow-up, obviously, but I have no interest in pursuing it, and certainly cannot summon the motivation to do so.  For one thing, I’m unconvinced that they’re correct, though that in itself is not a good reason not to pursue more information.  For another, I have no health insurance, and I certainly have no money to be able to get involved in paying for significant healthcare myself.  Also, I don’t want to have any more cardiac interventions of any kind, frankly.  I went through all that when I was 18, and I don’t want to go through it, or anything like it, again.

I also don’t have the mental resources—in terms of will, executive function, whatever you want to call it—to be able to seek out any kind of state or federal healthcare assistance.  I’m in Florida, anyway, and the public programs here suck.  Anyway, I’m no good at taking care of myself; I see myself as a nuisance, and I really want me to leave myself alone, but that’s obviously difficult.

Yeah, Florida really doesn’t make much very easy.  But, hey, at least there’s no income tax, so people like the Donald can enjoy living here.  The government is dicey at best, of course, at state and local levels, even relative to many other states and the national government—though our representatives there also aren’t exactly the cream of the mental or moral crop.  We really are the Mordor of the United States, in many ways, and not merely because it’s down here in the southeast.  Unfortunately, there are no volcanoes, and though we have big spiders, none of them are Shelob-scale ones.

Anyway, I probably won’t take any antidepressants, and I don’t expect to seek out any healthcare or mental healthcare.  It’s too much trouble, it’s too difficult, I can’t focus or concentrate on things like that.  I’ve been dealing with that shit too often in my life, and for too long, and despite my best previous efforts, I’ve ended up here in Mordor, all by myself.  I’m sick of it.  It’s not worth the effort.

I’m not worth the effort.

*I did get on BetterHelp for a bit, and it was okay as far as it went, but some difficulties arose, not anyone’s fault, certainly not my therapist’s, and I was off it after a little over a month, I think.

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Ugh.  Here I am again.

Ugh.  Here I am again.  I don’t know why, but I’m here…again, still, whatever the proper descriptive term is.

I guess the part of speech would be an adverb, right?  It’s referring to how I am here, not to what I am like or something along those lines.  I think that’s a place for adverbs, that “again” and “still” thing.  If I’m incorrect, I hope one of my readers will correct me.

Do I have actual readers?  (Other than family members, I mean…not that I take them for granted…I appreciate them deeply; I just wonder how much and how often other people read what I write, even those who “like” the posts.  Though again, I do appreciate those people as well, since they apparently make it more likely that other people might read them.)

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I had a particularly bad night’s sleep last night, if you even want to call it a night’s sleep.  I think I was asleep for less than two hours total, with maybe a few extra minutes here and there after, maybe not.  I feel anxious and tense and stressed out.  Yet I have no particular crisis hanging over me, other than the fact that I really just want everything to be over, but I don’t want to be unkind or unfair to the people around me who might be temporarily discomfited or whose days might be disrupted if (when?) I catastrophically collapse.

I really don’t know what to do.  I sometimes take a bit of note paper that I keep in the office, at my desk, and write on it, “I don’t know what to do.”  It doesn’t help, but at least I’m expressing myself; that’s supposedly a good thing according to pop psychology, most (or at least much) of which is a load of (well-meaning) nonsense.

Not that I’m anyone to talk about nonsense.  I’m a pretty free with the nonsense.  I indulge in it regularly and almost constantly.

I’ve thought occasionally that I should stop trying to make clever titles for my daily blog posts.  I do that, in case it’s not obvious.  I’m sure that I often fail and simply make something incomprehensible and inscrutable.  Occasionally, I probably make something witty and even funny, but I think most of the time not.

I wonder if maybe I should just take my first sentence (or two) of any given blog post and make it into the title, then either simply continue from there, or perhaps repeat it in the body of the blog.  I may do that today.  If I do it, you’ll already have been privy to the fact, though it may or may not be obvious.  If you feel like it, do please let me know what you think.

I don’t know what to do.  I really don’t.  I feel more or less incapable of taking any kind of constructive action.  I’ve felt that way for quite a long time, but I think it’s getting worse, or perhaps there are merely fewer things to distract me from it.

