Psychology

by

Work, pain, fear, compassion…let’s call the whole week off

Well, it’s Friday, and this will be the last blog post of this week, exclusis improvisis.  By which I mean, I am not scheduled to work tomorrow, and I will not work tomorrow.  I suspect even if I were threatened with rather severe consequences‒which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen‒I would not work.

After all, I have lost most of what mattered to me already, and though some things (people), important things, have indeed come back, and are cherished, I know that I can either survive whatever might be used to threaten me, or that I am not too frightened of death in such circumstances.

As the line from the famous movie (and book) Damage goes, “Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.”

Of course, that does depend on the type of damage and the nature of the person in question, but still, it is a valid point.  Indeed, as all of you who read this regularly may know, my biggest question is not “How can I survive?” or “Can I survive?” but rather, “Should I survive, and why?”  I’ll avoid getting into the whole Myth of Sisyphus discussion, since I think I’ve done it nearly to death, but I suspect you get the point.

I don’t mean to imply by the above that I think I am immune to threat and pain and torture and so on.  That would be quite unrealistic.  If nothing else, my experience with a kidney stone made clear the fact that, despite chronic pain for roughly a quarter of a century, it is entirely possible to visit upon me further pain so severe that I literally can think of nothing else but trying to get help and to stop it.

Actually, despite those 25ish years, it’s not as though my chronic pain isn’t gripping and debilitating in and of itself.  There are many days in which a lot of my time in the office is spent trying to do my work while writhing and contorting, trying to stretch, banging on my thighs with my fists to try to loosen their tension, sometimes even deliberately hurting myself (sometimes in ways that would frighten other people, I suspect, and that can involve very sharp things and/or very hot things) to distract from the other pain.

I’ve said it before, and I’ve encountered no convincing counterargument so far, but pain is not evolved for one to be able simply to ignore it.  And while I am admittedly rather weird and atypical, and often have felt that I was not the same species as the people around me, I am by no means a different enough organism not to share such a fundamental characteristic.  Pain‒at least, the capacity for it‒is a necessity for long-term survival.  And fear, as the 12th Doctor pointed out, is a superpower.

Of course, we must be careful to distinguish true and useful fear from pathological fear states.  As Gavin deBecker points out in The Gift of Fear, if your fear is of something real, you will be able to discern its cause eventually, and it will be fairly focused and reasonably specific:  a particular person makes you feel uncomfortable, something about a particular car or driver seems erratic or reckless, that sort of thing.  Whereas just general anxiety is often vague and nonspecific.

I know of people who felt afraid to take a bath after they saw Jaws!  Now that doesn’t make much sense.  If your bathtub is big enough and deep enough to have a great white shark in it, then you’re probably ultra-wealthy and the shark is your pet.  Probably you keep it well-fed on captured British Secret Service agents, so it is unlikely to bother you.

Anyway, what was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, not working and being unsusceptible to most ordinary threats.

Certainly, it would be rather ridiculous for someone to say they would ruin my future prospects, that they would put a black mark on my resume or some such.  How hilarious.  A major point on my current CV would be “Three years, Florida State Prison, West Unit, working as an inmate in the Education Department”.  I’m already not competitive for many positions I would have the skill to fill, just as I would no longer be allowed into many nations I would like to visit.

I am, actually, far more susceptible to cajolery and appeals to kindness, or rather “niceness”, than to threats.  I guess it’s because I want to try to be a good person, a kind person, a compassionate person*, despite my tendency toward darkness of various kinds.

It’s an area of insecurity and conflict on my part, because there’s always part of me saying, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.”  And I am not always sure, especially when my pain and my depression and my sense of otherness are at their peaks, that it would not be preferable.

But when I am clearest and calmest, I recognize that compassion and at least attempted kindness are better.  They not only may help other people, but they tend to be better for one’s own sense of well-being.  It’s an almost archetypal win-win scenario.

I guess that’s probably a good and somewhat positive place to end this post and this blog week.  I hope you all have a nice day and a good weekend and a good beginning of next week.  I will probably be back on Monday‒again, exclusis improvisis**.

*These are not three different people.  I’m not trying to be like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor.

**Yes, I am trying to apply that expression frequently to see if I can get it into (relatively) common use.  So, please, do feel free to use it when it’s appropriate, and tell people what it means.  And, what they heck, tell ‘em where you first encountered it.

by

Is this blog good for MY mental health?

For the first time in quite a while, I’m using my mini lapcom to write this blog post.  The main reason for doing this is that my thumbs have really been bugging me lately.  Also, as I’ve often said, it feels more natural to type on the lapcom than on the smartphone, at least so far.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since I have been typing far longer than I’ve been using a smartphone; indeed, I’ve been typing far, far longer than smartphones have existed.

How do you like them, Apple™?

Who knows, maybe someday I might get to the point where typing on the phone is at least as natural as on the lapcom.  I suppose if I wrote an entire book on one, that probably would make quite a bit of progress toward making it feel more natural.  But it isn’t as natural, and I don’t think it’s likely ever to be, at least for something like typing, because the scale is wrong; it’s too small*.  And of necessity, it either doesn’t have as many available functions as the desktop programs, or they are more difficult to access with any decent speed.

Okay, enough of that topic and/or subject.

I have, as you may know, been having somewhat worse than usual trouble lately with my chronic mood disorder(s).  I’ve been trying various personal interventions (nothing pharmacological at the moment), because it’s getting fairly bad and potentially very dangerous (to me).  Regarding those personal attempts, though, one thing I’ve noticed over time is a kind of internal barrier to certain specific interventions, and it’s kind of puzzling and a bit disturbing.

A long time ago—when our own galaxy was far, far away from where it is now**—I read a lot of various kinds of self-help and psychology books, trying to figure out, among other things, why I was so weird and how to get along despite that fact and such like.  In them, I learned about autosuggestion.  I also learned about a famous case of a proponent thereof who was ridiculed for encouraging people to try repeating to themselves on a few occasions throughout the day:  “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Now, I’ve always thought that sounded quite interesting and potentially beneficial, especially since I tend to ruminate on and repeat things in my head anyway, and if I could make it something useful, then I might as well do so.  So, I applied it.

