Psychology

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It’s not the size of the blog post, it’s what you do with it

Well, it’s Saturday, and here I am writing a post of sorts, which means I am working today and‒of course‒I am still alive, at least by some definitions of the word.  I don’t think I could write if I were not alive.

I’m not going to make this very long today, since I’m quite fatigued.  I had my assessment yesterday.  It wasn’t any kind of ordeal or anything, but I was quite nervous.  I don’t have any idea what my results will be.  Well, okay, at some level they’re just going to be either positive or negative, but I can’t give any kind of objective assessment of the probabilities.  I’m too much in the middle of it, so I’m disrupted by my emotions.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see what the outcome is.  I don’t know what I’ll do (if anything) if it’s positive and I really don’t know what I will do if it’s negative.

As for other things, I don’t know.  I haven’t been walking really in the last couple of days, except of course basic getting around a room or something.  I’ve been having a lot of pain in my joints and as always my back.  I also haven’t played guitar in a while.  I guess it’s good that I didn’t buy a new acoustic, huh?  Anyway, with the evaluation, I spent more money than I usually do, so I don’t need the added expense.

I don’t really have much else to say right now, I think.  Maybe I’ll add some more in the edit, but as far as I’m concerned, the first draft is over.  Have a good weekend if you can.

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O, you must blog your rue with a difference!

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course.  If you don’t know why I would say “of course” after my “Hello and good morning”, then you need to read more of my blog!

I recommend going back as far as you can; I certainly ought to have posts going back to, I don’t know, at least 2015.  For a while I just wrote weekly posts‒I was writing books and short stories and sometimes writing and recording music some of that time‒but then in more recent years I released one every workday.  Or perhaps you could say one escaped every workday.

That means…well, let’s do the figuring:  5.5 days a week (average) for 52 weeks is 286 days of a given year (roughly), and since I write an average of perhaps roughly 1000 words a blog post, then in a given year you have available about 280,000 words of mine to allow into your head.

You’ve already begun.

This means that there are multiple millions of my words out there, available for your imbibement, if you include my books and my blogs.  I really have written quite a lot.

It is from reading my blogs that you will probably rather quickly develop an understanding of why I said “of course” above.  But, of course (ha ha), reading my words, taking in my thoughts, can be terribly detrimental to your mental health, like exposure to mercury in tuna or to lead in car exhaust or to radon in your basement.  Or perhaps it might even be as bad as reading De Vermis Mysteriis, or even Al Azif (the original title of the Necronomicon).

Mind you, it’s unlikely to be as dramatic as what the stories depict happening when people read the above books, but then again, perhaps that’s worse.  After all, the initial infection with HIV is not usually terribly dramatic (sometimes there’s a mononucleosis-like syndrome, sometimes there’s nothing much at all), and Hepatitis B and/or C can be even more subtle.  But the long-term effects of those infections, if untreated, are terrible, and there is no known treatment for infestation with my thoughts.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

Like a retrovirus, my words are not as aggressively infectious as the common colds and coronaviruses and even the influenzas of social and other media.  But such loud viral spreads and “infections” tend to be very self-limited and acute.  They can (and do) sometimes destroy particularly susceptible people (I’m sure you can think of some) but for the most part, they come and go like the hula hoop or pole sitting*.

If it takes hold, my stuff is not too likely just to fade away into a mildly amusing memory of youthful or not-so-youthful foolishness.  My stuff will gnaw away at you like black mold and dry rot, like rust that slowly claims even mighty battleships, like erosion that wears down mountains, like a retrovirus that triggers lymphoma.  It’s terrifying.  And, of course, you have already been exposed, so it may already be too late for you.

Perhaps I should post a disclaimer at the beginning of every entry:  warning‒reading this writer’s words may be dangerous to your mental health.  Although, that might effectively be a sort of perverse advertising, like suggesting to people that they snowboard down this particular slope at their own risk, and we cannot be responsible for the outcome if you choose to do it.  The more humble and prudent people might heed the warning.  But the more daring, those who thrive on excitement, might be more inclined to dive right into my blog.

I guess such people would receive what they deserve.  For there is no excitement here, as such (though my stories can be relatively exciting).  Here there is only dark thought, sometimes disguised as humor or whimsy or curiosity or something else, for I cannot write what I don’t have inside, and as far as I can tell, all that exists within me now is darkness.

I guess that’s not anything really new.  I’ve always been dark and largely detrimental by nature.  I do, after all, have a subject heading for this blog that reads “My heroes have always been villains”***.  I’m a mutant grown from a mutant source.  I guess that’s how all new infections come into being.  They are not created ex nihilo, because nothing is****.

Well, it’s too late for you now.  Hopefully you won’t have too virulent a reaction, but I cannot be responsible, except in the broadest of senses, for whatever the outcome may be.