I’m very nonhappy.  This is a term I just invented, as a form of contrast to unhappy, though I feel that way right now as well.  It’s a bit like the playful term I invented not too long ago, “unsane”, which I use to refer to people or things or notions or situations wherein a sense of sanity doesn’t really even apply, or never was present.  From a human point of view, most animals might be considered unsane.  So too might aliens, if there are any, or so-called AIs like ChatGPT, or governments (considered as forms of AI in and of themselves, see Highly Entropic Mind’s excellent meditation on this notion).

Anyway, nonhappiness feels like a good term for dysthymia (though I think they’ve changed the official term for the disorder to “chronic depression”, which at least makes it clearer to the general public what’s being discussed).  While it’s true that I’m often fully unhappy, and even anti-happy, there are also long stretches in between of straightforward nonhappiness.  It doesn’t comprise enough dysfunction to be completely crippling—which is almost a shame, here from inside, because at least that would force the issue—it’s just a steady state of lack, of emptiness, of joylessness…dust and ashes, butter that’s spread over too much bread, more and more bread all the time, every day more, because there is no new life being generated, it merely continues, stretching further and further, until you want to scream at your overly thinly stretched self simply to BREAK ALREADY!

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  Apparently, at least, I’m ending sentences with prepositions, which is a contradiction in terms, if not any other offense.  Other than that, though I just don’t know.  I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know where to go.  I don’t really want to go anywhere, and I don’t want to be where I am.

I keep hurting myself in little ways that aren’t too obvious, just to keep myself feeling something—to keep myself from fully entering the wraith world, as it were—and also because I hate myself.  Also, it distracts me a bit from my chronic pain.  At least it’s a punctuation, a variation.  Even if all you ever ate was something as nice as, say, cake, you’d probably pretty soon welcome even some hated food—insert the one you hate most.  For me it’s probably eggplant, which I can’t even smell without gagging.

Actually, I think I’d stick with cake.  Even thinking about eating eggplant makes me queasy.

Maybe the problem is that I get no real break from being myself, from having to be with myself—one of my least favorite people—all the time.  I can’t even sleep; I don’t even really have any dreams at night that I remember.  I certainly don’t really ever imagine being any other person; I can’t even really grasp what that could mean.

I suspect other people can’t really imagine it either, they just sort of imagine themselves in the other person’s shell, some Freaky Friday kind of thing, which doesn’t actually involve becoming another person, merely disguising oneself as the other person.  If you and another person switched places completely, at every level, at every atom, every wiggle in every quantum field, every tiny bit of the state of your being, then nothing at all would have changed, because those things taken together are you, and nothing else is pertinent.

Anyway, I don’t know what the point of that tangent was.  Probably there was none.  I’m just writing “stream of consciousness”.  I wish I could write in “scream” of consciousness (ha ha), but my consciousness doesn’t seem capable of screaming, unfortunately.  I have no mouth—metaphorically speaking—for such things.  My world will probably end not with a scream or even with a whimper, but rather with a catch-up inhalation caused by me unconsciously holding my breath when I focus on something for a bit, clenching my jaw as I do.

That’s it for today, I think.  If I’m still kicking tomorrow, I’ll probably write another post then, though I can’t make any promises.  I don’t know what to do, so I don’t know for sure what I will do, but it will probably be more of the same trudge through the desert of the real (to borrow a nice term from The Matrix).  You’re welcome to join me, if you’re a glutton for punishment, but I warn you, the company is not merely poor but actually unnoticeable.  As far as I can ever tell, or at least feel, I am alone here.

I can’t blame others for keeping their distance.  I wish I could.

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Is a feral cat that’s locked in a shed alive or dead? Alive…or dead?

I hope no one was worried about me on Saturday when I didn’t write a blog post.

I doubt anyone was.  Why would they be?  Even if something catastrophic had happened to me, it would probably have been for the best, anyway.  If anything, someone might’ve had a positive thought, rather like Ben Affleck’s character in Good Will Hunting, when he says that he hopes (or dreams) that one day he’ll come to pick Will up and Will simply won’t be there.  He’ll have gone, as it were, to a better place.

Regrettably, I cannot give you all any such good news as, for instance, that I’ve gone anywhere better, worse, or nonexistent.  We simply didn’t open the office on Saturday, because there were quite a few people who were out sick during the week, and even among those who were not, perhaps only one had planned to come in.  Since that would leave just me and one other person in the office, and since I commute from North Miami to Deerfield Beach, with no car or anything, the boss just said, let’s not bother opening the office.