I never applied it in its original form, though.  I used to give myself messages about my mind getting stronger every day, or my will getting stronger, or my power (whatever that meant) growing, or me getting smarter, or me getting stronger in all senses of that word, those sorts of things.  But somehow, I always balked at telling myself that I was getting “better”.

I have tried doing the auto-suggestion thing again lately in various forms.  I think it at least gives me some mental focus, and at times at least makes me feel that maybe I’m getting stronger, or my will is improving, or whatever.  It’s a little silly but not without merit.  However, when I try to do the “better and better” version, it’s as if someone had cast one of those “langlock” jinxes on my mental tongue, and the phrase doesn’t want to come out.

It’s similar to the resistance I have to telling myself that “I love my life and I love myself”.

Interestingly, I was able to do that one while in prison, which feels sort of ironic, since I wasn’t loving life then.  But I knew that my situation was temporary—more so than life itself is, even—and I was able to keep looking forward to getting out and being part of my children’s lives again***.  Having something in the future toward which to look really helps keep your spirits up, or at least your fortitude.

I sometimes wonder if I fear getting better—not morally, I don’t think I have any issue with that.  But I do worry that some aspects of my personality could be quite harmful if I were to think too highly of myself.  I also have real internal revulsion (bordering on literal nausea) toward the idea of being delusional, especially about my own abilities and nature.

I guess it wouldn’t be too big a stretch to say that I fear it.  So many of the ills that I see in the world—current, past, and potentially in the future—are born of people who are too sure of themselves, too convinced they are right, too sure that they are exceptional, too convinced they know “better”.  I would hate to fall into such a banal and pathetic personality trap.  It’s all very silly, probably.  It might even make some of you laugh, or roll your eyes, or throw your hands up at my melodrama.

I suppose if I had anyone around with whom I could just talk about these things, I wouldn’t bother sharing them here on my blog.  They are, after all, quite personal.  But if I don’t share any of the thoughts I have, they are merely evanescent fluff inside my head that will never have any contact with other, external ideas, but merely have autologous impacts.  Of course, everything is like that (as far as we can tell), but I’d like to have some beneficial local impact on myself, at least.

And who knows, it may be possible, in the fullness of time, for the descendants of humanity, or similar beings, to break free of the nature of the transient and vanishing, and become, like the virtual particles near the event horizon of a black hole, real particles, things that endure indefinitely, and actually gain some degree of control over not only their own future but that of the universe itself.

When I’m being somewhat fanciful, I imagine myself contributing to such progress, and even being able to see it to its fruition.

See what I mean by getting egotistical?  I fear that tendency toward grandiosity, because it can be toxic all by itself, and because it is a frequent hallmark of more serious mental illness.  I’m more than a little afraid of that, because I often feel that manic magma of grandiosity rising up inside my mind.  I think it would be all too easy for me to lose my grip on myself entirely.  My mind, such as it is, is pretty much all that I have going for me; I’d rather not lose it if I can help it.

But the more time I spend on my own, the more likely it feels that it’s going to happen.  And I am not enthusiastic about it.

*That’s what she said.  Ha.  Ha.

**On a cosmic scale that doesn’t really mean anything, but time has passed, and the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, the local group, and so on are all moving.  From a cosmic scale they don’t seem to change much, but if you zoom in, even the surface of the Earth moves at nearly a thousand miles per hour (depending on your latitude) in its daily rotation alone.  Here’s The Galaxy Song to put it into context.

***It turns out that was overly optimistic and did not come to pass, but there was no good way for me to know this at the time.

by

Warning: Reading this blog may be hazardous to your mental health

Well, it’s Monday yet again, though I don’t know why it bothers, and it’s the beginning of yet another thoroughly pointless work week.

Okay, I suppose one can honestly say that it’s not pointless at the local level; people need to work to be able to pay rent, buy food, get medicine as needed and so on so they can survive.  But that, of course, just kicks the can of meaning farther down the empty dirt road of reality, since why they should survive‒why they should want to survive‒is a debatable question.

There are empirical answers to that question, of course, but ultimately, it probably gets down to the brute fact that this shit just is.  There’s no sign of any kind of meaning beyond what people invent for themselves in their own (individual and/or collective) heads.

And that would be just fine, too, as far as meaning goes, if people could just own the fact that it is all artificial, it is invented‒any (and all) of our senses of meaning and purpose, any of the stories we tell ourselves and each other about the telos of reality.  But people have this irritating tendency to start to believe their just-so stories, no matter how absurd, because they would rather delude themselves than face the possibility that everything is‒on the deepest and largest scales‒meaningless.

I suppose it’s related to the recognized fact that the best way to convince someone that you’re telling the truth about something is actually to believe that you are telling the truth, even if you are not.  If you believe something, no matter how absurd, you are likely to convince others that you believe, and that might make it more likely that they believe you.  Of such bootstrapped fictions are cultures and civilizations made, at least initially.

By the way, my plans for meeting up with my youngest this weekend fell through at the last minute, so to speak, thanks to a prior engagement with a friend (theirs, not mine) who came in from out of town, and about which meetup they had forgotten.  These things do happen, of course.  I could hardly blame anyone for preferring to spend time with someone else rather than with me.  Not that I think this was the situation!  I’ve no real doubt that the conflict was true and real and regretted.  But even if it were not, although it would make me sad, it’s not something for which I could blame anyone.

Well, I guess I can blame myself.  After all, it is surely because of what and who I am that people don’t really like to be around me much, and don’t like to stay around me longer than they are required to do.  If I knew that there were some precise and specific, alterable attributes in me that were responsible for this, I would probably try to change those attributes.  But it’s probably the gestalt of me that is the problem.  I simply am that which I am, and this portion of my four dimensional structure seems to tend to repel other such four dimensional beings.