TTFN

*Just to be clear, all the discussion of infectious diseases (viruses specifically) is metaphorical.  It may not be necessary to point this out to most of you‒it probably isn’t‒but there are always those people who are metaphor-impaired, and we should strive to be patient with and supportive of such disadvantaged people.  Who would choose to be so impaired?  No one who knew what they were missing.  But, alas, such people do not know what they are missing.  It can break your heart, if you let it**.

**You probably shouldn’t let it.  If your heart is functioning properly, you should try to preserve and encourage its health.

***That’s a play on the old Willy Nelson song My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.

****The only possible exception being everything.

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“Pull me out of the air crash…”

Well, it’s been a short while since I posted here.  I intended‒vaguely‒to write a post on Friday and then Monday (which was yesterday), but I had a surprise situation happen that I haven’t really discussed with anyone yet, though I might have mentioned it on Threads.

It seems at least some of my underlying distress was evident to some people at work‒I certainly know that I’ve been feeling like I’m coming apart at the seams, and at times in between the seams.  So, on Thursday morning, my boss somewhat quietly came to me and “suggested” that I take a bit of time off.  He suggested 5 days, but if I had come back tomorrow, there would be too much backed up work, so I got it down to 4 days (plus Thursday afternoon).

He said he could tell that I was really getting stressed out and irritable, and that I needed a break; I hadn’t taken any non-sick time off since my mother died.  In and of itself, this was truly kind of him, and that’s completely in character.  On the other hand, he doesn’t understand me all that well.  It’s hard to blame him; I’m a weirdo, after all.

Anyway, he suggested all sorts of absurd things, like getting a hotel room on the beach, drinking cocktails, getting laid, and so on.  Imagine that:  me getting laid on short notice!  I wouldn’t have the comfort level with strangers even to pay to have sex with someone, let alone to pick up or be picked up.  When he made those suggestions, I started to giggle hysterically‒it was a sound that worried and sort of even frightened me‒and I had to suppress it pretty quickly, because if I didn’t, I knew I was going to start to cry.  In any case, I left the office at noon and went back to the house.

As for the beach…

Well, I did do some biking, trying to get used to riding so I could do more, and after riding around the local area a total of about 9 miles on Friday, I decided on Saturday to ride out to the beach and (of course) back, about six miles each way.  It was quite a ride for only my second day back on the bike, but I managed it.  Then I walked down to the beach and saw that at least every human in the western hemisphere was there, so there was no way I was going to remain for long.

I didn’t bring beach gear anyway, having no intention of swimming.  The waves on the Atlantic coast make swimming at the beach there irritating.  The beaches on the Gulf of Mexico are much more pleasant.  Also, I’m about as fond of sand as is Anakin Skywalker.

So, I stopped at a 7-11 for some Gatorade, drank it, and rode back.  Then, on Sunday I biked to the train station and back, which is only about 10 total miles, but it was harder than the day before, probably because I hadn’t fully recovered.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I took a very long, 12-mile walk.  I wore spandex braces on my ankles and my left knee, and these seem to have helped a lot.  I do have a minor blister and a half on my left foot, but otherwise there were no real ill effects.

I probably look as though I partied in some fashion, because I am pretty sunburned.  That’s okay; for some reason, sunburn doesn’t really hurt me much.

So, anyway, I at least got some exercise.  I bought junk/comfort food for a few meals (deliberately) but even my old comfort foods are becoming unappetizing.  That would be okay with me.  In fact, yesterday I ate only a total of around 1000 calories, despite my long walk, because I just wasn’t hungry.  I didn’t even finish all that I “cooked” myself for dinner yesterday.

Being off from work has been at least somewhat fruitful for me, in this at least:  that I have worked on improving my physical condition and have tested my endurance a bit.  Otherwise really, what mostly happened was a harsh, undiluted confrontation with just how empty my life is.

Work is in some ways the most positive part of my current existence; I have to be productive to be worthy of staying alive, and I can interact with my coworkers in ways that are couched in work-related situations.  It is far from fully positive; the noise alone is terribly frustrating.  But then again, I’m pretty much a net negative wherever I am, so it’s hard for me to be judgmental.

When I am at the house, I am fully immersed in how alone I am*.  And things like being at the beach just cement that even more for me.  I do not feel like the same species as everyone else out there.  I don’t know what I am or should be‒I’ve had great past success in all the ways I thought were success, but that all just blew up in my face in the end.

Honestly, I was more than half hoping for a heart attack or some other health crisis or life-threatening occurrence while I was biking and walking over this surprise long weekend.  Perhaps it would have been good to be hit by a car.  One thing I did note was that there are a lot of tall buildings with balconies down along the beach.  That’s something at least a bit interesting.  The bridge over the intercoastal, unfortunately, is rather low there, so it’s not much use.

