Personal

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When Friday night arrives, will it or will it not have a suitcase?

It’s Friday, and the trains are back up and running, and I’m heading in to work, so I am also writing a blog post for today.  Callooh.  Callay.

I’m writing this post on my cell phone, if that term is still strictly accurate to describe the modern “smartphone”, because I didn’t bring my laptop with me when I left the office early on Wednesday.  This was not an accident; I decided that, even though I had a raincoat and an umbrella, it was possible rain might get into my backpack and damage the laptop if the rain was heavy enough.

That turns out to have been a thoroughly unnecessary precaution.  I don’t want to make light of the travails of those who had a worse time of it, but around here, the recent subtropical storm was not that intimidating.  Neither power nor internet went out, I didn’t even come close to needing to close the storm shutters, and the rainfall wasn’t all that impressive.  We’ve had far deeper puddles from a typical summer afternoon storm.

I guess that’s all good, though the trains didn’t run yesterday, nevertheless.  It was probably possible for them to do so, but I respect the decision of those responsible.  They can’t know ahead of time how debris and damage might affect the tracks, putting those riding the trains in danger and potentially derailing‒pardon the expression‒operations on longer and larger scales due to mishaps.  It was a sensible precaution to suspend service for the day.

I could have made it to the office by bus, but that’s a very long ride, and my boss basically told me just to enjoy the day off.  He has commented, in other contexts, on the fact that I’ve never taken a vacation in all the years I’ve been working for him, and that’s true.  The only time I’ve taken off has been on the two occasions when first my father and then my mother died.

As I said to him, though, what would I even do with a vacation?  I don’t have anyone with whom to go anywhere, and to me, vacations are things one does with other people.  I don’t even watch TV or movies with anyone, anymore, nor do I tend to watch shows that anyone else around me watches.  The closest I come to watching something with someone else is watching one of the many YouTube “reaction videos” for shows that I have watched.  I suppose that sort of situation is probably one of the reasons people like these kinds of videos; it feels like sharing a show you love with a friend who hasn’t seen it before.

Yesterday, during my “day off”, I decided to make use of it by going for a nice long walk (I even jogged about 40 paces during it) and then watching some movies of the sort that always used to get me motivated to get/stay in shape.  These tend to be specific kinds of action movies, and the ones I watched yesterday were Hit Man, Man on Fire, and The Equalizer.  Good, clean, violent, revenge-type fun where the strength of the hero is at least as much his cleverness as his physical prowess.

These were the kinds of characters I admired most‒of those in action movies, anyway.  And though the main character in Hit Man is a sort of born-and-raised, brutally trained and modified to be what he is kind of person, he’s still basically a relatively believable, and very clever protagonist.  And of course, both of the latter two movies were made when Denzel Washington was probably as old as I am now, or nearly so, and he’s never been an action star type.

I don’t think any of these movies are realistic, of course, but they tap into a sort of primal motivation that gets me going, and works far better than any thoughts of simply being healthy.  The whole “to live a long and healthy life” thing doesn’t push you much if you don’t even want to have lived as long as you already have lived.  But the feeling of wanting to be able to be a badass, to be able to carry out necessary violence in appropriate circumstances‒even if it kills you‒that can get even a person like me motivated.

So, I did some extra push ups of three different kinds‒it was appalling to me how few I could readily do at once, especially since I can do 35 dips at a time (and that despite being a fat pig).  I guess they really don’t work quite the same muscle groups.  I also did extra ab exercises and lunges and some other stuff.

It’s all silliness, of course, but as the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, all is vanity.  Still, vanity that gets one up and moving and trying to get in better shape is at least a locally useful kind of vanity.

Anyway, that’s how I used my “day off” which was one of the first I’ve had in a while that wasn’t just because I was sick, not counting alternate Saturdays.  Of course, in a few weeks I’ll have Thanksgiving off, but I don’t do anything on Thanksgiving.  I don’t have nearby family or close friends with whom to spend it, and if I were invited to join someone’s family’s celebration, I would probably feel too awkward and tense at the prospect to take them up on it.

It’s a bit of a depressing situation, but I don’t really know what to do about it.  I used to have family and loved ones around me (these are not mutually exclusive groups), but some members of those groups have ended up distancing themselves from me often enough‒and causing a great deal of non-intended pain in the process for me‒that I find that the sense of risk is greater than the urge to try to connect with anyone new.

Also, it’s led me to the provisional conclusion that I’m simply not beneficial to have as a family member or loved one or close friend, since I am the common denominator in all these situations.  So I also don’t want to inflict myself upon other people, least of all the sorts of people who would be kind enough and patient enough to want to be close to me, and to whom I would want to be close.  So, I’m not liable to change things on my own.

Most of the close friends and loved ones I’ve had in the past were either family, who were forced by blood to have me as part of their “in group”, or people with whom I’ve been almost randomly and fortuitously (for me) put together in school or university or work, or who, in a way, sought me out because they found me interesting.  I’m not as interesting as I used to be, though, and even those who most thought me interesting, such as my now-ex-wife, eventually found me intolerable.  She’s a smart woman; I have a hard time faulting her judgment in this.

Anyway, speaking of Saturdays‒and I did mention them not long ago‒I am apparently going to have this Saturday off; my coworker with whom I alternate Saturdays asked to switch and take this one over the next one, so I said yes.  Thus, I won’t be expecting to write a post tomorrow.  If something changes, well…you’ll know because I will have written a blog post.

In the meantime, I hope you have all had pretty good weeks, and that things are going well for you, and that all your potential disasters have turned out no worse than tropical storm Nicole turned out for me/us in south Florida.  Thanks for reading.

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“When comes the storm?”

I brought my laptop with me yesterday after work, and I’m using it to write this post.  I was afraid this morning that I would need to avoid its use.  I was worried that there would be heavy rain and high winds at the train station thanks to the “subtropical storm” morphing into a hurricane that’s bearing straight at the east coast of Florida.  However, this morning it’s just a bit breezy, and the rain is not very impressive—more a drizzle than anything else, though it is steadier than rain tends to be down here.

I have my raincoat on, just in case.

As of yesterday, the announcement was that today the trains would stop running after about 5 pm, so I’m going to need to leave work early if that’s still the case.  In addition, the announcement was that there would be no train service on Thursday, since the storm is predicted to make landfall at around 1 am Thursday morning.  So, I may not be going to work on Thursday, since if the trains aren’t running, the buses aren’t likely to be running, and I have no other reliable way to get to the office.  If that’s the case, I probably won’t be writing my traditional Thursday blog post.

I doubt anyone will mourn.