Since we hadn’t bothered opening the office, I didn’t write a blog post, because I wasn’t commuting.  I considered getting on the site on Saturday morning and leaving a brief message about it all, to prevent anyone worrying, but it occurred to me that this was silly and stupid.  No one out there in world with any sense actually cares about me—other than family, of course, and they can always text me if they’re concerned.

People in general are right not to care.  I’m thoroughly worthless, I’m a real downer, and I bring little to no good to anyone in the world, myself included.  I’m extremely unhappy and I’m very tired; lolling about in my room over the weekend is no more pleasant or restful than going to the office.  I’m also always as tense and uptight as a feral cat, but less charming, less trusting, and less able to express myself clearly.  Except in writing, of course—I’m better at writing than feral cats are, unless they’ve been brilliantly hiding some skills of which I’ve never heard the slightest inkling.

Then again, my writing doesn’t seem to get my feelings across very well at all, though I try.  But either there aren’t enough people reading it for anyone who’s able to do anything to get the point, or people understand me but don’t really care or simply have too much on their own plates—which is fair enough, of course.

I watched a video last night about “Cassandra Syndrome” which I’d never really heard of before, though I was aware of the name.  No, it’s not the daughter of the villain from The Incredibles.  Apparently Cassandra was some Greek mythological figure cursed always to tell the truth but never to be believed.  The syndrome is apparently associated with people trying to convey their feelings or thoughts or emotions and thinking that they’ve done so, and yet finding that others don’t get the message.

It’s like that line from Brain Damage that I always quote:  “And when the cloudbursts thunder in your ear; you shout and no one seems to hear.”

That line always hits me quite hard, as I feel it expresses exactly my usual experience.  And then, of course, it’s followed by “And when the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”

Well, the “band” I was in has been playing different tunes for more than fifteen years, now.  I’m no longer with them, of course.  My involuntary solo career has been a huge flop.  As for the preceding line, well, I feel like I’ve been shouting and shouting and shouting every day, all day for what feels like an eternity.  I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs, but clearly, no one seems to hear—or they just don’t seem to get what I’m saying.  It’s as though there’s some weird auto-correct on all my attempted communications, making everything I try to say come across differently from the way I’m trying to make it come across.

I guess that’s the way these things work sometimes, at least according to the video I shared.  I’m speaking a different language from everyone else or something, and it’s just terribly frustrating.  I’m tired of it.  I don’t really want to do it anymore.  It is, apparently, pointless.

I stopped writing fiction, and I stopped playing (let alone writing) music.  I probably should just stop bothering to do these blog posts, too.  I’m just shouting upwind into a gale, or spitting into the ocean, or throwing around metaphors that no one seems to grasp.  I’m apparently not capable of being more explicit than I’m being, probably because I hate myself and don’t want myself to succeed.  Something like that, I don’t know.  I don’t really have any clue.

If I don’t write anything tomorrow, you’ll have at least a clue about the probable reason.  If I do, well, you’ll know that, if you look.  If you don’t look, then it will all be Schrodinger’s Cat to you, anyway, only it’ll be a cat in an experimental box you’ve never even heard of.  It’ll be a feral cat—paranoid and tense and scraggly and unlovable, whether alive or dead.

Also, it’s really heavy-handed with the metaphors.

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So we profess ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies of every wind that blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, against almost everyone’s better judgment.  Indeed, it’s the first Thursday (and the second day) of March, which is a new month (though the name is, of course, not new).

It being Thursday, it’s time once again for my traditional weekly blog post, which differs from my now-daily blog post only in that it follows the old pattern of a Shakespearean title and usually a picture…and, of course, this little introduction in which I note all these points, which is frankly rather tedious.  I should probably just quit doing it.

The trains were having severe troubles yesterday morning and yesterday evening.  In the morning, there was temporary suspension of the trains northbound from my usual station, due to what the fellow at the station referred to as a “train versus vehicle* event”.  The RTA was supposedly providing a “bus bridge” from that station to the next one north of the accident, and indeed, at long last, two full buses arrived bringing passengers from the station north of the event so they could continue south.  However, only one of the buses was heading back north, oddly enough, and that bus got full literally just as I was about to get on it.  I was the very one at whom the driver held out his hand, palm forward, and said, “No more passengers.”