In all honesty, speaking as a physician about myself, I think what I needed was not a “vacation”.  What on Earth would such as I do on a solitary vacation other than be solitary?  Instead, I would probably recommend that I be hospitalized, if that were available, or at least get some intensive kind of treatment.  But of course, I don’t have insurance, and whatever my boss might think about my finances, I don’t have the wherewithal to pay for much of any medical or psychiatric care.  I also don’t have the mental wherewithal to seek out any such help.

I am finally getting an autism assessment this Friday, and I’m slightly anxious about it.  I fear that it’s going to be utterly negative, and that I’m not autistic, I’m just a defect.

I do find that, even when I try to lurk around autism based sites and feeds and so on, I feel that I still do not fit in with any of them.  Maybe if I get assessed and it’s positive, I will feel differently.  I don’t know.

In any case, I am back to work today, and if I survive until tomorrow, I will punish you all with another stupid blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*I did have a very nice phone call with my sister on Sunday night.  That’s always enjoyable.

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Some of this is metaphorical

I’m back on the smartphone to write today’s post, and I’m on my way into the office quite early.  I’ve already been awake for hours, but there was truly no point in getting up so far ahead of time, so I just laid around*.

I did get a bit of extra rest, because yesterday I left the office early, after only about a quarter of a day.  I didn’t really get any extra sleep, but at least I decompressed a little.  This means, however, that I am well behind on preparing the payroll, so today is going to be irritating.  It must be done, though, and no one else is going to do it.

I guess it’s good to be useful.

Yesterday, my boss suggested that I ought to take about three or so days off sometime, and do something fun.  But I just shrugged, feeling worse for having to say it, and asked him, “Where would I go?  And what would I do?”  In my head, I added, “There isn’t anything.  Or anyone.”  I really do nothing for fun, and certainly there is no one with whom I do anything fun, or even just hang out.

On the other hand, I don’t want just to hang out with someone and do something.  Trying to do some random activity with some random person would be more stressful than doing nothing.  My tastes and my personality are at least somewhat esoteric.  I wish I could find another member of my species.  But I fear perhaps that I’m just a mutant or a hybrid or something, and there is no other member of my species.

Certainly I feel no real sense of kinship with any of the major figures in any of the political parties.  The most vocal people on both the left and the right are flagrant idiots, and most of their statements** are, as I think I said yesterday or the day before, “idiocy on performance enhancers”.

The specific idiocies tend to be different on the two sides of the current spectrum.  The most extreme people are as different as Hitler and Stalin‒very different in their ideological dogmas, but all too similar in all the ways that count the worst.

Never trust anyone who is sure they know what’s right, because it’s pretty clear that no one does.  And people who believe that they know what’s right‒not just for themselves, but for everyone‒are capable of committing grotesque atrocities, all the while fumigating their self-image with the fact that they have good intentions.

You know what was built with good intentions, right?

My inclinations tend toward classical liberalism, à la John Stuart Mill et al.  I have sympathy for the most sensible of progressives, and I am a fan of progress in general.  But, of course, arrogating the word “progressive” to yourself (or “anti-fascist” or “patriot” or any other such “Look at me, I’m a good guy!” terms) does not actually make you progressive by any sensible use of the term.

Likewise for conservatism‒I can  sympathize with the notion that one should not just haphazardly make changes to long-standing ideas and institutions.  All improvement is change but not all change is an improvement.  Random change is as likely to be bad as to be good‒probably more likely, like random mutations in the genome of a reasonably well-adapted organism.

But there are so very many “conservatives in name only” and “Republicans in name only” in the sense that they are not really in line with anything that the GOP has traditionally promoted, nor any sensible conservatism.

As DMX said, “Talk is cheap, motherfucker.”  Or, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, progressive is as progressive does, conservative is as conservative does.  And perhaps most egregiously, Christian is as Christian does.  Ugh.  Dealing with that hypocrisy*** would take a  whole post at least, and right now I don’t have the stomach for it.

So, to make myself a bit clearer, in case anyone was confused by my recommendations that the left should avail itself of its 2nd Amendment rights:  the reason I addressed them thusly was that they are traditionally the side that’s been more opposed to personal gun ownership and use, and so they are less likely on average to have guns.

It is the “right” who are currently in power (in the US) and they are pushing many boundaries of constitutionality (and they also tend to be fans of militarized police forces and the like).  So, if you fear that they are going the way of fascists and authoritarians in the past‒and there is at least some evidence to support this thesis‒then you must admit something the right has long since pointed out and of which it has in principle been aware:  it is harder to oppress an armed populace than it is an unarmed populace.