Maybe I should take this as a sign from the universe that I should just give up on this blog post, as I’ve given up writing fiction or playing guitar or even really listening to any music, let alone singing along.  I get the impression that my post yesterday—which was on a subject I find interesting, and thus about which I tend to go on and on and on, even when writing on my phone—wasn’t particularly interesting to anyone but me.  There’s nothing terribly wrong with that, but it’s a lot of work just to spew my random thoughts into the void, when for the most part, I already know what those thoughts are.

I’ve given myself plenty of such potential “signs” to look out for, that I would take to mean that the universe wants me to stick around.  Not that I really believe in any such nonsense; it’s just a bit of frivolity.  Most of the potential signs I’ve chosen center on my love of numbers; they relate to certain automatically generated codes that happen when processing things at work.

I gave myself more than 10 opportunities over the last several months, and they’ve all failed, which was predictable.  I knew that they weren’t likely—I was looking for palindromic sequences of eight digits in an eight-digit code that turns over very rapidly, since numerous offices and businesses use the service—but I figured, since I’m a fan of numbers, and especially such numbers, if one of them came up honestly, in the normal course of business, I would take it as an indicator to reorient myself somehow, at least for the time being.

I don’t actually imagine that the universe cares one way or another whether I live or die, or indeed, whether anyone or anything lives or dies, except to the extent that the universe contains minds instantiated in flesh.  All of those that might have any pertinent opinion have shown the general tendency to find their lives more comfortable when I am not around them much, as I’m sure I’ve noted ad nauseam in the past.  So, there really is nothing significant holding me here.

Even those distant people with whom I keep in occasional contact, and who would probably be sad for a bit if I were gone, would not experience any true upheaval in their lives.  I’m disconnected from nearly everyone, beyond tenuous cobwebs; the people at the office are the ones who would have the greatest adjustments to make, but these would be rapidly achieved, and some people there would no doubt get raises as they took over some of my duties.

I’m tired, in so many ways.  I’ve slept worse than average even for me this week, probably partly because of the change in the clocks over the weekend.  And the fact that it gets so dark so early in the evening this time of year has never been good for me.  I’m on the first train of the day here, now, but I was up for hours already before I left the house.

I kind of wish for something to take the whole issue out of my hands.  I don’t tend to cross streets against lights deliberately—that would feel utterly impolite and inappropriate to me—but I have been willfully walking into the road even when right turners are approaching the intersections, hoping that someone will be reckless and run into me.  It’s a silly little thing, but if someone caused such an accident, they would be the ones disobeying traffic laws, so the fact that my “gain” would inconvenience them would be appropriate.

So far, I’ve had no luck.  I don’t really expect to have any in this sense—even if someone were to hit me, the speeds are too slow to be likely to be lethal.  Still, I have channeled the Joker (from The Dark Knight) a few times while crossing the street recently, saying, “Hit me, hit me, I want you to do it, I want you to do it,” under my breath as drivers approach the intersections.  Of course—rather obviously—no one has hit me so far.

Wusses.

Oh, they’ve just confirmed with announcements on the train that, yes indeed, there will be no service tomorrow (and today it will stop early) so I don’t plan to write a post tomorrow.  If you’re looking forward to my bastardized Shakespearean quote for the week, I can only apologize, but I’m not going to go out of my way to do it.  It’s not as thought there would be any point, to it or to anything else that I do.

Every day, more and more, I feel like someone lost in a Lovecraftian landscape full of creatures that make little sense to me, and with whom I cannot effectively communicate or interact.  I know that I make no sense to them, also, or at least very little.  I suppose, in a way, I’m the alien, I’m the mutant, so I have no “right” to expect them to try to understand me.

But surely, to Cthulhu or to Yog-Sothoth or to Shub-niggurath, humans and other mortal creatures must look as horrifying and alien as those creatures do to the hapless humans who encounter them in the stories.  Cthulhu may find the presence of humans to be as repulsive (and even frightening) as humans would find an encounter with cockroaches, ants, and mice or rats in their kitchens, in their food.  If it’s evil for Cthulhu to want to destroy humans, then it’s surely just as evil for humans to want to fumigate their homes when they are infested with “pests”.

I know, I know, Cthulhu isn’t real*, but that doesn’t change the point I’m making.  The monster, the outsider—the stranger—can be just as innocent, just as horrified, just as frightened as any human in any scary story.

Fear is not the mind killer, despite what they say in Dune, but prolonged fear is erosive, corrosive, and a burden that can become too great to bear.  And being a stranger in a strange land may be a low-level kind of fear—often more of a stress and tension, really—but it is real.

And even a monster, a stranger, might hope or dream or wish that somewhere, somehow, someone would rescue it, would reach out and try to help it, so that it doesn’t have to feel so lost and alone and afraid.  But it might recognize that it has no actual right to expect that anyone would ever do such a thing, and—seeing as it is a monster, a stranger—that its nature is to be alone until it finally succumbs to its local increasing entropy.

Anyway, that’s nearly all for today.  I won’t be writing anything tomorrow.  As for Friday, well, whether I write anything then will depend on factors such as whether the trains are running again by then so that I’ll be able to get to the office okay, and of course, whether I’m even alive—but, then, it always depends on that latter variable.

In closing, I’ll refer to a different topic.  Many of you are probably aware of the very large Powerball jackpot that was recently won (or so I understand) by some human somewhere.  If you’re interested in reading a story about someone who wins a similarly large jackpot and tries to do good with it, leading to unexpected and earthshaking consequences, you could read my short story, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” which is available as a standalone story through Kindle, and also as part of my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is available on Kindle and in both paperback and hardcover editions.  I think it’s a pretty good story.  If you read it, I hope you enjoy it, and I’d be grateful for any feedback I’m able to receive.

Stay dry and safe, wherever you are.

*As far as we know.

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A personal brush with being nonverbal

It’s Monday morning, the beginning of the first full work week in November.  I had the weekend off, so that’s why there was no post on Saturday.  I wish I could say that I had an enjoyable, restful weekend—I did at least rest some, though I don’t feel rested—but I didn’t do anything of value to me or to anyone else this weekend, except perhaps for my minimal contribution to the economy that entailed buying things to eat and some cleaning supplies.  I certainly did not socialize in any way.

I did not edit that recording of mine on the nature of time, so my apologies to anyone who was looking forward to it*.  I did do another very brief recording to myself last night, but this was mainly a reminder to me to try to write or think about something, and since it did work to remind me, I’ll mention what it was about here, now.

I was watching a video by a young woman who was diagnosed with ASD in adulthood speaking and thinking about “selective mutism”.  The kind she was discussing was that where someone apparently loses the power of speech only in specific circumstances, and for her it seemed related to social anxiety.  There are, however, instances of prolonged apparent mutism, or nonverbal state, among people with autism spectrum disorder.  Thinking about that from time to time had made me recall a rather disturbing event from my own childhood, one that I don’t think anyone else has ever known about.