So, grumbling, I stepped back, and I and the other remnants waited, asking when the next bus would be.  The fellow at the station did not know, though he guessed about ten minutes (ha ha).  After a while, he received notice that normal service was resuming.  This probably means no one had died in the “train versus vehicle event”, which I suppose is a good thing**.  I ended up being about an hour late to the office, and this was on Wednesday, which means there was payroll to do.  Also, we’re setting up and putting into practice a new program that I am heavily involved in, and we had two new people starting on a trial basis, who needed to be processed…and of course, meanwhile, we had at least three people out sick.  I was pretty stressed out, even relative to a normal day.

Then, last night, as I waited at the train station, the southbound train was announced to be late, and then announced to be later, and then that train was cancelled, and then the next one was announced to be late, and then later…

Eventually, it got to the point that, even if that next train got there at its announced later time, by the time I took it, then the two buses***, then walked from the stop to the house, it would be quite late.  And, honestly, I didn’t have anything (and certainly not anyone) waiting for me at the house, so it didn’t seem worth it to bother going.  I walked back to the office, and I slept here overnight.  And here I am writing this.

Such is my life—if you can call it that.  I hate it.  There’s nothing in it that’s of any real worth.  I’m still in chronic pain, I still have insomnia.  Obviously, I still have my dysthymia/depression, and of course, if I do have any neurodevelopmental difficulties that have hitherto gone undiagnosed, they certainly haven’t gone away.  I remain at least slightly uncertain in that latter category, because though I think the evidence is good, I do not quite trust my own judgment.

Can you blame me?

So, anyway, again, here I am, though metaphorically I am nowhere.  I also have a headache, which is probably at least partly tension related.  And I’m tired.  I’m not sleepy, but I am tired, almost all of the time.  I honestly don’t know what to do.  I mean, I know what I think I ought to do.  But it’s hard to get an “is” from an “ought”—though all “oughts” come from “ises****” contrary to what humeans seem to think—and I don’t have quite the will yet to overcome the activation energy wall created by biological drives/resistances to get to the other side.

I’m working on a way around.  There are things one can do to reduce one’s resistance in the short term, to lower that activation energy barrier.  But I’m not really interested in drugs, nor am I willing to deal with people who deal in illicit ones, and alcohol just tends to make me sleepy (and yet not to stay asleep or feel rested).  I do step swiftly into crosswalks when the lights change, hoping someone will not pay attention to traffic signals and will just hit me; they would deserve to have to deal with it, since pedestrians in the crosswalk have the right of way when obeying signals.  But so far—though many seem tempted—even when I tell them to hit me, none of them have.  I don’t know whether to feel irked about that or to be slightly pleased that so many people are more careful than one might expect.

Oh, well.  It doesn’t matter.  I suspect I’ll find a way to get back where I came from one way or another before too long, blisters and biological drives notwithstanding.  There must be some kind of quantum tunneling that can eventually get me through that mental barrier*****.

There’s no reason to expect things to head in the opposite direction, though, so I don’t really have any sense of optimism or even of possibility.  But in the meantime, I’ll keep writing these daily posts on days when I work, which will include Saturday this week.  You can continue to look forward to them, if you do, but for a limited time only.

TTFN

tri rail

Golden Glades Tri Rail Station – no trains present

*Is a train not a type of vehicle, though?

**Although, honestly, given the trouble the driver of said vehicle had caused—presuming that it was that driver’s fault, which is not certain but seems more likely than not—I can’t help but wish that they at least could have been injured badly, and if you had asked me at the time, I would almost certainly have said they ought to have been killed (but not their passengers, of course, unless the accident was caused by such a passenger).  After all, given the number of people whom they inconvenienced, and the economic, social, and psychological losses they thereby engendered, and the physical stress they created among many people (me included) it seems likely that their escapade led to diminished health and even premature death in one or more than one person.  But they probably didn’t do it on purpose, so perhaps the death penalty would be excessive.  Still, I don’t hear about such accidents happening in countries where commuter trains are much more common than here in the US, whereas something of the sort happens almost monthly just during the times of my commutes.

***I probably wouldn’t have walked.  I’m trying to rest the healing blister on my right foot, at least from more than a mile of walking at a time.  It seems to be doing well.