I’m against oppressors, authoritarians, totalitarians, etc., on any side, largely because I know‒to the extent that I know anything at all‒that they are mere flesh and blood, mortal, tiny-minded Naked House Apes.  This fact is not shameful in and of itself‒no one chooses their own nature‒but when nearly hairless, ridiculous-looking primates start thinking that they are something fundamentally superior or even divine, that they are anything but dust in the wind, then they start making messes.

If it were only themselves that they were hurting, things would be better.  Though it would still be sad, it would be morally tolerable.  But like drunk people getting behind the wheel of a car or like people who refuse quite safe vaccination against highly communicable and dangerous diseases, they become a danger to other, innocent**** people.  And, when threatened with the unrepentant use of force (deliberate or negligent, active or passive) by such supremely finite minds, people have the right‒if there is any right to anything at all‒to protect and defend themselves, and their loved ones, and the innocent, and the helpless, with force.

Of course, even this must be done judiciously, and one must always exercise the principle of charity against even one’s perceived opponents.  The presumption of innocence is crucial, and not merely at the obvious level.  Otherwise matters are prone to degenerate into mindless feuds.

It’s not that your opponents are not monsters; it’s that you are also a monster.

That’s enough for today.  I’m already exhausted.

*Weirdly enough, this is unrelated to getting laid or sleeping around.  Believe me; it’s completely unrelated.

**I was going to use the word “argument” but that would be an insult to the word.

***Based on the gospels, Jesus really did not approve of hypocrisy.

****In this matter, at least.

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No one else here will save you

It’s Saturday, and I’m writing another blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, actually, you can say that‒nothing is stopping you from enunciating those words‒but if you do, you’ll either be mistaken or lying.  And it would be hard to excuse you making that mistake, since I’m right here, reminding you that I did warn you, and I’m even putting a link in* to the post in which I warned you.

As for topics about which to write, well, I don’t know.  The world is such a boring place right now.  There’s nothing interesting or troubling or unusual happening at all.

I was being tongue-in-cheek there, as I hope was obvious (though social media and the internet more generally have shown us that this can never be taken for granted).  However, it’s also true that the tragicomedy of current politics is not really very interesting, any more than is any other set of primate dominance conflicts.  To the primates themselves, and perhaps to those who study them, it might be interesting, but to everything else in the universe‒including yours truly‒it’s just a bunch of noisy, smelly, stupid animals making a mess while jockeying for positions in a contest that only matters to them (and not even to all of them).

But it is still a potentially violent process, and there tend to be brutal injuries and fatalities, so I’ll repeat my admonition:  it’s fun to repeat the slogan “punch a Nazi” but it’s important to recognize that that is just a slogan, like “catch the wave:  Coke” or “nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”**.

The actual Nazis‒you know, the real ones from 30s-40s Germany, not just the people you call Nazis the same way some might say “your mama”‒were stopped by people with real weapons, and it required real violence and personal danger.  Passive or verbal (or even fist-based) resistance works against relatively civilized opponents, like the colonial British in India, but would not work against actual Nazis, actual fascists, or against other actual totalitarians like the Soviets or Pol Pot or Chairman Mao and his successors, or the various smaller-scale dictators, authoritarians, totalitarians, and just generally other bully types throughout history.

Such people are not civilized‒not completely‒and they will use force against those who oppose them, or just against those whom they don’t like, or of whom they don’t approve 

You can say “punch a Nazi” when you’re talking about people who just act like Nazis, or who seem to sympathize with such ideologies, but when it comes to actual “Nazis”, the slogan should be more along the lines of the Joker’s three favorite things‒dynamite, and gunpowder, and gasoline.

Or, as Chris Cornell sang in his Casino Royale Bond song:  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The political right in the US has long been the group of people who are most fervent about defending the 2nd Amendment, but the right has betrayed so many of its former ideals already, and totalitarians (and would-be ones) will generally do their best to disarm a populace they want to control or oppress or simply to kill.  So, if you’re at all serious in thinking that those on the current “right” are akin to Nazis‒and this is not necessarily wrong‒I say again, get weapons and train yourself to use them well.  Learn the arts of sabotage and improvised munitions.  Take a bartending class and learn to make a Molotov Cocktail***.  Heck, buy a flamethrower; they’re legal (and ironically, they don’t count as firearms).

Of course, in fighting against oppressors, it is essential to remember Nietzsche’s admonition about fighting monsters and gazing into abysses.  Learn from the examples of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution; “revolutionary” ideologies tend to turn into paranoid self-policers, but not necessarily in a good way.  Remember, many of the initiators of the French Revolution ended up meeting the Guillotine themselves at the hands of their own co-revolutionaries.