I was very young when this happened.  Possibly it was shortly before I started kindergarten, but more likely it was in the first year or two of elementary school, but I remember one day I was frustrated about something I had tried to say.  Perhaps someone had laughed about my inability to get something out, perhaps someone had told me to be quiet; I don’t recall what or who the specific trigger was.  In any case, I recall deciding to myself, in an almost spiteful way, that I would just not talk anymore.  So, I made myself be silent, and for the next few hours, I did indeed remain silent, not speaking.

Then, a little later, something rather frightening happened:  I decided that I wanted to say something**, and realized that I could not speak.  There was nothing wrong with my mouth or my vocal cords or my lungs.  I simply felt that the part of my mind that produced the spoken word had been flipped into the “off” position; Broca’s area had been taken offline.  It was a bit like having taken in a post-hypnotic suggestion that one would be unable to speak; I learned years later that I was a pretty good hypnotic subject, and I did daily self-hypnosis for years starting in junior high or so***.

But that was years later.  At this age, all I knew was that, having decided earlier in anger that I was not going to speak anymore, I found that, indeed, I could not seem to speak.  I remember—I think—being in the dining room near the back of the house, where the deck door would eventually be put in, though I’m not sure if it was there yet.  I felt very frightened that I would never be able to speak again.

It occurred to me, or it felt to me—if I remember correctly—that if I let this go on, it would only be harder to break over time, and it might become permanent****.  I don’t recall exactly what I finally was able to force myself to say, after several moments or minutes of trying; I think it was something like “Hello”, or some rhyme or something along those lines, something very easy to remember and automatic.  But it was difficult.  I really had to force myself, as hard as I had told myself not to talk anymore, to do it.  I was finally able to do so.

It’s a very strange event, but I’ve never really forgotten it, thought the details are plainly fuzzy.  But I wonder if the fact that I was so close to being able to shut my speech down is related to my (apparent) ASD—according to the many tests and explorations that I’ve done—or if it’s simply that I am, as I noted, a good hypnotic subject and was able inadvertently to hypnotize myself in a moment of frustration and anger.

Perhaps “hypnotizability” is related to some aspects of autism spectrum disorders, such as the tendency to become obsessed with certain subjects or interests, to “zone out” when focused on things, ignoring the world around, and even to do various fidgety stims (I’ve always tended to fiddle with things in my hands in one way or another, from dice, to coins, to pens or pencils, to my fingers themselves, and so on).

I don’t know, and I don’t know that anyone has done much research on such things.  There seems to be a relative paucity of functional and structural neuroscience research on autism spectrum disorders, at least based on my own searches—though perhaps I’m just not deep enough in it to know where to look.  But it is interesting and somewhat disconcerting.  Still, maybe my flirtation with being nonverbal, albeit only for a few hours, is related to the phenomenon overall.

More likely, it’s just me being exceptionally weird, as usual.  I don’t know that I’ll ever find out.  In any case, no matter what, I’ve always been decent at writing, and me being nonverbal would not have spared any of you the existence of this blog.

*As if there were any such person.

**Again, I cannot recall at all what I wanted to say or why.

***I got a book about it from my father, because I had a second-hand book from the same author as his book.  My father is probably the person I’ve known whose mind was most similar to mine in many ways, so I guess it made sense that he and I had books from the same author about influencing one’s own mind.

****I’m sure there are people out there who wish it could have been so.

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It’s Time for a Title

Okay, well, it’s Friday now, and to those of you who have the weekend off—as I do—I hope you’re looking forward to a good one.

It’s November 4th, 2022, and it would have been my mother’s 81st birthday, were she still alive.  I guess, technically, we can still call it her 81st birthday, since we can certainly celebrate the day of her birth readily enough, even if she can’t appreciate the celebration.  The time since her birth is what it is, no matter what, since no one we know is traveling near the speed of light.  Also, probably more people are happy to celebrate the fact that she was born than celebrated my birthday, which was only a few weeks ago, and I’m still alive…in a manner of speaking, anyway.

I have yet to edit and prepare to upload/share my recording of my thoughts about time, and for that, I apologize to those of you who feel that it’s taking too long.  My head has not been as clear as it might usually be this week.  Sleep has been particularly bad, as I think I’ve mentioned before.

This morning, I woke up waaaay before time to get up, and I’m now waiting for the first train of the day.  I didn’t go through the whole prime number evaluation of the time as I did the other day—see my post here—since I had already sorted that problem, but I did get on Amazon and flip through their Kindle book recommendations to see if anything looked interesting.  I put a few on my “list” but didn’t buy any.

I did get a couple of Kindle Unlimited books yesterday about things like signal processing and circuits and some other areas I wish I had learned more about earlier in life, but it remains to be seen whether I’ll get very far in any of them.  Perhaps I will.

I won’t hold my breath, though.  That would be silly.  If I tried to hold my breath until I had read any given book, I would not get far.  Even if it were possible for me to hold my breath indefinitely, I would be dead long before I got into any book; but of course, it’s simply not possible for a person to hold its breath long enough to kill itself.  The breath is controlled by the brainstem, etc., and it can only be briefly squelched by the conscious mind, not deactivated.  It’s not quite as fully outside conscious control as the heartbeat, or the peristalsis of the GI tract, but it’s not up for veto, either, not without pharmaceutical interventions that would certainly interfere with one’s ability to read…and would kill one.

Heck, even the fact of being awake is not something over which a person has conscious control, believe me on that.  You might say that this goes without saying, since to have conscious control of something, one must be conscious, and to be conscious is to be awake.  But it would be nice to be able simply to choose to go to sleep and to stay asleep until some pre-chosen amount of time had passed.  If it could be done, and I could thereby sleep until well-rested, I would do so.

Alas, most of the things we have to try to make our minds do are not as much in our control as we like to imagine they are.  Even our very thoughts are not really ours to choose, for how could we choose what to think without first thinking about what the thing to think would be, and thinking about thinking about what to think, and so on, ad infinitum?  Our thoughts happen to us.  We can try to encourage certain kinds of thoughts and habits of thoughts, of course, by exposing ourselves to certain ideas, putting ourselves in certain situations, rewarding ourselves in some sense when we think about things we like to think about.  But even that is quite tricky and fiddly.

I like Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the mind as being a person riding an elephant, with the tiny little person being the conscious mind, but all the real workings of the brain—the motive power, the strength, and ultimately, the decision power—being the elephant.  The conscious mind cannot pick up and move the elephant wherever it wants, nor, apparently, can the mind simply climb off the elephant*.  It is the role of the conscious mind to try to train, to steer, to reward the elephant when it does what the rider wants, to try to discourage it from doing what the rider doesn’t want, and to try to keep it from going on rampages that can be harmful to it and its rider.