****That’s a plural that doesn’t want to be spelled.

*****I think this was Dylan’s original first line of All Along the Watchtower, but it just didn’t scan.  It turned out fine when fixed, though, and Jimi’s version was even better, as Dylan himself is said to have admitted.

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What? Were you thinking?

Ugh.  It’s a new day—and a Wednesday, at that, so I have to do the payroll.  It’s a new month, too, so there’s rent and water and electric bills and eventually cable bills and all that coming soon.

I suppose it’s nice that the vernal equinox is this month, and thus the beginning of Spring in the northern hemisphere.  And of course it’s nice that my brother’s birthday is also coming up this month (and one of my best friends from back home has her birthday before that, but we haven’t interacted in a long time).  But other than that, I have no interest in any of it.  Frankly, I don’t have much interest in anything at all.

I spent about ten minutes scrolling through my Audible app this morning, trying to find something I wanted to listen to on my way to the bus stop.  I didn’t find anything, though I have a fair few Audible books—not as many as I have Kindle books, but still, there are quite a few.

I eventually just returned to a podcast that I had started yesterday—an old one with Anil Seth on Sam Harris’s podcast, two interesting people talking about interesting things.  I get a bit frustrated when Sam betrays some of his bias toward the “hard problem of consciousness” being a legitimate, persistent thing, which I think is just a notion he holds onto as a meditator and thinker about consciousness—the notion that there’s something pseudo-mysterious about the fact that neural processes give rise to actual subjective experience.

I don’t understand what he thinks the alternative is.  The so-called philosophical zombie thought experiment is self-contradictory and incoherent when you look at it closely*.  How would a self-monitoring and flexible, self-directing, agentic, information-processing system that’s part of a biological organism with problems to solve and a not-completely-predictable world in which to live be expected to function?  It monitors itself internally and externally, including monitoring at least some of the contents of that processing, because that’s a useful thing for an organism to do to survive and reproduce in a complicated world that includes other beings like itself in addition to predators and prey and whatnot.  Why is it a hard problem that all this produces “subjective” experience?  What do you expect it to do?

It’s not any more sensible than asking why there is something rather than nothing.  What do you expect?  Obviously, there are only people asking that question if there is something.  And why would there be “nothing”, anyway?  Why do people assume that’s the default state?  Of course, I don’t think any actual, conscious being can truly imagine “nothing”, anymore than any conscious being can really imagine or contemplate the experience of ceasing to exist.

If you’ve been under general anesthesia—particularly really deep general anesthesia like you have for open heart surgery and the like—you’ve experienced the temporary cessation of pretty much all of your brain functions.  Try to remember what it was like when you were under complete general anesthesia**.  If there’s something for you to remember, then you were still conscious, and that means you weren’t under complete general anesthesia.

Alternatively, try to remember what it was like (for you) long before you were born, before even your parents were born***.  That’s what it was like not to be conscious.

From within its own realm, consciousness is, in a sense, endless, because it doesn’t feel itself begin and it doesn’t feel itself end—it’s almost like one of those Penrose/Escher diagrams of infinite hyperbolic spaces contained within another, finite space.  And this, of course, may very well describe the configuration of our own universe, since GR allows for spaces that look finite from the outside but are infinite from within, and mathematics can deal with them rigorously and consistently and thoroughly.  It’s not readily intuitive without a bit of thought and practice, but why would one expect it to be****?

Anyway, that’s the sort of irritated but at least engaging argument I get into within my skull with people who are not actually present with me, and with whom I’ll never interact.

When I try to talk to people at work about such things, I just get blank looks and confusion.  I tried to bring up my discussion from a week or so ago—regarding the M-theory related notion I had of a potential explanation for “dark matter”—with the smartest person I know in the office.  It was disappointing.  I was actually enthusiastic—I get that way about science and math, still, sometimes—but though he listened intently and politely, he said that it all really just went over his head.

It’s very frustrating, and quite disheartening.  I really do feel like a stranded alien castaway, sometimes, and in many ways, I always have.  This is part of why I always liked the villains in stories, not because they were bad guys—who cares about that?—but because they were always different, but strong and confident nevertheless.  They were people who got things done and changed the world, and who, by the way, also didn’t let other people fuck with them without cost.  They were strange, they were weird, but they were powerful and capable, though often not in productive ways.  And they’re fun, at least, or they used to be.