Even if I could fix myself, and with relative ease, I might not.  I don’t honestly feel that I deserve to be fixed.

I could, of course, fall back on the true words of Will Munny from Unforgiven and say:

But, while I can recognize that fact in my frontal lobes and other parts of my neocortex, unfortunately my basal ganglia hate me, and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.  They have tremendous neuropsychological inertia, and I don’t even know where to get a grip to try to move them.  But I sense that pushing them in just some random direction is more likely to make things worse than better.  I’ve gone into that general reasoning before, and I’ve encountered nothing to change my conviction on that count.

You know, it occurs to me that I should probably have some kind of disclaimer on my blog in general*, to the effect that people shouldn’t read this blog unless they have a pretty strong sense of self-worth and so on, and that people who have mental health issues should definitely not read it.  I fear that a person who is vulnerable might be inadvertently convinced to do themselves harm after reading my work.

Possibly I think too highly of my lowliness, but I’ve long since recognized that my inherent nature veers toward destruction.

So, yeah, I guess you can warn anyone who expresses an interest‒if such a being exists‒that if they so much as doubt their courage, they should not try to enter this particular Cave of Caerbannog, for death awaits them all here with nasty, big, pointy words.

Oh, and finally, let’s just take a moment to mark and to celebrate the Apollo 11 Moon landing, which took place 57 years ago today.  If you are one of the people who claims to think that humans did not land on the moon, well…I won’t tell you that you should end yourself and thereby raise the overall intelligence of the world by a small but measurable amount; that would be uncharitable.  But I do suggest that you please either get a vasectomy or a tubal ligation, because if there is any genetic component to such stupidity, we don’t want it to propagate forward in time.  Let’s put a bit of chlorine into the gene pool.

Otherwise, have a good day.

*I have put one in today’s headline, at least.

by

Movie and comic book villains, some songs, weekend plans, and a slightly improving mood

Well, it’s Friday at long last, the end of the “official”* work week.  My mood is at least somewhat better than it has been previously this week; starting midmorning yesterday, my mood increased and I even became somewhat playful and a bit silly.  This was, hopefully, thanks to certain interventions I have undertaken, and not just because of some low-grade cycling of my mood.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of bipolar disorder; certainly no therapist has even mentioned considering that as one of my issues.  Then again, none of them (to my recollection and knowledge) considered the possibility of undiagnosed ASD.  But I have, apparently, done quite a good job at masking over time.  Or so I believe.

Anyway, I’m not going to be working tomorrow after all (my improved mood long preceded my learning this fact).  In fact, I’m going to be getting together with my youngest to have a late Father’s Day outing.  That also came about hours and hours after my mood had improved, and after I had learned I would not be working.

That’s about as good as my life gets, and has gotten, in nearly a decade and a half, but it is quite good.  The only thing that might be better would be if my son were also coming, but I cannot get my hopes up about such things.  He does as he must.

I’ve lately taken to rubbing Aspercream™ with lidocaine all over the MCP joints and the interphalangeal joints of my thumbs, and it seems to be doing at least a little to ease the pain of my arthropathy therein.  This helped make me willing at least to try to play guitar (and sing) a little bit yesterday.  I was still a bit stiff, but it wasn’t too bad.  Mind you, I didn’t do anything particularly fancy; the Bach piece I’ve mentioned was the most challenging part of the session.

I have a whole repertoire of songs I can sing and for which I can play chords from memory.  It’s not a big playlist, but it’s there.  Ironically, it doesn’t include any of my songs, which I would have to relearn at this point!  That’s kind of sad, really.  But it is a weird thing that I’ve noticed, that once I’ve made and shared a video (or even just audio) of me doing a song, I tend to stop playing it at all.  It’s quite strange, at least to me.  Have any of you encountered anything like this?

This shouldn’t be confused with the general anhedonia I’ve been experiencing lately (not for the first time); that makes me not really interested in playing anything.  I also have not been able to find anything that I can keep reading for more than 10 or, at most, 20 minutes before getting bored of it**.

I’m trying to read something different now, so I downloaded some Star Trek and Star Wars novels from Kindle Unlimited, and we’ll see how they go.  Currently, I’m reading the novelization of Into Darkness, which I think was an underrated movie.  Did it play fast and loose with certain aspects of important characters from TOS?  Absolutely!  Even so, the surprise was fun, and the casting, I thought, was very good, as were the performances.

The book is by Alan Dean Foster, who is one of the most reliable science fiction authors out there.  He has written quite a few of the best novelizations of science fiction movies.

I also downloaded the novelization of The Wrath of Khan, one of my favorite movies.  I’ve read the book before (by Vonda McIntyre, who is at least as good, if not as prolific, as Foster), a long time ago, and it was good, so hopefully I’ll enjoy it again.

On a somewhat related note, as a very big fan of Doctor Doom, I am rather nervous about how he will be portrayed in the upcoming MCU movies.  He has been badly written so far in the movies that have featured him, though I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was well cast and did what he could with the role.

But I’ve long said that if anyone wants to know how to portray Doom onscreen, there is a nearly perfect performance on which to model one’s acting, and that was Ricardo Montalban as Khan, especially in the movie (though the original Trek episode Space Seed is also great).  Khan is a lot like Doom, though he has a more sentimental, romantic aspect to his character (it’s the death of his wife that leads to his wrath in the movie, after all).  Still, the charisma, the brilliance, the arrogance (and, alas, the overconfidence and the tendency to be consumed by vendetta) match the best-written aspects of Doctor Doom’s character.

To be fair to Khan, he is kinder to his subordinates than Doom sometimes tends to be.  This, I think, is one of Doom’s biggest flaws.  Then again, I suspect Doom is “on the spectrum”, so he doesn’t necessarily really get how to manage people at a personal level, though as a national leader he is unsurpassed.