My elephant has a very hard time staying still for very long, and it’s always getting me up and wandering around (figuratively and sometimes literally) when I’d rather be resting.  It is a powerful elephant; I’ll give it that.  But it’s a very grumpy, gloomy elephant, and it and the rider have frequent trouble sticking to pleasant pathways.  Somehow, we seem to be inclined toward darkness and coldness, with occasional flames and smoke.

Anyway, I’m pushing that metaphor beyond all bounds of tolerability.  My apologies.

I will try to remember to work on that audio file for thoughts about time, and perhaps to post it on YouTube this weekend if I remember to do so.  I got a decent response to my more recent one on the fact that perception is not reality, and I even got a comment on YouTube, which is a pleasant surprise.  The sound quality on this recording should be better than at least the first part of the sound quality on the last one, though I obviously haven’t really listened through it yet.

I hope again that you all have a good weekend, and that things go well for you in every way they can—which they will, since anything that happens is the only thing that could have happened, once it happens.  Even if we had a rewind button, it wouldn’t necessarily let us change anything, since by rewinding, we would make ourselves the same person, in the same state, as we were the first time things happened to us.  Unless what happened was literally random, it seems unlikely that things would be different on a replay without prior knowledge.

Until next time.

time or not cropped png

*In this, I guess, the metaphor makes the mind almost like a centaur with an elephant body instead of a horse.  But it is just a metaphor, it’s not meant to be a literal, precise model of exactly how things work.  And it’s a good metaphor.

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Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun Nor the furious winters’ blogs

Hello and good morning.  You should know that it’s Thursday if I use some variant of that greeting.  I got started in that habit early in the course of writing my (then only Thursdays) blog, and got myself locked into the pattern mentally.  Now it would make me very tense and stressed if I were to write a Thursday blog post without that opening.  Likewise with the title being a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.

I’m writing this on my laptop for the first time this week, because I decided to bring it back from the office yesterday.  It was our first decent business day this week, but I still felt thoroughly rotten, in the sense of being tired and in pain.  I’d been lying awake in “bed” during the night, looking at the clock, deciding when just to give up and get up.  I had seen the time getting to about 3:50 and started thinking about the various three digit numbers coming up.

I knew none of the even numbers were prime, and I knew 351 wasn’t prime, since the sum of its digits is a multiple of three*.  But 353 looked like it might be prime, so I started checking it in my head.  Obviously it wasn’t divisible by any even number, nor by 3, nor by any multiple of 5, so I started trying from 7, then 11, then 13, then 17, then 19, then 23, then 29…by that time I was getting suspicious.  The next prime was 31, and I tried that in my head, but it wasn’t divisible, because after you divide the first two digits by 31, you’re left with 43 remainder, which is clearly not going to be evenly divisible, so I stopped there with that.  And the next prime number was bigger than 35 (it’s 37), which started making it look like 353 might be prime.

I cheated then, turned to my computer and checked with Google if 353 was prime**, and it said it was.  That was good enough for me.  I decided to get up at 3:53, which by that point was about a minute and a half away.

Thus, I got on the first train, and luckily, there were no “trespasser strikes” or any other kind of delays, and my train arrived and left at the scheduled time.  I definitely am not going to kill myself by jumping in front of a commuter train (or probably any other train).  I don’t like hypocrisy, and to be worn out by delays only to cause them oneself would be petty and spiteful in a way that I would prefer not to be in my swansong.  I need to do something less intrusive.

That’s all unless, of course, I give up on trying to be polite and just act on some impulse that comes at the right time in the right place, and fuck all the humans if it causes them problems.

I’m sitting in a different seat on the train than I usually use, because I didn’t feel up to climbing to the top level.  I worry that I’m sitting in someone else’s usual seat, but it’s very non-crowded on the midway level of this train car, so I don’t think I’m causing anyone inconvenience.

It’s probably bothering me more than it would bother anyone else that I’m not in my usual seat, but I just didn’t feel like taking 8 more stairs up.  If it had been a prime number of steps, maybe I would have done it.  Probably not.  I only just now counted the stairs to see, but I hadn’t counted them before deciding I didn’t want to climb them.

It was eighty degrees out and quite muggy when I left the house this morning before five o’clock.  Don’t envy it.  It’s not as though people are going to the beaches or sitting out in the sun and sipping cocktails, or enjoying any other aspects of warm weather.  Everyone is scratching out their livings, going through their daily routines in a grimy, overcrowded urban environment.  One of the only visible effects of the warmth is that you’ll see people wearing things like basketball shorts to work—grownups who are not professional athletes wearing baggy, gaudily colored shorts in places of business.  How is one to take any of them seriously?

At least the people who run the Tri-rail trains all wear uniforms of one kind or another.  They are quite professional and serious—and pleasant and friendly to passengers***—and they do their jobs well and with enthusiasm.  There’s even a conductor who sometimes works in the evening on the train I catch leaving work who, as we approach my station (which is Hollywood) makes the announcement, “Now approaching Hollywood…Hollywood, California, now approaching Hollywood.”

I like this because it’s similar to my own usual thoughts when we approach the station, which is to recite the words of the man on the street in the beginning of the movie Pretty Woman, who calls out to no one in particular, “Welcome to Hollywood!  What’s your dream?” and so on.  That’s a moment or two before we see a young Hank Azaria in a bit part as a detective, investigating the murder of a prostitute, astonished that tourists are taking pictures of the crime scene.  It’s an unusually dark beginning to a classic romantic comedy.

Real romance rarely begins so darkly, though it often ends unpleasantly.  It does always end, eventually, even for those who stay together for the rest of their lives, because life is no more than 120 years (at the extreme maximum) for humans, and usually quite a bit less than that.

Sorry.  That’s dreary, even for me.  I’ll try to turn it around by taking a line from the…I think fifth series of modern Doctor Who, in which the Doctor describes a species of mayfly on some planet I can’t remember, saying that they live only twenty minutes, and they don’t even mate for life!

Time is relative in many senses.  I’ve had more than one day this week that seemed to last far longer than twenty-four hours.  The faster you think, the slower time will seem to pass for you, so it may be worth practicing that, if that appeals to you.  Users of psychedelics sometimes report their trips seeming to last for eons, and meditation and similar states can sometimes produce similar experiences.  We all know that dreams can give that impression.

So, as Tyrell says to Roy, “Revel in your time,” even if all those moments will be eventually be lost like tears in the rain.

TTFN

Hollywood_Amtrak_Tri-Rail smaller

*It’s actually also a multiple of 9, since its digits add to 9, but it’s 9 times 39 (9×40=360, take away a nine and you get 351), and 39 is 3 x 13, so we know that 351 is also 27×13.  The prime factors of 351 are 3x3x3x13.

**I do this sort of thing often enough that when I start typing, by the time I get to “Is 353…”, Google pops up the option (and the answer) for the question “Is 353 a prime number?”