Nothing is very much fun, anymore, to quote the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns.

The next few songs on that album are Don’t Leave Me Now (too late for that) then Another Brick in the Wall, Part III, which definitely resonates with me, and finally Goodbye, Cruel World, to end the first half of The Wall, one of the greatest concept albums ever made.

The very fact that Pink Floyd’s only number one single was Another Brick in the Wall, Part II, the least good song on that album (though it’s got a great guitar solo…of course), is just another example of how unutterably stupid and worthless the world is.

Goodbye, cruel world, indeed.  And good riddance.

hyperbola hyperbole

*Just because one can utter the words of a “description” of what a philosophical zombie is and make it syntactically correct doesn’t mean the idea makes sense.  I can write 2+3=12, or say it, or whatever, but given what we mean by those symbols or words, it’s not a coherent mathematical statement.

**Not what it was like when you were just going under or gradually coming around.  Don’t be an idiot.

***Not any nonsense about past lives/reincarnation.  Don’t be an idiot.

****I think people tend to exaggerate, quite severely, just how complicated hyperbolic geometry really is.  (Get it?)

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“What the hell am I doin’ here? I don’t belong here.”

I apologize for my rather boring blog posts over the past few (or several) working days.  I was trying to be as upbeat as I could, and to stop dwelling quite so much on my mood disorder and my otherwise disordered mental state, such as it is, because I feared that I would end up just turning readers off.  So, instead, I’ve focused on walking and blisters and silly things like that which, upon occasion, and in passing, would give a glancing blow at some interesting (in my opinion) subject matter like yesterday.

The fact is, I’m having severe, ongoing, worsening problems with my depression, and I feel like nothing I’ve done here or said here has been of any benefit to it or to me.  Or, well, what I’ve said and done might benefit the depression in and of itself, i.e., it might have made it stronger.  But that’s not necessarily good for the larger organism (me).

This is referring to the depression as if it were a being or entity in and of itself, with a separate nature and goals and criteria for thriving and so on.  It’s not, of course.  It’s a state of my own brain/body, a sort of self-sustaining but destructive pattern of internal and external interactions in a brain that’s already not exactly functioning in quite what might be considered a normal, or at least normative, way.

I’ve previously likened depression, as a state or an “attack”, to a hurricane—a self-sustaining pattern that forms and grows when conditions are right and is very difficult to break once it gets going.  I think that’s actually a decent analogy.  It’s certainly vastly better than the popular “chemical imbalance” notion upon which I’ve spat my vitriol more than once in the past.

As with hurricanes, I think it’s not entirely unreasonable to think of depression as if it were an entity of its own that tends to act to sustain and strengthen itself, as if it had intentions and a will, as long as one maintains the implicit awareness that this is a metaphor.  It’s easy to get into the habit of using metaphors so often that they stop behaving like metaphors in one’s head and start being, effectively, literal interpretations of things that are fundamentally otherwise, and it’s important to try to avoid doing that.  That way madness lies, as they say.

And madness does lie—almost always.  That’s one of the big problems with it.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make and to which I’m struggling to stick, is that depression acts as if it has a life of its own, rather as a tumor more or less literally acts as an entity in and of itself within the body, with its own “agenda” of self-sustenance and growth.

I’ve said to others, and to myself, that my mind is not my friend.  This is one of the reasons, for instance, that though I’m intrigued by them, I don’t think I would ever seek out an experience with any form of psychedelic.  My mental state often already has the feel of a bad trip of sorts, as I’ve heard them described.  I don’t want to pour gasoline onto that fire.

But I’ve fought with this entity in my head for almost as long as I can remember.  My brain, my mind, has always been weird—to me, relative to the people around me, and to many of them as well—though others also often seem inscrutable and inexplicable to me, at least in the sense of feeling things “in my bones”, though I’ve read and learned many things that give me at least an academic, intellectual understanding of things people do.  But I can’t say I grok them.

I’ve often said that basic primatology—particularly that which applies to primates that live in large groups—provides a sufficient framework on which to hang the vast majority of human behavior.  I suppose this should not be too surprising, since humans are primates, after all.  But it’s disheartening how rarely humans fully depart from the simple, chest-thumping, fang-baring, hierarchy-climbing, mate-seeking, dominance-submission behavior patterns that could with only a little simplification be transplanted onto the average baboon flange.