I know, I know, I’m being fanciful, but I really do love these characters.  They are bad guys, certainly, but they are not really evil, or at least not psychopathically selfish and shallow the way, say, Voldemort is.  I’ve said before, Doom and Batman are in many ways very similar characters.  Both have similar tragic backstories and are obsessively driven, implacable, indeed all but unstoppable, and neither of them has actual super powers (contrary to what was represented in the first two Fantastic Four movies).

I wish Julian McMahon had a chance to play a well-written Doctor Doom, because I thought he was an excellent casting choice (and I’m pretty sure Ricardo Montalban was not available).

Okay, I’ll draw things to a close for the day and for the week.  As a parting “bonus”, I’ll embed below some old audio files (NOT high quality recordings – lots of clipping and some flubs and occasional pitchiness) of songs I have recorded me practicing and singing, just for fun, in case you’re interested.

I hope you all have a nice Friday and a good weekend.  There’s a big sporting event on Sunday, I think; if you like those kinds of things, why not take that in?

Sore dewa.

Nothing Compares 2U – originally by Prince

Karma Police – Radiohead

Just the Way You Are – Billy Joel

Here, There, and Everywhere – the Beatles

Here Comes the Sun – the Beatles

Desperado – Eagles

Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead

Julia – the Beatles

*I’m not sure what exact office might be involved in that determination, but whataya gonna do?

**Though I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot Org lately, focusing for the moment on vectors and working into matrices and related stuff, with an eye toward General Relativity.

by

Blog thyself last, cherish those hearts that hate thee

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (thus the “hello and good morning” opening), and here I am writing yet another blog post.  I don’t really know why.

I’ve been trying to promote my “stuff” the other day, at least in a haphazard way.  I shared several blog posts on various social media the other day.  Then I shared my “My Books” page, and then the entries for each of my books.  This was done over several hours.

Then, yesterday, I shared some of my songs, to X and to Bluesky, just to see if anyone checks them out.  So far, no luck.  As far as I can tell, no one has so much as seen any of those shares.  Certainly no one has “liked” them.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I don’t exactly have a huge number of followers, anywhere.  But that just shows the poor taste and lack of discernment of humans, that they cannot appreciate ineffable and transcendent genius when it’s right there in front of them.

I’m kidding.  I wish I could be so egotistical; even if I were the most glaringly deluded person ever in the world, if I loved myself, at least I wouldn’t hate myself.

I’ve tried at various times through autosuggestion/self-talk to get myself at least to believe that I love myself (and thence, hopefully, actually to love myself), and I have at times been known to act as if I thought very highly of myself, though those acts were almost always patently in jest.  I think everyone who knew me knew that; they certainly acted as if they did.

Now, though, I have a hard time even saying that I love myself as part of a sort of mantra or summat.  That doesn’t just refer to saying it out loud, but even in my head.  It’s a bit like saying over and over to myself that I do not feel any pain; I’m not good enough at making myself believe the flagrantly counterfactual for it to work.

My mind is strange to me.  For instance, I have a very difficult time taking any joy, let alone pride, in accomplishing anything.  I don’t know why.  So, most of the things I’ve accomplished have not been motivated by any sense of expected satisfaction in the outcomes but rather by a sense of tension and anxiety about the possibility of not achieving it, whatever it might be.

It’s sort of, “Oh, you accomplished something?  Well, of course you did, it’s what’s expected of you.  If you didn’t, there would be hell to pay, even if it’s only the hell of your own sense of failure.  Now, it’s time to get on to the next thing, because you don’t have a right to rest.”

“Run, rabbit, run

Dig that hole, forget the sun.

When at last the work is done

Don’t sit down, it’s time to dig another one.”

Anyway, that driving fear becomes less and less motivational over time, especially after one has failed so much and so often, and one’s life is a tattered mockery of what one thought it might be and what it used to be.

At least if I believed that Lord Foul were doing this to me‒he’s prone to try to hurt people by ruining something they love and then returning it to the person*, it seems‒then I could admire his handiwork (or denigrate it, since he could have made things quite a bit worse than they are).

But of course, I don’t believe in any supernatural entities of any kind.  I don’t rule them out a priori, except by definition (since anything that actually exists is natural, not supernatural), but I find none of them remotely convincing.  I’ve tried to see if they can be, but no, really, all of them bear the flagrant hallmarks of ignorance and would-be wish-fulfillment and fear of death and so on.  They are just instances of humans’ desire to be, literally or figuratively, at the center of the universe.

This applies even to modern discussions about whether consciousness can be “merely” matter** or must be some other, extra, “special” kind of thing, because, after all…it’s humans, innit?  It surely must be something fancy and magical.

I’m being sarcastic, which I hope is obvious.  Things like panpsychism, and even the slightly more sensible notions that consciousness requires quantum events of some kind in the brain and cannot be a product of “ordinary” computation, are merely attempts to make anything we don’t yet fully understand into something woo-filled and magical.  They bear all the hallmarks of an egotistical, willful delusion that tries to make mere humans**** unique, in a unique way.

It’s rather sad.  But more, it’s rather pathetic and contemptible.  At least, I hold it in contempt.  People think they want to imagine magical and “supernatural” things, and while those things can at times be entertained as hypotheses, they generally don’t hold up even to minor to scrutiny.  Reality has tremendous wonders on offer, but because they are “ordinary”, they cannot be good enough for some people.  Unfortunately, as Eliezer Yudkowsky said, “If we cannot take joy in things that are merely real, our lives will always be empty.”

Of course, I cannot seem to take joy in the real or the imaginary, and I certainly have a hard time finding joy in myself.  I find me thoroughly irritating, a lot of the time.  And unfortunately, “No matter where you go, there you are.”  I cannot get away from myself, even by sleeping (see yesterday’s post).

Enough.  The more I write today, the more I seem to want to burn everything down.  I guess I’ll stop, at least for the moment.  I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*Thomas Covenant said, about Foul’s tendencies, “How do you hurt a man who’s lost everything?  Give him back something, broken.”