***This is lost on me, I’m afraid, though I admire it.  When the driver waves out of his window toward passengers as he pulls in, I’ve never had the impression that he was waving at me until this morning when, for the first time, I thought it seemed like he might have turned a final wave in my direction after more obvious ones to other regulars—I always stand at the far end of the platform.  I just felt a bit frozen and stressed, like someone who’d been called on in class but hadn’t been paying attention to the lesson.  I tried not to look toward the window, but just kept kind of looking down-ish and toward my entrance to the train, and I felt like a fool.

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If “November” is the 11th month, then is the “second” day number 4?

It’s 4:35 on Wednesday morning, November 2nd, 2022, and it’s already 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) at the Hollywood train station and very muggy.  I’m dripping with sweat just from walking as far as the bench to wait for the earliest morning train*.  It’s ridiculous.  For this reason and others, I wish I had never moved to Florida.  In my opinion, it’s overall a “nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there”.  Or as many locals say: “Come on vacation, leave on probation”.  It really is a shame, because there is a tremendous amount of natural beauty here, but much of even that has been ruined by invasive species, the main one being Homo sapiens.

It’s on hot and muggy early November mornings such as this that I truly miss being in Michigan, where I grew up.  Say what you will about the Detroit area, at least there are fewer humans there now than there were in the past.  It can be somewhat depressing to see that, but boy, in Autumn all the trees along the side streets in my hometown looked spectacular, and you could walk from your door to the street without sweating.

If the Detroit area is too sad for you‒or too flat‒then you could go to upstate New York, where I went to university.  That was amazing in the Fall.  Walking back to the dorm down Libe Slope after class at this time of year was like seeing a fifty mile wide fireworks display happening in slow motion, spread out over many weeks.  Of course Winter was quite cold, bitter, and snowy there, but if you were adventurous, you could take a tray from the dining hall and “tray” down Libe Slope.  I never did that, myself; there was a road right at the bottom of the hill, and though it was not busy, it was hard not to think about careening uncontrollably into some passing salt truck.

Actually, they really did an amazing job keeping the roads clear in Ithaca in the winter.  They had to keep them clear.  There were many slopes in town that could have served as ski jumps if you’d put an upcurve at the bottom, so these had to be cleared pretty much as fast as the snow could fall.

Of course, while I have my complaints about Florida, I did come here of my own free will**, and have had many good times and good life events here, the most outstanding of which was the birth of my daughter.  I can’t ever complain about that.

My son was born in New York (not Ithaca) but we left before he was old enough really to remember it.  Both of my children are Florida kids, effectively.  I wonder how they would feel if someday they moved up North and experienced Autumn there for the first time, beginning to end.  Would they be as wowed by its beauty as I always have been, or would they feel a homesickness for the heat of the Sunshine State as the weather cooled and the days shortened?

Of course, the days don’t literally shorten, just daylight hours.  There are subtle variations and even occasional tiny diminutions of the day, as happened recently, but overall, the rotation rate of the Earth is going very steadily and gradually to slow, barring other inputs, so days will become longer.  If nothing else, since the planet’s mass is not perfectly symmetrical, as it turns it must radiate some miniscule amount of energy away in the form of gravitational waves, and the Moon/Earth orbital pairing will radiate some, too.

When I say “miniscule”, I’m guilty of severe (and ironic) understatement.  The sun will surely long since have gone through red giant and on to white dwarf status before there would be any appreciable loss of rotational energy from gravitational waves alone.  I can’t give you the numbers‒if anyone out there can, please share‒but it’s tiny, it’s wee, it’s verging on infinitesimal.

Speaking of small things and their opposites, yesterday’s post ended up being unusually long and exceptionally dreary***, so I’ll bring this one to a close now.  Thank you for your patience, thank you for reading, and if you have any comments about reactions to autumn, or to major changes of local climate due to moves throughout life, I would be interested to know about them.  No pressure.

*Yes, I came for the 4:45 am train, but only because there wasn’t an earlier one.  I couldn’t sleep.

**So to speak.  I’m provisionally convinced that there is no such thing as free will.  I could be wrong, of course, but it doesn’t really matter all that much.  As I like to say, I either have free will or I don’t, but it’s not like I have any choice in the matter.

***But nonetheless true.  I can’t pretend that it was an exaggeration nor that really, my mental health is just fine.  It is not.  It’s horrible.

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Just say “No” to vember

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and against all my considered advice, a new month has started. That month is November, in case either you’re reading this at some later date or you’re really not paying attention. It’s the year 2022. That’s AD or CE depending on your preferred terminology, though those things, like the number of the year or the month or the day are all arbitrary. For all I know, by the time you’re reading this, you may be using something like stardates from Star Trek or summat.

I’m writing this on my phone again, because I didn’t feel like bothering to bring my laptop home. Yesterday was just about the least enjoyable Halloween I’ve had since I got back from being “up the road”. It was a disappointing October in general. I had an almost unnoticeable birthday, then a pathetic Halloween, which was a particularly rotten day for business, also. I put together a pretty cool costume, in case we did something at the office as usual, but we didn’t. I wish I had that money and effort back.

It’s not a big tragedy to have a disappointing Halloween, obviously, but it is one of the only things to which I look forward, so it hits harder on top of my general deterioration than it might for other people. I also had more trouble with the WIFI last night, and my rest was worse than usual even for me. I didn’t get a single hour of uninterrupted sleep. My back/hips/leg/ankle are really bothering me this morning, but that’s partly from worse-than-usual sleep and probably partly from wearing boots to go with my stupid costume yesterday. That was an ill-considered idea in retrospect, but it’s no one’s fault but my own. I always make a mistake when I approach something optimistically.

I did upload that video about perception not being reality yesterday. The content is literally the same as the audio I posted with my blog yesterday, other than the screen picture, but here’s that video, anyway.

You are certainly encouraged to “give a thumbs up, subscribe, hit the bell, comment, and share” if you are so inclined. It doesn’t really matter, of course. I’m sure my YouTube channel has no future of any note.

Speaking of the future, and also about the past, I didn’t even begin to edit the audio that I recorded with my nocturnal thoughts about time from Sunday night/Monday morning. I anticipated there being…I don’t know, something happening at the office. There was nothing. But I still didn’t get any editing or anything else useful done there. I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever done anything useful. I guess it would depend on one’s definitions of usefulness.

I’ve been trying to find books that are intriguing to me, but no fiction or even non-fiction seems interesting. My favorite blog (or should I say “website”) that I follow is on a near-hiatus, with only minimal posting for the moment. That site is the closest thing I come to socializing, so I’m disappointed. Anyway, I’ve curtailed my commenting on it of late, because most comments I make end up coming across as weird or stupid or irritating to me or to other readers or to the writer of the site, and I don’t want to bother people who are some of the only people, and some of the most rational people, with whom I interact in any way. That would really be mortifying*.