Remember Robespierre.  Remember Trotsky.  Don’t become just as evil as the people you oppose.  Also, remember the presumption of innocence (even for people you hate) except in true, immediate danger to life and limb.  Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean they are evil (and just because you like them doesn’t mean they are not).  Just because you are fighting against “bad guys” doesn’t mean you are necessarily a “good guy”.  To be a “good guy” requires self-reflection and self-criticism and devotion to the concept of fallibilism.  Remember, Stalin fought against Hitler and helped defeat him, but he was most assuredly not a good guy.

On that cheery set of notes, I wish you a happy weekend.  Wishes may be useless, of course, as ineffectual as “thoughts and prayers”, but they are real, nonetheless.

*Not referring to the website/social media platform LinkedIn.

**I know these slogans are really old, but none that were more recent popped into my head, and I couldn’t be bothered to try to think of one.

***Yes, I know, it’s not a real drink.

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I don’t have the energy to do a Shakespeare quote title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and this is technically the 4th blog post of the week, though yesterday’s post felt a bit disjointed and erratic.  I didn’t edit it much, and frankly, I’m not sure I had anything to say 

I did, though, get the “inspiration”, or perhaps the geas, to throw together that little slide-show-style video to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3 that I shared yesterday.  I did the whole thing in the morning before I posted, and threw it up on here and on Instagram.  I didn’t share a version of it to YouTube, because I figured it might get blocked.  I know it wouldn’t be monetized, but my channel isn’t monetized, anyway.

I don’t know if anyone really caught the meaning I was conveying.  Basically it’s a montage of pictures from my former life, of the people I love whom I no longer see, some of whom are dead, and basically all of whom are gone from my life.  Early on, the pictures are dominated by, or at least include, people who are dead.  Then there are loads of shots of my kids, some including my ex-wife and even me, then some of my coworkers and so on, switching from one to the next to the beat of the song.  Then, at the end, there’s a massively altered picture of me that looks just a bit like I’m made out of bricks:

The point is that, as the song sings, “I don’t need no arms around me…”  It’s showing all the people whose arms are not around me* and probably never will be again, and so on.  It’s appropriate and it is just, though; I’m not a person who is worth embracing.

Anyway, those last two songs on the first album of The Wall have always meant a lot to me, albeit in a very dark way.  They’re basically about giving up, about recognizing that you’re alone and you’re always going to be alone, and that’s just the way it is.  Also, relationships are perilous, especially if you’re the sort of person people tend to end up leaving.  To quote a different song that I’ve already covered, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”  How can you not want to build a wall?

Some of us come with some sort of pre-built wall that requires active and sustained effort to lower, and which spontaneously regenerates even as you try to break it down.  It gets terribly exhausting.

Of course, it’s the following song from The Wall that’s most prominent to me, and I am going to start working on a video for that, but it won’t be a one morning thing made in a sort of compulsive fever dream state like this last one was.

Yesterday I was so wound up by the time I posted my “video” I had to close my little office door before work because I couldn’t stop crying for a while.  It wasn’t anything extravagant; I wasn’t sobbing or anything.  I was just sort of quietly crying, but it didn’t want to stop, and I didn’t want the people in the office to see me when they arrived.

I’m beginning the final novel of the light novel series I mentioned before, after which I’ll be pretty much done with every book I can find any interest in reading.  I cannot even sustain my interest in the e-book version I found of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is one of my favorite books.

None of the hundreds of fiction or nonfiction books in my Kindle library catch my attention; they all seem boring.  And none of the books on Amazon seem interesting at all.  Many of them seem just frankly moronic.  To quote another song from The Wall, “…nothing is very much fun anymore.  And I…can…feel…one of my turns coming on.”

I haven’t played any guitar so far this week.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.  I haven’t drawn anything apart from a weird doodle of a sort of demonic cartoon caterpillar on the top of one of our deal sheets.

I used to do that sort of thing all the time.  In undergrad and in med school, though I always brought a notebook and tried to take notes, that’s never really been the way I learn things.  So, my college and medical school notebooks are a smorgasbord of doodles‒some comical, some dark, some frankly horrifying, some very rough and some rather artistic.  I don’t know what has happened to any of them.

I feel as though I’m approaching the end of all this.  And so, I intend to make a sort of video to the song Goodbye, Cruel World, the last song on the first album of The Wall, and maybe release it as a message.  It’s not an iff** sort of statement.  For instance, I might not finish or post a video and yet still kill myself.  I came pretty close yesterday.  But no one seems to have noticed.

And, of course, even if I post it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will kill myself or have killed myself.  I might fail, even if I try.  And someone might even stop me.

Ha ha, just kidding.  That last scenario is definitely not gonna happen.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope (and trust) that almost all of you are feeling much better than I am.

TTFN

*Actually, technically, if I were to show pictures of everyone whose arms are not around me and will not be, I’d have to show pictures of everyone in the world, which would take too much time.