**As if there were anything “mere” about matter***.

***Except matter that is part of a mere (which is a term for a shallow lake).

****Humans merit the adjective “mere” much more than matter does.

by

“When I wake up early in the morning…”

It’s Wednesday morning, it’s not even really close to five o’clock (like in the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home…get it?), and yet I am heading to work, waaay earlier than necessary.  That may seem odd enough, but actually, I’ve been “awake” for hours already.

This is nothing new.  Something along these lines happens nearly every night, unless I have doped myself up with antihistamines (which produces its own rather significant problems).  I just don’t talk about it very often, because people just don’t seem to get it or to appreciate the scope and scale and the chronicity of the problem.  They seem to imagine that, since they have had some nights with less than ideal sleep from time to time, they know what I experience, and think it’s not that big a deal.

I am 56 years old (plus about ¾), but I have been “awake” long enough to have been alive, well…let’s see.  To do the figuring, I need to work out my typical or average number of waking hours, divide it by the more normal or healthy number of waking hours, then multiply it by my current age.

Ikimashou:  19 or 20 waking hours a day is usual for me.  I’ll round it to 20 for ease of math, since this is not a precise calculation anyway.  So 20/16* or 5/4 or 1.25 times 56.  Since 56 is evenly divisible by 4 we can just add that quartered amount, which is 14.  So, I’ve been awake long enough for someone 14 years older than I am, or someone who is 70.

To be fair, most days I feel older than that.

On the other hand, I haven’t really been fully awake all these years.  As the narrator in Fight Club pointed out, with insomnia you’re never really asleep, but you’re also never really awake.  So, my brain has not been fully awake as much as a healthy 70 year old’s (or a healthy 56 year old’s) would have been.

I have spoken here more than once about the last good, full night’s sleep I had; it was in the mid-nineties, and waking up the following day was like seeing the first morning of the world before Arda was marred.  It was amazing.

The fact that it was so memorable or noticeable, even at the time, should make it clear that I had already started having trouble with chronic insomnia, though I don’t think I recognized it as such yet.  I think I had been not-too-secretly pleased by the fact that I didn’t “need” as much sleep as most of the people I knew, and I wished I did not have to sleep at all.

I had probably been accumulating the detrimental effects of suboptimal sleep for years already by that time.  And the author of Why We Sleep, who is a serious and prominent sleep scientist, points out that one can never really “make up” for lost sleep, just as one cannot build up a sleep surplus to use later.  Sleep isn’t a substance, it’s a process.

Anyway, the fact that I felt so great after that one night of really good sleep should have warned me that the rest of the time I was being affected detrimentally by less sleep.  But, hey, I was in my mid-twenties.  I didn’t exactly think of myself as immortal‒open heart surgery at age 18 does a good job of splashing ice water in the face of anyone who thinks he’s indestructible‒but I had enough baseline youth and strength to make up for the developing detriments, at least for a while.

However, I did know that I was not that happy with feeling unrested all the time.  I recall saying to the therapist I was seeing in the latter nineties for my ongoing dysthymia/depression, that I thought probably the reason vampires live forever was because they perforce got a full day’s sleep every day.

It was a joke, of course, and it came to me because I had been reading Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles around that time.  But I had at least come to some realization that my chronic sleep deficit was having negative effects on me.  I thought it was mainly due to or related to my chronic depression issues, since early waking is a common sign of developing depression.

It was probably related to my depression, and it certainly affected it, but looking back now, with the benefit of more recent knowledge, I think my ASD (not the heart one, the other one, which went undiagnosed about three times longer than the heart one) was probably a big part of it, with the associated feeling of being always in a potentially hostile, alien environment no matter where I was.

I don’t know why I’m going into all this.  Then again, it is my blog, so I guess I can write about whatever I choose.  If I do ever have any therapists in the future, I can at least refer them to my blog if they want to know more about what goes on in my head.  It’s of course a biased and incomplete picture, but so are all pictures.

Biologist and historians and psychologists and anthropologists** have had to deal with various forms of “observer effects” long before quantum mechanics developed its ideas about uncertainty principles and wave function collapses.  The trick is to try to develop an objective model of a subject in part by recognizing the biases in and limits to one’s various kinds of data and trying to correct for them.

Sorry, I’m rambling.

I’ll close by saying that I seemed to be holding my own up through the end of the nineties, but after coming to Florida, my health gradually (and not so gradually) began to deteriorate.  Then my life went, chunk by chunk, into the shitter.  Of course, my spatial location was probably coincidental, and no matter where I was, roughly the same things would have happened.

Still, it’s hard not to associate Florida with my problems, especially now when the effing heat and humidity makes me think that Homer Simpson got it right:  Florida is America’s dong.  And right now it feels like America is long overdue for a change of underwear, preferably after a very good shower.

On that pleasant note, I’ll draw to a close for now, and if we’re all lucky (which seems unlikely), for good.  I wish you all a nice day.

*If one sleeps 8 hours a night, as is the roughly healthy amount, one is awake 16 hours, since 24 minus 8 is 16.

**This sounds like a term for a person who tries to defend humans against critics.  I suppose, in a way, that’s probably accurate.

by

Are there any insights in sight in this post?

It’s the beginning of a new work week.  By which I mean, it’s Monday.  But of course, the day to start a work week isn’t truly universal, is it?  That makes sense, since the very notion of a week’s length is pretty arbitrary, and it certainly doesn’t represent anything external in the universe, only things that are inside human minds and their artifacts.

Of course, having set lengths of typical weeks and having pre-programmed days off is probably very good for people at the overall and individual level.  After all, if left to their own devices (so to speak) most businesses would probably like people to work seven days a week (and probably 24 hours per day).

This is not a case of businesses being “evil” or capitalism being “evil”, it’s a case of everything and everybody tending to respond to local incentives and to support their own self interest‒because things and people that do not support their own self-interest tend to go away, as they are inherently outcompeted by things and people that do.