***

We’re currently stopped in the train at the station two up from mine, apparently waiting for clearance from the dispatcher. I have no idea why. They haven’t mentioned anything about any accidents or whatnot. It’s a bit frustrating, because I seriously considered not going in to the office today, since I had such a rotten night’s sleep, and I feel so utterly depressed, and in more pain than usual. But I said to myself that since I wasn’t literally sick**, and especially since it’s the first of the month, when rent is due and all that, it feels irresponsible not to go in. Considering yesterday was such a lame day for business, it seems only right to do my part to be “all hands on deck” today.

I’m so tired of always feeling responsible, though, of always feeling like I have to try, to do my best, to do my part (or more), to try to act cheerful and to be a person who can help other people when they come to him for help, as they always do. Honestly, the times I’ve been in the hospital for surgery or relatively severe illness were such a relief in a weird way. Everything was out of my hands, and I could rest.

***

They just announced that there has apparently been a “trespasser strike” north of Fort Lauderdale station; that’s the cause of our delay. I believe this is a euphemism. A trespasser is someone who wanders into the vicinity of the railroad tracks, which is technically the property of the state of whoever runs the railroad system, and by “strike” I don’t think they mean someone is marching on a picket line holding a sign.

This is why I said it would be rude if I were to throw myself in front of the train or in between cars of a freight train. It leaves everyone on the trains delayed and inconvenienced. Of course, it’s very sad that someone was apparently hurt or possibly killed, but little stressors and inefficiencies and backups accumulate in any society, costing money, time, energy, stress…and these effects do wreak costs upon the health and the lives of numerous people, with consequences that are real and tragic, but are not seen so clearly because they happen via the accumulation of disparate forces and events. What looks like a traffic accident due to driver error is really an externality produced by the increased stressors that accumulated to wear that driver down, until the wrong thing happened at a bad time, with tragic outcomes. It’s happening all the time, it’s as real as the cumulative effects of sun exposure that lead to skin cancer over time, or accumulating atherosclerosis leading to heart attacks and strokes when the system finally fails at some weak point, and it’s even harder to pin down. It’s probably utterly hopeless and pointless for me to even try to do my part not to make things worse by not destroying myself in a disruptive way, but I don’t want to make things worse if I can help it. I probably can’t help it, given my nature.

Oh, well. My foundations and load-bearing walls are creaking and cracking and crumbling day by day, and they will eventually give out somewhere, and the whole edifice will collapse. I can hear the creaking; it’s getting louder and louder, growing slowly but with an exponential trend as time goes on. I don’t know what to do about it. I have no personal resources to apply to it, and I have no right to ask anyone else for help.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that. I’m sure you all wish I would finish off sooner rather than later, and just get it over with. Probably a good idea.

In the meantime, I hope you have a good day and a good month, and a good remainder of the year, and a good next year after that. If you’re patient enough to have read this far, then I’m sure you deserve the best.

***

P.S. We had started to go forward, but halfway between one stop and the next we approached what must have been the scene of the “strike” and now they say we’re going back to the previous station, though currently we’re sitting still. I don’t know what they’re going to do from there. Sometimes they arrange bus services or whatnot, to go around the spot. I don’t know if I can handle that. I may just walk to the nearest regular bus.

P.P.S.  I have gone back to the house.  I cannot wait for the shuttle because it’s not there and I’m in increasing pain and stress and am so very tired.  I went back to the station and back to the house.  I have no reliable means to drive to work and back, and I do not have the wit or will to deal with taking the bus.  I just want to go to sleep and stay asleep.  That would be so nice.

*Unfortunately, not literally so.

**In any infectious, contagious sense, anyway. I am sick in the head, and I’m not being facetious about that. I am very, very ill right now, and I don’t have any good idea what to do about it. I think it’s going to kill me.

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Happy, happy Halloween (Silver Shamrock)!

It’s Monday morning, and I’m writing this on my phone rather than on my laptop, because I didn’t feel like bringing my laptop back to the house from work on Saturday.  Those of you who have read my very long post from Saturday will probably be happy that I’m using my phone, since my writing tends to be much slower (and therefore shorter) when I use it, rather than my laptop keyboard.  Though I’ve never formally taken any typing courses, and I don’t know what my actual typing speed is, I have been typing since I was quite young (I think I was 11), since my maternal grandmother gave me her electric typewriter and I started writing the first of many fantasy novels, so basically, I can type pretty darn fast.

Of course, today is the 31st of October, and that means it is Halloween, my favorite holiday.  I personally think this should be a “bank holiday” as they say in the UK: a day most people take off work.  But I guess most other people don’t think so.

I’m afraid I haven’t posted the video that I mentioned on Friday and Saturday.  I left it at the office, so to speak.  I also didn’t record myself performing The Haunted Palace yet, but that was just due to a lack of motivation.  I’ll probably do it soon, if I do it at all.  I will attach the audio for my “video” from last week into the bottom of this post, so those who are interested in listening among my readers will get earliest access to it.  I’ll try to remember to post the video on YouTube later today.

I did another impromptu audio recording last night, as some thoughts occurred to me while I was watching a lecture on the nature of time by Sean Carroll, one of my favorite teachers of physics.  They weren’t brand new thoughts; I might even have written something along their lines once before in my other blog, Iterations of Zero.  I haven’t done anything on that blog in quite a while now, since I stopped sequestering my darker brain drippings from this one.  Maybe I should turn that into the place I share my audio stuff before turning it into a video or anything else.  I’m not sure.  It seems a shame to leave it fallow, but most things in life come to naught, anyway, and if it’s appropriate for any blog, then that might well be the one for which it’s most appropriate, given its name.

If anyone out there reads both blogs and has any thoughts about that one, please let me know.

As like as not I’ll never do anything with it, one way or another.  As like as not, even this one will peter out or abruptly terminate sometime soon.  Of course, depending on your time scale, any time could be soon.  And on the Planck time scale, it’s been a nearly immeasurable eternity just since I started writing this post.

There, those are some thoughts about time that didn’t make it into my recording from last night.

Regarding the earlier nocturnal recording, which I’m posting here, today, I need to warn you that the first portion has less than ideal quality, though that might not be obvious until you reach the second portion and compare.  You see, I did the first portion in the middle of the night, as I think I’ve told you before, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to where I was or what was around me.  It was dark, for one thing.  Also, I was sitting up on the floor* very close to the air conditioner, which was active at the time.  I’ve done my best to remove all that racket, and largely succeeded, but the noise reduction does affect the reproduction of my voice.

So, I’ll be editing the vocal thoughts I had last night/this morning, soon, and I’ll post the “video” of my previous thoughts on YouTube soon.  I guess I’ll probably post the audio of last night’s musings here before I turn them into a video and share them on YouTube.  And who knows, maybe I’ll recite The Haunted Palace soon and share a video about that.