I cannot claim any superiority, of course.  My own, apparently “neurodivergent”, brain* is erratic and irrational even by its own—my own—standards, and I certainly cannot claim to be a well-adjusted machine running in optimal condition.  There are aspects to my machine that really are well put-together, and I’m glad for those, of course.  But they don’t seem to be enough to keep the whole thing operational.

I decided to give up even trying to look for help or improvement or to expect myself ever to get any better, and I tried not even talking—or writing—about it.  But that didn’t make for very good blog posts, apparently.  So maybe this one will at least be more interesting.  It’s truer to my inner state, if nothing else.

So, welcome to Hell, population one—I would like to say welcome to Purgatory, but there is no process of cleansing or improvement—of purgation—going on here.  There is only malicious, sadistic, hateful torment meted out by the demonic overlord of a realm repurposed for the eternal excoriation of a lost soul that is also the demon itself.

Okay, well, that paragraph was gratuitously melodramatic and misleading.  Sorry.  It makes the whole thing sound more exciting and impressive than it actually is.  Oh, well.  At least it’s not boring.  Except when it is, which is actually quite a lot of the time, come to think of it.  That’s one of the many forms of torture it entails.  Actually, that’s one of the big issues about it; even things that ought to be interesting are utterly mind-numbing, or seem so because the mind itself is numb (not comfortably) in the first place.

This is all a bit of mess here.  Again, sorry.  Returning to an earlier point, I’ll say that though the hurricane analogy is good as far as it goes, hurricanes have a tendency to peter out, eventually, as they move through the atmosphere, certainly once they go over land and lose the source of their water and heat, and then they kind of just fade away.  Certainly, no hurricane is going to destroy the Earth itself.

Depression, on the other hand, can absolutely do the equivalent of such planetary destruction.  In this, it’s much more like a tumor than a hurricane.  It’s a slow-growing tumor, perhaps like an indolent prostate cancer—the sort of thing you can have, and not treat, and yet you still might die of something else before the cancer ever would kill you (though kill you it may).  But even if it doesn’t kill you, it certainly doesn’t make you stronger.  It affects everything else in the system.  It steals energy from all the “good” things, when there even are any, and it further whittles away at those few good things by making a person intolerable to the people and things that are good in that person’s life, until nearly all of them are gone.

I don’t have any answers to this problem.  I know of ways to end the problem, but not to cure it.  Unfortunately, I don’t see any evidence that anyone else out there has any good answers.  Believe me, I’ve looked, and I’m “qualified” to evaluate such matters, in more than one sense.

The world was not made for us; it was not made for anyone; as far as we can tell, it just happened.  Ditto with human beings and other forms of life—even weirdo, alien, replicant, robot, changeling, mutants like me.  Ditto with culture and civilization.  There’s no reason to expect them to work flawlessly or efficiently.  They just have to work “well” enough to be self-sustaining.  That’s natural selection, and it’s not pretty.

Well, it can be quite beautiful, depending on your point of view, but even Darwin noted how slow, cruel, wasteful, and harsh it all is.  Nevertheless, it’s the only game there is, as far as I can see.

I so just want to fold and walk away from the table.  Right now the blister on my foot is inhibiting that somewhat, but it’ll heal**.  Then maybe I can finally take a long walk off a short planet.  I don’t see any better options.

*Every time I take new or repeated tests to check on whether it’s accurate to describe it that way, I keep getting results pretty resoundingly supportive of that hypothesis.  I recognize that I am not performing scientifically rigorous evaluations, since the one administering and the one to whom the tests are being administered is the same, and it’s only too easy to introduce bias.  But I don’t have ready access, nor the mental wherewithal to take advantage of it, to resources to get a more objective assessment.  And when I go online and watch videos and when I read books and articles, when I go to social media and look at available resources and groups there, and so on, I find that, while these people all make somewhat more sense to me than most other people do, I still feel severely weird even in comparison to them, and I could not feel comfortable among them or interacting with them.  I feel no sense that I could connect to the related communities—to any communities, really.  I feel like a creep and a weirdo relative to every potential group or person with whom I could consider engaging.

**I almost accidentally wrote “it’ll heel”, which would be funny, but the blister is on the ball of my foot, not the heel, so as a joke, even an unintentional one, it just wouldn’t work.