Of course, most entities have more than one local incentive going on, and these can be at relative odds with each other, just as in any individual human (and presumably other) mind, there are numerous modules that have parallel and sometimes conflicting drives‒parts of the mind/brain want specific kinds food at any given moment, and want rest, and want safety, and want excitement, and want companionship, and want sex, and want to learn, and want run around and play, and so on.  And the strength of these “wants” varies from moment to moment; their vector sum changes continuously.

So, getting all the incentives and forces lined up within one individual is already a complex and varying, nonlinear problem.  Then one has to work things out between individuals, and that often leads to groups and organizations of various kinds which then have to balance their own drives and interests and “fears”.

It’s tricky, it’s complicated, it’s immensely nonlinear, and it’s all highly “emergent”.  Almost none of it is actually motivated by any desire to be “evil”, to willfully harm others*, to be deliberately unfair.  Most negative behavior that isn’t entirely in the eye of the beholder is simply brought about by a kind of myopia, a nonreflective self-interest.

Very few people (or institutions) are specifically predicated upon doing harm.  Those that do consistently do harm seem a lot of the time to be motivated by fear.  This can exist, I would say, not merely at the level of an individual, but also at that of a larger organization, since organizations without self-preservation inclinations tend ceteris paribus to be less likely to survive over time.

To feel fear is not inherently irrational or even always detrimental or to be avoided.  But there are many kinds of irrational and nonrational fears.  And when one’s behaviors (whether one is a person or a company or a nation or a slime mold) are born of misapprehensions and even full-on delusions, those behaviors are going to tend not to be as productive as they might be**, and again, this makes for poor outcomes over time.  It is not, as the biological term goes, an evolutionarily stable strategy.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this topic and subject and whatnot.  I feel sure that I’ve written about all this before.  I didn’t use the exact specific words and ordering of words, of course; that would be vanishingly unlikely unless I did it on purpose, because there are so many ways to put together so many words to convey ideas.

In any case, it’s not as though they make any impact, even to the extent that I have potentially useful insights.  Very few people read my blog, and I don’t know that anyone “shares” it, even if they like it***.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this much longer.  I don’t mean this blog, though that is subsumed by what I do mean, so it can at least serve as a marker.  I’m really not doing well.  This blog is, most days, my only social interaction that has to do with anything at all in which I am interested.  I have “social” interactions when at work, of course, but they are about work.

That’s usual for me.  I cannot seem easily to socialize for the sake of socialization‒it’s not that I don’t want to, I just cannot seem to do it‒but have to have some associated purpose.  Even things like movies and shows and so on have always been things in which I participate at least partly as a way of connecting with people.

Unfortunately, this tends to make shows that I used to watch (for instance) or books that I used to read and discuss or movies that I went to see and enjoyed with someone specific painful for me when those people are gone.  Actually, on a day-to-day basis, almost everyone is gone, many of them long gone.  Like the song below says, “everyone I know goes away in the end”.  Though it’s not even “the end” yet, and most of them are already gone.

It’s too bad my depression won’t seem to go away.  I know it’s not literally always at its worst, since that could only be the case for something with a constant level, but it does feel interminable.  That’s a commonly described attribute of depression, that when you’re in it, it feels as though it has always been and always will be.  I know that’s not literally true, and also that it’s not constant, but I also know that it never seems to go away for long.  And I am running out of countermeasures, and the ones that I still have are losing their effectiveness.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  But I do hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Though sadism does exist, it tends not to be a stable attribute, because other people take a dim view of it (for reasons of self-preservation if nothing else) and will eventually expunge the willfully destructive from the world.

**Reality exists, whatever it might be, and those things that do not stay parallel to the course of reality are destined to crash into its walls.  And they will lose in that collision.

***I didn’t mean to refer to my song, Like and Share, but what the heck.  I’ll embed it here.

by

Winding down at the end of the week

It’s Friday as I write this (and as I intend to publish it), and I do not expect to work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis*.  There had been some sort of slight possibility of doing something with my youngest one of these weekends, but I’m not sure if that is ever going to pan out.  There certainly hasn’t been any finalization of anything, nor really any tentativization (which is probably not a legitimate word).  I guess I’ll find out.

I don’t like to try to push things from my end, because I don’t want to elicit any sense of obligation or guilt in my child.  While I definitely want to spend time with them (with both of them, ideally, but that’s another matter), it would be horrifying to discover that such time was spent only because of a sense of remorse and duty, not because they wanted to spend time with me.

Then again, I have a hard time imagining that anyone ever wants to spend time with me, at least not anymore.  In the past, I would say that I used to be at least some degree of “fun” as a person with whom to hang out.  But I don’t know that I am capable of being that way anymore‒actually, based on many people who have spent time with me perforce, I think it’s pretty clear that I am not pleasant company.  Maybe I never really was.  Maybe most people just put up with me in the past.

Given such facts, on my current weekends off, such as this coming weekend, I basically just spend time by myself.  That’s good for getting rest from the effort of interpersonal relations, and it also lets me rest my back some, but I do feel quite isolated and gloomy and, yes, lonely.

Waah.  Poor baby.

I’m running out of interesting YouTube videos to watch, despite there being many billions of such videos available.  I do enjoy going for walks when I’m able, usually, and they are good for me overall.  Except, right now, at this time of year, the heat index gets well above 100 Fahrenheit here starting quite early in the morning, meaning my body’s cooling mechanisms cannot adequately function to maintain a healthy temperature, so I’m in danger of heat stroke if I push much at all.

It turns taking a long walk into a possibly suicidal gesture (even potentially a deliberate one).  That’s a bit fascinating, because they can’t Baker Act you for taking a walk, at least not readily.  But overheating and dehydration can put one at risk for kidney stones, and that is something well worth avoiding, believe me.  Well, you don’t have to believe me, but if you end up having kidney stones yourself, I’d be willing to bet that you would agree.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m trying to discuss.  My mental health has not been good lately, even for me.   By which I mean it isn’t just not good on average, which is true, but that it’s worse than my typical, average, poor state.  I don’t know if that’s obvious to people around me‒as far as I can tell, no one can ever see when I feel truly horrible‒but I can certainly tell, even if no one else can.