If I’m lucky, though, maybe I’ll get hit by lightning, or a truck, or a meteorite, or a V-fib arrest, and that’ll be that.  I’d say that I look forward to oblivion, but of course, that doesn’t quite make sense, since one can’t really imagine oblivion‒if one is doing any imagining, then one is not simulating a state of oblivion.

Still, oblivion has much to recommend it.  There’s no pain, no sorrow, no fear, no regret.  Of course, there are no positive experiences, either, but if the curve of one’s life enjoyment is consistently below the x-axis, then a reversion to zero is a net gain**.  It’s where we’re all headed eventually, anyway.  And Halloween wouldn’t be such a bad day to die, would it?

Knowing my luck, that’s probably not going to happen.

To finish, here’s the audio of my thoughts on the fact that perception is not reality, followed by a few Halloween-appropriate pictures of mine.

Happy Halloween.

Welcome Home Medium in prog (2)

headless horseman croppedpumpkin demon cropped

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Mark Red

Vagabond pose pic on highway 3 posterized

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full-12 (1)

skull drawing

*I sleep on the floor.  Beds take up too much space, and they tend to make my back pain worse.

**This is related to the fact that the lesser of two evils is, by simple mathematical logic, the greater of two goods.

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I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rolling ’round the bend

It’s Saturday again, and I’m going to work today, so I’m writing a blog post.  Any of you who follow me on the weekend may be glad (or not) that this is the case.

I’m waiting at the train station for the first Saturday train, and they just announced that the northbound train, the one I take, is delayed “15…20 minutes due to a mechanical failure”, so I’m going to be sitting here longer than I thought I would be.  I wish I had a reliable alternative means to get to the office, but the buses are also slower on Saturdays, and the trip always takes longer via bus, since the train doesn’t have to stop for traffic lights, and has fewer stops to pick up passengers.

It’s curious that the announcements for delays say, for instance, “15…20 minutes” rather than “15 to 20 minutes” which seems to me to be the more normal way to express such a range.  If one took it as giving an estimate in the way people often read off strings of numbers, one might infer that they were saying the train would be delayed by 1,520 minutes, but that’s 25 hours and 20 minutes.  Surely anyone waiting would just take the next train, in an hour, rather than wait until tomorrow morning at 6:09 am.

Of course, based on past experience, the train may end up being cancelled and I’ll be taking the next train anyway.  It’s not an auspicious start for a Saturday, but one doesn’t do what one does because it’s convenient (necessarily).  A lion on the savannah that gives up hunting because the prey seems too difficult to get and it’s an unpleasant day will have a much lower chance of surviving to reproduce than one that just buckles down and keeps trying.

Lions are idiots.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Of course, lions aren’t that bright relative to the average human, but they’re pretty bright as far as the overall animal kingdom goes.  So are their competitors.  Their prey is not necessarily as bright as they are, but they don’t have to be.  It doesn’t take much brainpower to sneak up a blade of grass, but herbivores still need to be smart enough to avoid carnivores as often as feasible.

I’m a tiny bit nervous about today—about how I’ll be, that is—because I have not taken my antidepressant.  I haven’t mention it, but I’ve been back on them for some weeks now (I don’t recall exactly how long) as an attempt to see if they can help me with my worsening depression.

That hasn’t happened, as I’m sure you can tell if you’ve been reading my posts.  My depression has, if anything, worsened, though that may just be a natural progression that has nothing to do with medication.  Also, I cannot know how I would be if I had not taken them, though perhaps, if the many-worlds description of quantum mechanics is correct, somewhere out there in the omniverse are versions of me that have acted as the experimental control to my attempt.

Hey, they just said the train will be boarding in 10 minutes!  That will, honestly, make it only 15 minutes late, not 1,520 minutes, which is quite preferable.  See, sometimes things go better than expected, even for pessimists.

Anyway, the reason I’m stopping my antidepressants, at least for now is that—in addition to seeming to fail to improve my psychological state—they are giving me side effects that give me even more difficulty interacting with people around me, and leave me feeling more tense, more irritable, and also more dry-mouthed.  That latter bit isn’t such a big deal, but the others are a problem when, possibly because of my supposed ASD, I already have trouble interacting and connecting with people.  And that only makes me feel worse about myself.  I don’t feel worse about the other people; it’s not their job to connect with or look out for me, after all.

Oh!  I got at least some of the editing done on those sound recordings from yesterday.  The one from the middle of the night was really full of background noise, and also, apparently, the microphone on the phone is especially susceptible to breath and movement noise, so that’s required a lot of fine-toothed editing.

The phone app records in stereo, which is interesting.  I’m assuming that means there are at least 2 microphone inputs on the phone, though they can’t be very far apart.  Anyway, I also recorded a brief addendum, which I’m just going to tack onto the end of the first and turn into a “video” which I’ll front with a picture that I’ve manipulated and altered and made, I think, pretty cool.

I hope that having stopped my antidepressants doesn’t lead me to crash and burn today, but I’ve been losing altitude steadily anyway, and sooner or later there’s going to be a hill or a building that I can’t clear, and that’ll be it.  There are rarely survivors of airplane crashes—though I’m not sure what the statistics are for metaphorical airplane crashes.

I think the reason medicines have sometimes worked for me in the past was because I was also getting therapy, and for someone like me, who has trouble connecting, but who can talk about what interests me once I get started, it was very useful to have someone whose job includes listening.  I tried the Better Help website to do therapy late last year, but I think I’ve mentioned that that fell apart because my therapist had to go on maternity leave within a month or so of my beginning, and the online therapy wasn’t a great fit.  I also just didn’t have the strength to start again with a new therapist so soon.

I had to do text-based therapy, since I didn’t feel up to Skype-style talking over the computer, and I didn’t want to talk out loud about my issues in the house where I live, anyway.  Unfortunately, in-person therapy is expensive, and I have no insurance, nor good transportation or spare time.

A lot of why therapy has helped in the past was, I think, because I was just in a better situation then, overall.  I was depressed, as well as being apparently “neurodivergent” without my knowledge, but I was—the first time—happily married, finishing med school and then doing residency.  After that, unfortunately, my back injury and chronic pain and then failed back surgery syndrome and all that jazz made it less effective, as did the failure of my marriage and, later, my professional catastrophic failure.

Prison wasn’t much help, either.  Not because it was bullshit* that I was sent there—I’ve never expected anything but injustice from the world in general, and by that time, with chronic pain and my marriage having failed I didn’t see it as being much worse than where I already was—but because it separated me from my children, whom I haven’t seen in person in over ten years now.  It also made it very hard for me to return to my previous profession.

Anyway, if I get “worse” from stopping antidepressant treatment, well that’s just too bad.  Hell, I may just steer myself toward a hill or mountain if I can see one.  I’ll avoid buildings, because it wouldn’t be nice to injure other, innocent people, just because I hate the world and my life and myself.  That would be petty and pathetic, and I have no patience for people who do such things.