**That’s mathematics-speak for “if and only if”.

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Detritus

Well, I’m getting ready to go to the office this morning.  It’s payroll day, which means I’ll be more stressed out than even I usually am.  It’s really gotten to be more complex over time, with different people being paid in different ways and rates and with different incentives, and people in our new, other office.  Oh, and now we’re getting yet a new “product” to sell which is going to require more differentiation and so on.  Huzzah!

I don’t know why I keep writing this blog.  I feel like I’m just continually rehashing the same things, saying the same things over and over again, not even really expecting different results.

Incidentally, there’s no actual (reliable) record anywhere of Einstein saying words to the effect of “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  Frankly, it doesn’t even seem like anything he would have said.  It doesn’t make sense, either‒it flies completely in the face of the idea that someone can improve with practice at something, or that in some circumstances retrying something over and over again occasionally brings about different outcomes.

Einstein apparently did say that there are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  Of course, as a Jewish scientist, he left Germany in the 30s (I think) because he saw the products of the breed of human stupidity that arose there at around that time, so you can understand why he might take a dim view of human intelligence.  I wonder what he would think of us now.

Anyway, I’m still taking my “antidepressant” and also trying to adjust things better to control my chronic* pain.  I can feel the immediate effects of the St. John’s Wort, which I always do when I take it.  Dry mouth, slightly less reactive, and feeling a bit stiffer (metaphorically) and more socially withdrawn in the morning for a while after I take it.  It’s not making a difference for my sleep, that’s for sure.  But, again, maybe it will at least give me enough of a boost finally to act on my desire just to stop existing.

It would be nice if it at least gave me more will or drive to exercise, which it has done in the past, though not every time I’ve taken it.  At least it doesn’t tend to give me the asthenia that I would get with SSRIs, and it doesn’t give me the rampant and intolerable tension and anxiety that Wellbutrin and Effexor gave me.  It’s closest in character to the old tricyclics‒amitriptyline and nortriptyline‒but not as groggifiying.  Anyway, hopefully it does something to help me make some changes.

I think of depression as being at least partly a disease of gumption, a disease of the will, where the sense of motivation is impaired.  Or perhaps it’s more of a psychological autoimmune disorder, where the mind turns upon itself.  That’s an oversimplification, and there are certainly more aspects to it than that, but that is at least part of it.

Of course, there may be other factors at play in my brain.  I’ve encountered a place online that does reasonably priced autism assessments (I found it through Threads) and I may avail myself of that.  It is slightly worrying, of course.  It sometimes feels nearly certain that, if assessed, I would be told, “No, you don’t have ASD or anything related to it.  You’re just fucking out there like Vega, you don’t even count as human.”  Which would come as no real surprise, but it would be somewhat disheartening.  How does one treat, or at least accommodate, someone who is an alien?

I don’t know what I will do with any knowledge I gain through that process, if I do it.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe I’ll just flush it all away with every other bit of information I’ve ever taken in.  I guess that’s what’s going to happen one way or another, anyway, right?

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, or have good days, if that should be plural to match the subject.  I suppose I’ll probably write another blog post tomorrow.  I’m sure you can hardly wait.

In the meantime, here’s a little “video” (really more of a slide show) that I threw together this morning, to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3.

*I originally made a typo there and wrote “chromic” pain, which sounds like something from which a synesthete might suffer‒a chronic discomfort that they experience with all the colors of the rainbow.

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…since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble blogger is mad.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.  That’s why I did the whole “hello and good morning” thing.  I started doing that, not thinking much about it, when I first started my weekly blog as a would-be promotion for my fiction.  Then, when I started doing posts every workday, I still made it a point to use that phrase on Thursdays.  That’s the kind of odd person I am:  I keep traditions and habits that absolutely no one cares about, because really, nothing I do is actually consequential to anyone, including me.

I seriously think I may just stop doing this now.  In fact, yesterday, my tentative plan was to come on today and do a post with the title “I’m not doing this anymore”, and with content consisting of “It’s just a waste of my time and that of anyone who reads it.  Oh, well.  Whatever. Never mind.”  And that was going to be that.

But I figured maybe I would give a slightly more polite sendoff, so here it is.  Who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind.  I can’t readily make or maintain any commitments right now‒except, it seems, for the commitment to use some version of “Hello and good morning” on any Thursday blog post, for what that’s worth.

All sorts of little ideas and thoughts come into my head about what I want to do.  I want to learn more quantum mechanics and relativity.  I want to start to learn Russian, or learn more Japanese, or bone up on my Spanish.  I want to start “audio book” recordings for Son of Man.  I want to make video recordings of me playing and singing various songs, like Ashes to Ashes, The Man Who Sold the World, or One Headlight, or Nothing Compares 2 U, or any of a number of other songs I can play and sing reasonably well.  I want to get a new acoustic guitar.