Oh!  This brings up a personal pet peeve of mine (I guess all “pet peeves” are personal, but you probably get what I mean):  I despise the recent tendency to use the term “mental health” as a euphemism for mental illness, as in “that person suffered from mental health”.

I don’t understand what people think they are accomplishing‒or avoiding‒by attempting such linguistic gymnastics, but it’s maddeningly absurd and idiotic.  “Health” and “illness” are antonyms, dammit.  One doesn’t suffer from mental health (though I have seen that exact expression used unironically), one suffers due to a relative lack thereof.  It’s as if you said someone went bankrupt from a surfeit of goods and money.

I don’t know why people feel that avoiding words that describe unpleasant things will make those things somehow less difficult, but it doesn’t work, as far as I can see.  It just obfuscates the issues and makes it more difficult to improve things.  You can’t get your mechanic to look at the part of your car that’s having trouble just by saying that your car is really driving lately.  That may not be the best absurd parallel, but that’s okay; the thing itself is so stupid and absurd and insane that it stands alone.

You don’t say of someone who is dying of metastatic cancer that they are suffering from physical health.  They are suffering from a terrible illness.

Likewise, depression (and its various related issues), chronic or otherwise, is a mental illness, and it has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, and worse than some.  There is also much more stigma associated with it than with such ailments as cancer, which doesn’t help.  I’m not sure what can be done about all that.

One thing I can say is that my mental health is poor.  That’s nothing new overall, obviously, but it gets just more and more tedious all the time, even as it continues to have its usual effects.  It becomes harder and harder to see any point in trying to fight it.  What would I gain?  What do I have to which to look forward in my life?

Nothing.  I anticipate no new revelations or relationships or creations or friendships or companionship (redundant list entries, I know).  I anticipate no new accomplishments.  I expect only gradual and rather pathetic decay and dissolution, unless I’m lucky enough to have something take me out more precipitously, or to arrange some such thing for myself.

Well, whatever.  Sorry.  I hope you have a good weekend.

*Barring the unforeseen.

by

“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous”

Well, I’m writing today on the lapcom, not for any particular specific reason, but just because, as of yesterday afternoon when I was preparing to leave the office, the various strengths (or magnitudes) and directions of the vectors in my brain came together and produced enough impetus for me to pack and then carry the lapcom with me.  After that, there’s much less of an energy barrier in the way of actually writing using the lapcom in the morning.  If I have it with me, I prefer to write using the lapcom rather than the smartphone.

As for the subject/topic of this blog post, well…I don’t know.  I have no idea what to write or what to say, other than to say whatever comes out of my (figurative) mouth here.  I don’t know what I’m going to write ahead of the actual writing any more than you know what my next word will be before you read it.

I guess that’s how conversation happens in real life as well.  People (at least, neurotypical people) don’t tend to script their conversations.  They just start talking, and the process of talking is identical with (or at least part of) the process of forming the ideas in the first place.

You don’t think about that to say before you think and say it, nor do your think about what to think about and say before you think about thinking about and saying things.  One cannot in any literal sense fully plan ahead what one says or thinks, because it would imply an infinite regress.

No, most of the time, expressing one’s thoughts is the first circumstance in which one formulates those thoughts (though of course it might well not be the first time one has had the same or similar ones).  Ideas, and even memories, do not exist fully formed within the brain, as if on some SSD drive; they must be reformed every time they are brought up.

This is part of why memory in humans is so malleable.  All memories bring out not just information from the past, but also color it with whatever information is leading to the memory being recalled at a particular moment.  This feeds back on and can alter the memory over time.

The things that happen with neural nets/deep learning systems/LLMs is teaching us at least some things about how thoughts and minds work in non-linear ways, though it’s important not to draw too many or too literal parallels to actual brains.  For one thing, brains are vastly more efficient than any kind of software/hardware we have.

Though your brain is certainly the most energy-hungry portion of your body, using about 20% of all the calories you burn, this still is only about 20 watts or so.  That’s less than your typical lapcom uses, and far, far less than any LLM or similar system uses.

The brain is also more complex on many levels.  Synapses are not simple binary switches, like transistors; they are more or less continuously variable in the amount of neurotransmitter they release into a synapse, and the number of receptors in the receiving synapse, and the degree to which activation (or inhibition) of those receptors affects the functions of the postsynaptic neuron and how that interacts with other inputs and the basic metabolism and chemistry of the next level of nerve cells.

Those functions are also affected by hormones of various kinds, from peptides to steroid hormones to things like histamine and glutamate that are neurotransmitters and hormones and (some of them) even amino acids.

Then, of course, there are the inputs from the many and various “glial” cells, which are not neurons, but which “support” neurons in the brain, and which (among other things) create the myelin sheaths that allow nerve transmission to happen much more quickly in “white matter”, and so on.  These things can alter and tweak the “weights” in any particular neuron “node” in ways that are more complicated than the nodes and weights in neural nets.

And of course, the scale is daunting.  You have about a hundred billion neurons in your brain (give or take), and each one has connections with 1,000 to 10,000 other neurons, making the total number of synaptic connections in the brain on the order of a hundred trillion to a quadrillion.

Just imagine if every star in the Milky Way galaxy had some kind of hyperspace links to 1,000 to 10,000 other stars.  That would be a complex galactic network.  The brain is this scale of network.  And the synapses, again, are not binary switches like transistors, but are more or less continuously variable within a given range.  Likewise, the impulses traveling down an axon, though binary in a sense (each nerve impulse either happens or does not), actually vary continuously, because it’s the rate of impulses arriving that affects the release of neurotransmitters.  But it’s not the only thing that affects it.