Well, that’s enough for today.  Be on the lookout for my “video” this weekend.  I may do a reading of Poe’s The Haunted Palace for Halloween and put that on YouTube, so be on the lookout for that, too.

Thanks for reading, today and otherwise.  Until we “meet” again (if we do, which is far from certain) I wish you the best.

*Yes, I know, surely everyone who is arrested and then takes a plea bargain because the state has threatened to try to put them away for a minimum of 15 years (and as much as a few hundred) for (naively and foolishly) trying to help others who have chronic pain, but not grasping the societal dynamics of the situation fully (probably at least partly because of ASD) would say that their situation was bullshit.  But I honestly think I’m being objective about this.  It was a politically motivated process, in which I was something analogous to a dolphin caught in a tuna net, but there was no incentive for them to throw me back.  My uncle, who was a criminal attorney for many years, had even said that it was obvious that they knew I wasn’t a bad guy—they barely paid any attention to my case other than to finally offer the plea deal to avoid having to prove anything, knowing that someone who doesn’t have millions of dollars at the ready and so cannot easily defend against a state machine that does, and the risk of getting a possibly very long sentence if found guilty (jurors are unsympathetic toward doctors, apparently, and I was judged not to be a likeable person to put on the witness stand) is going to take it and save the state the trouble of actually trying to prove any crime.  Of course, I figured, three years is better than the risk of fifteen or more, and I’d be able to see my kids again after that at least before they were all grown up**.  But the state wasn’t about simply to drop the case; that would have looked bad and been politically inexpedient.  What wonderful reasons they have for ruining so many people’s lives.

**Insert gales of sardonic, scornful laughter at my own repeated naiveté.  I am so foolish when I’m optimistic.

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“A weary pilgrim on the road”

It’s Friday morning, and I’m once again on the earliest train heading toward the office, because I woke up way too early and wasn’t able to get back to sleep.

While watching a video to pass some dead, middle-of-the-night time, I heard a casual statement that poked one of my pet peeves, so I made a quick, five minute, audio essay on my voice recorder* responding to this idiotic verbal excretion.  I’m going to edit that a bit and then post the audio here, and also probably turn it into a “video” on YouTube, though there is no actual video involved.  I’ll probably just put up some picture, hopefully of something relatively pertinent, as the video portion.

An “interesting” thing happened in the office yesterday.  Where I work, they play loud background music all throughout the day** because people are on the phones talking to customers and don’t want to be distracted by other people on their phones.  The music is literally just noise to break up any coherent verbal background.  I’ve never worked anywhere else where people felt the need for such things, but apparently this is typical in these settings.  I’m often tempted to play construction noises, or factory floor noises in the background, since—supposedly—this would serve the same purpose.

That’s more or less what the effect of the constant noise is to me.  It’s like jackhammers and drills and traffic and chaos always going on in the background, and it’s overwhelming.  I need to stay relatively aware of things, because my own job requires responding to things happening in the room, recording and processing and checking various things as they happen.  But I do have a pair of good earmuffs or whatever you call them that I put on occasionally.

At other times, when things are a little slower and I can afford minor distractions, I will put in earbuds and watch a video or podcasts or something either on the computer or my tablet or phone during the downtime.

Well, it’s a been a strange and slow week, with very diminished business compared to last week, but with erratic spurts of good activity, and yesterday afternoon, after doing some decent business during the middle of the day, things were slowing, and I put in my earphone*** and was watching some videos.  Then, at some point, I looked up from one of the videos and realized that everyone else was gone.  They had all left early, since things were so slow, but nobody had made sure that I knew.

For a moment, I wondered if everyone had simply stepped outside for a moment for various reasons, and it had just coincidentally all occurred at once.  Such things are possible.  But I doubted it.

I texted my coworker who is closest to me in the office and asked him if everyone had just up and gone.  He texted me back that yes, they had, since all but one person was off the phone already, and there seemed little point in pushing through for the last forty minutes, with no prospects in sight.  I texted that it would have been nice for someone to tell me, and he duly apologized and said that he’d forgotten I had my headphones on.  I did only have the one, but the other ear is obviously even less useful than I thought.  Also, I guess, when I’m focused on something I can become difficult to distract.

I’m already having worse trouble than usual lately with my dysthymia/depression, and my (apparent) ASD, and just generally a non-existent social life, since all the people I’ve ever loved don’t seem to want to be around me.  But this new occurrence certainly didn’t help my mood even as I made sure the coffee was off and shut off the rear and front lights, set the alarm, and left to office to go to the train station.

I know that my problems in general are my “fault”, in the sense that they arise from my less-than-ideal machinery and programming, so to speak, and I don’t think anyone is out to get me or particularly trying to hurt me or anything of that sort.  But it still does hurt to have that glaring reminder of how different and separate I am, even where I work, before leaving to go back to the house in which I live, in a room by myself, where I don’t talk to or interact with anyone but the stray cat in the back who seems to like me.

I’m allergic, unfortunately, so I can’t take him in, but he’s a pleasant cat, and I do give him food.  I know cats can take care of themselves, but he’s a somewhat older male, and there are a lot of stray cats in south Florida, and raccoons and other creatures as well, so it’s nice to make him as stable as he can be, as well as another cat, a female, who is extremely skittish and timid.

Anyway, it further cements my provisional conclusions that I am not really a beneficial organism to the creatures around me—except a few stray cats—and that I have no connection of any depth with other beings.  I feel utterly adrift and alone, like I’m on a raft in a limitless ocean.  It’s a big raft, and there’s enough food and fresh water for an indefinite time, but there’s nothing else about, and no land in sight.  There may be no land anywhere.  I want just to dive into the water and sink, but the delusion that someday I might see land of some kind makes me keep putting it off, despite the fact that the journey is so dreary and pointless.

That’s a pretty ham-handed metaphor, and it’s not very good.  Sorry, I’m sure this is getting tiresome.  I know it’s tiresome for me, like everything else, so I’ll leave it at this for now.  I’m working tomorrow, so I’m sure I’ll write and post something then.  Have a good day, please, if you can.

*Yes, I figured out how to set it up and use it, which was not hard.  What confused me was the fact that it asked permission to be able to save the recordings on my phone’s memory, and even to use the microphone and speakers.  I don’t recall other such apps needing to ask for permissions.  Why would I record something and then save the recording if I didn’t want it saved on my phone?  It still makes me nervous, just ever so slightly.

**I say “music”, but it’s pretty crappy.

***I mainly put only the left earbud in, because my right ear has badly reduced hearing, and constant tinnitus, and it’s also good to keep at least that, rather muffled and hampered, source of sound input active, so I don’t miss too much.