I want to finish my started and planned works of fiction. I want to draw.  I want to paint.

I want to try to get an “official” diagnosis of ASD (or not).

I want to wipe out the whole human race and all other life on Earth.

(None of these things is likely to happen.)

More than anything else, I want…well, I don’t know how to put it but that I want to be able to rest.  But I can’t seem to do it, not unless I’m deathly ill.  I’ve already been awake today since 1 am‒no slipping in and out of a doze this time‒and that was after only maybe two and a half hours of sleep.  I’m so tired.  But I’m not sleepy.

TTFN

P.S. – The picture above is an original work.

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Pulling a trigger warning

[Seriously, I talk about suicidal thoughts and ideas of methods, as well as self-harm here, and I don’t want to trouble anyone who might be “triggered” by this…I do enough damage to people who are even figuratively close to me, and I don’t want to do that even more, so if this will, or even might, upset or worsen your mental state, please don’t read any more of it.]

I was a bit hypo-manic yesterday morning or something; sorry about my little tangent fest.  Today I mean to keep things shorter.

Work has been hectic and too up-and-down for easy tolerance lately.  Today is payroll day, so I’m going in early to get that done, but it will be chaotic and urusai and stressful no matter what.

I used to be able to deal with stress, not by avoiding stressful things but by not letting things bother me, by keeping things in perspective, by having good enough personal support systems in place, by having a good philosophical outlook, by meditating, what have you.  No longer.  The person I used to be is dead.  His remains are just sitting here and rotting, as you would expect from an unburied, unpreserved corpse in a hot, humid climate.

I hate my life.  Honestly.  Seriously.  I am trapped in this idiotic universe full of even more idiotic creatures and things, of which I am a prime example.  There is, of course, a way to escape, but to avail oneself of it requires courage, and I haven’t yet been able to work that courage up.  I’m trying.  I’ve come close.  It’s only a matter of time.  A natural 20 may be a relatively hard “saving throw”, but it will happen eventually.

It’s funny, but it occurred to me lately‒thinking frequently about such matters, as I am‒that it would be easier for me to shoot myself in the gut, sort of Van Gogh style, than to shoot myself in the head.  It’s hard to say why, exactly.  I have “played” Russian roulette once, and though I did pull the trigger (barrel in mouth, aimed as carefully as I could), I didn’t go for a second turn.  I just cried by myself in my stupid old apartment.  And that was before I even went to jail or prison for trying (cluelessly, it must be said) to help relieve the suffering of other people experiencing chronic pain.

I came to a realization when I responded to something someone on Threads said‒about just wanting to be shot in the head‒by saying that I would rather take it in the gut, because it would be slower and more painful.  I realized that I really would find it easier to shoot myself in the belly than the head.  Perhaps it’s because I could then experience the process and the pain.  Maybe it’s because it would give me a sort of chance to change my mind at the last minute or something.  I don’t know.  I suppose at some level I’m still a coward.  Anyway, I don’t own any guns anymore, so it’s a bit moot.

Weirdly enough, I doubt that I would be able to stab myself in the gut, let alone do anything like seppuku.  This is probably at least partly because one has to apply the force oneself, whereas with a gun, the bullet rockets out quickly and without hesitation once the trigger is pulled.

Using fire would be hard, too.  I know that I’m able to burn myself deliberately, because I do it from time to time (twice, yesterday) but it’s always at least a little startling how much it hurts, at least for an instant.  It can actually be almost invigorating, especially when some surprising little phenomenon happens, such as something in your skin giving a little “pop” when hot metal touches it.

A whole body process would be quite intimidating, though.  I have enough flammable liquids to do it, but I think that would be most appropriate for some sort of public statement of a death.  I’ve thought of going to sit out in front of the Palm Beach County courthouse (where the finishing blows to my life were delivered) and immolating myself, but you want to make sure you’re committed completely before trying something like that.  Otherwise it would be very embarrassing.

Maybe the best way, by some measures‒other than actual medically provided euthanasia, perhaps with some combination of high-dose valium, fentanyl, and digoxin‒would be hypoxemic asphyxiation, when you would just sort of go lightheaded and “faint” and, if you’ve done it right, just drift away.  I gathered the equipment for this not too long ago.

But of course, if you’re interrupted, or you accidentally dislodge your apparatus while losing consciousness, you could just get brain damage from hypoxemia and not even die.  To be honest, I don’t know how much worse my brain could possibly even be than it is now, but it’s a fact of reality that things can always get worse, even if it’s not true that they can always get better.

It would be good if something (not someone) else took it out of my hands.  Every time I start getting better from a respiratory infection I feel disappointed.  Where is the pneumonia that will develop over top of my URI and usher me away from this shit hole of a universe?