Anyway, this is all interesting stuff, I guess.  Learning about neural nets is fascinating, and is yet another use of linear algebra, matrices and the like (which are also good for General Relativity).  And learning about how gradient descent works in machine learning and so on is interesting and thought-provoking (an amusing coincidence, not an irony).

I’m reading some things about this and trying to pick up on it, just for general understanding.  I doubt that I’ll ever do anything with any of it other than maybe “talk” about it here (which is nearly the only place I talk about much of anything).  But at least it’s interesting.

It’s futile, of course.  But nearly everything I do or have done is or has been futile.  And that’s not just on a cosmic scale, but on a human, day-to-day, interpersonal scale.  Almost all my efforts are either wasted or fully counter-productive.  This is the outcome of something like me trying to do and be good as much as he can; it just tends to be pointless or worse.

None of it matters, though.

Anyway, as often happens with the lapcom, I’ve written too much of nothing today, and that’s irritating to me.  I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to my readers.  At least, the rest of your day will probably be less annoying by comparison with this post, right?

Right?

I guess maybe it doesn’t really work that way.  It’s all just irritating, isn’t it?  It’s irritating that I don’t catch a terminal illness, some kind of deadly but not-too-quick infection or cancer or something.  It would be good to be able to have people know that I was dying, so that if anyone out there is mad enough to want to see me or greet me or say goodbye to me before I die, they could.  I think I would appreciate that.

Odds are, though, I’ll just disappear and be gone someday, perhaps very soon, and almost no one in the world will notice.  Those who do notice will only do so vaguely, because there is practically no one to whom my life is integral or even very strongly connected.  I’m just background static for the most part.  When I go, it will just be good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.  There’s really no sensibly available better alternative of which I am able to avail myself.

As Kurt Cobain sang, “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”  He had some good ideas, did Cobain-sensei, and he carried them out.

by

Imagine whatever headline you want; I don’t care

Welcome to the Monday of the first full week of July in 2026 CE (or AD if you must).  I hope that those of you in the USA had a nice Independence Day weekend.  There are no more significant holidays (that I recall) until at least September, now.

I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday‒unless you count trying to burn some kudzu‒because holiday celebrations generally involve other people, family and friends and such like, and I did not have any such group with whom to celebrate.

It’s probably just as well for such groups that I am not a part of them; I’m a serious downer and an unpleasant person* to be around for very long.  This used not to be the case; in my default or older settings, I’m naturally more hyper and sometimes rather silly (that too can be irritating, I fear).  Since my chronic pain began, however, I have become a much grumpier, angrier, more irritable person.  Things that I would have laughed off in the past, or about which I would have been more “philosophical”, easily get my ire up, even tiny little, minor, innocent things.

Using the seven dwarfs as personal descriptions, I spend most of my time these days Grumpy, rarely if ever Happy, frequently Dopey, quite Bashful almost always, from time to time Sneezy, not Sleepy nearly as often as I would prefer.  But I’m always Doc.  Take that for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing.

Anyway, yeah, I didn’t do anything pleasant on Saturday, nor much on Sunday, though at least I did talk on the phone to my sister.

I toyed with the notion of “celebrating” the 4th by making my way to the front of the Palm Beach County courthouse and making a fireworks display in the style of Thích Quảng Đức.  However, it was not only a Saturday, but it was a federal holiday; no one would have been there.  Also, I don’t know that I would have the courage to go through with it.

I need to do something though.  I cannot keep doing what I’m doing.  But I don’t see many options which I’m capable of embracing, given my dearth of personal energy and motivation.

I’m sorry I’m not being more positive or interesting, or at least quirky and strange in a less negative way, today.  Actually, I don’t really know if I’m ever interesting.  But, anyway, I just don’t have the energy right now to pretend not to be depressed, like I often do.  Maybe I’ve been pretending all my life that way**.  They do talk a lot about “masking” in neurodivergent people, and it has struck me as a very accurate and apposite notion since the first time I encountered it.

But, of course, there’s not necessarily any identity underneath such masks.  There’s certainly nothing very consistent, since “who we are” at any given moment or stage of our lives is but a three-dimensional slice of what is actually a four-dimensional being.

In case that sounds weird, I just mean that who we are at any given moment is true for just a point in time, a snapshot of a being that has not only spatial extent but also has a beginning and an end in time and which changes with every moment of that time, taking in and losing particles, maintaining that roughly constant but always altering configuration from frame to frame of of the movie that is a person’s life.

So, a question like “Who am I, really?” is perhaps best answered by saying, “I am the being who is asking that question.”  There is probably no deeper answer, at least not any much more specific one.  There is no “character description” in some Platonic realm that lays out who we really are, or if there is, I’ve encountered not the slightest intimation of it, and I would be very surprised if it existed.

Anyway, enough gobbledegook.  I’m just tired already, and it’s only the very beginning of Monday morning.  I’m so very tired.  I really ought to go before I spoil the party, to paraphrase a good Beatles song (see below).  I fear that I will just be a black cloud for everyone around me today, and probably in general.

I can’t even seem to find a book I can stick with reading right now; I shuffled through several different genres, let alone books, in my Kindle library a few dozen times in recent days, weeks, whatever, trying to find something interesting.  But after a brief time reading each thing I lose momentum and interest.  Even The Noonday Demon, a well-written book about depression, loses me after a bit.  Even Physics isn’t interesting to me, and that’s a bad sign.  Ditto for music, or movies (or shows) or what have you.

Everything is just a drizzly, insipid gray‒metaphorically, and sometimes also literally.  And I sometimes don’t have the energy to keep pretending that I can see anything else.

Like Ed Deepneau said in Stephen King’s Insomnia, “…sometimes the world is full of colors…but now all the colors are turning black.”

Enough, this has gone on too long already.  I apologize.  I hope you have a good day and a good week and a good remainder of your lives.

*More than one person has told me this, and they did not compare notes.

**Probably not.  It would be very bizarre indeed to be born depressed, though the tendency thereto can certainly be congenital, much like both forms of ASD that I have/had.