It’s a cliché that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.  It isn’t easy.  But I’m working on it.

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Maybe it’s signal. Maybe it’s noise. Maybe it’s Maybelline?

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I don’t know that I have anything of use or substance to say, or anything to say that isn’t mostly just noise.  Perhaps I’m just some peculiar source of radio static in the background of the universe.  Or perhaps…perhaps I’m just pretending that what I do is unplanned, when in fact everything is calculated and subversive.

Ha!  I wish.  My brain doesn’t work like that, and I’m not sure anyone else’s does, either.  Even John Von Neumann had to develop complex mathematics and sophisticated models to deal with the limited degree of uncertainty in highly simplified versions of one-on-one poker.  If he was so intrigued by what he‒possessing perhaps the highest general intelligence of which history is firmly aware‒could not fully model, then this is strong evidence that no one, now or ever, has really been in control of anything.

Of course, game theory has advanced since Von Neumann co-invented it, and it is certainly useful, but it is clear that, at best, it deals in probabilities and tendencies.  There is no Asimovian 2nd Foundation Hari Seldon psychohistory that can figure out the specific events of whole galactic civilizations well into the future, and I doubt there ever will be.

Of course, if we want to be trivial, we can predict the far future with some degree of confidence:  Eventually, unless our knowledge of the universe is deeply mistaken*, as entropy increases inexorably, new stars will stop forming, old stars will burn out (even red dwarfs), black holes will evaporate, and the universe will be a thin haze of elementary particles.  Indeed, if everything eventually reduces to massless bosons (e.g., photons) then in a very real sense, time will literally have no meaning, since photons, being massless particles, do not “experience” time.  From their point of view‒to speak very figuratively‒their entire existence is instantaneous.

Of course, going on to the very far future, given the nature of probability, new universes may arise.  Something like Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology may be the way things happen, or there may merely be a Poincaré recurrence of the universe.  Or maybe, as I’ve speculated previously, time is not one way, and our future might also be the future of another, far distant “big bang” but for which time/entropy increases in the opposite direction.

Also, of course, if civilization and intelligence persists and grows, which is not a small “if”, then who knows where technology will develop?  Our descendants could conceivably develop the capacity to do cosmic engineering, literally shaping the large-scale development of the universe, or even making new ones.

But I suspect they still will not be able to micromanage perfectly the interactions of innumerable agents in complex systems.  Some limits are fundamental, and I think this may be one.  This comes down to something related to my “Elessar’s First Conjecture/Theorem”, that no complex, intelligence can ever fully understand itself in detail, because to model a given complex system requires a system of greater complexity, which itself will need to be described, leading to an infinite regress.

And, of course, we know that in complex systems, in which interactions are stochastic and multivariate and nonlinear (and thus exhibit chaotic development) the specifics of future happenings will be unpredictable since to know them perfectly, we would need an infinite number of significant digits**, though in some cases‒like entropy‒we can make general predictions with high confidence.  

This is part of why “planned economies” fail, and almost certainly always will, unless they are stupendously lucky.  In any case, such luck will not last, just as neither strength nor good purpose will last in the presence of the One Ring.  This is also why most complex conspiracy theories are simply laughable.

People derive their models of the world to too great a degree from our ubiquitous visual entertainment, which has been around long enough to be deeply self-mimicking and self-derivative.  Gunshots and explosions don’t behave in real life the way they do in action movies, but action movies (and shows and videos) take their models of the world from previous action movies, much as an AI’s model of human speech and interaction, if derived from the internet, is going to be increasingly contaminated by the products of other AIs, and may end up veering far away from anything reminiscent of human interactions, at least if left to its own devices.

Maybe that’s an advantage of written fiction over movies and TV and other videos; it’s not presenting a simulation of some version of reality, it’s telling you a story, describing things, but you have to imagine them.  Meanwhile, if all your fiction is in words, your physical intuition of the real world‒and your psychological and sociological and economic intuition‒would be derived from real events, not the Machiavellian machinations of Manichean movie-based manipulators.

That was an interesting stream of consciousness, if I do say so myself (and I do).  Who could have predicted it?  Not I.  And I’m the one who wrote it.  Which goes to my point.

Please try to have a good day.

*This is always possible in principle, but for many aspects of cosmology, our credences can be justifiably high.

**I sometimes say that while knowledge can vary greatly, ignorance is always infinite.  This can be proven with a single, simple example:  the digits of pi.  There are an infinite number of them, and no matter how many we calculate, there will be an infinite number we don’t know.  Ditto for e and any other transcendental numbers, let alone all the other real numbers that have no specific designation, of which there exist an uncountable infinity.  And this is just one place where infinite information dwells, of which we will always have only finite knowledge.