Psychology

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Don’t worry; this won’t be like yesterday’s post

It’s Friday again, and I’m working again tomorrow, so this won’t be the end of the work week for me.  I did not walk to or from the train station yesterday, deciding to give myself that recovery day after nearly 24 miles of walking over the previous two days.  But I did walk to the station this morning.  I probably won’t walk back this evening, but that will depend at least a bit on how I feel.

I started off the morning yesterday in a moderately good mood, at least for me.  As you may have noticed, I was rather silly and self-indulgent as I wrote yesterday’s post, of which the footnotes were almost longer than the main body.  I feel better about such footnotes while reading Determined, because Robert Sapolsky seems at least as fond of frequent and often extensive asides as I am.  Maybe it’s something to do with having the name Robert*.

I often imagine that my less dark and somber and repetitive posts‒like yesterday’s‒will be more popular than my usual ones.  That’s certainly how I feel when I’m writing them:  “Here, at least, is something that readers might be able to enjoy, and which deals with somewhat interesting subjects.”

However, time and again, I have found that such posts receive fewer likes and comments and so on than my darker posts.  It’s been similar to the way my interactions with other people in the workaday world‒and before that, the academic world‒tend to be.  When I’m feeling relatively good, and feeling good about myself, people seem to find me confusing and irritating (at least based on the ways they interact with me, and their expressions, and the impatient tones of their voices, and their tendencies to keep their distance).  Maybe I just get too hyper and silly.

On the other hand, when I’m dysthymic and even fully depressed, although people do seem to find me a bit of a downer, they don’t seem to mind me as much.  It’s frustrating, but it’s been a long-standing pattern that I’ve noticed throughout my life.  It makes it that much harder to want to bother trying to be upbeat and energetic.  What’s the point, if when I’m actually feeling halfway good about myself I just rub other people the wrong way?

I guess maybe it would be different if I truly didn’t care whether people liked me at all or found me a pain in the ass.  But there are at least some people with whom I like to be on friendly terms, if I can, and that very class of people seems to find an upbeat, positive, energetic Robert to be annoying.  I guess maybe I’m just too weird overall; and at least when I’m depressed, the exposure of others to my weirdness is blunted, whereas when I’m in one of those increasingly rare states of higher energy, my weirdness comes out in full force.

I’m tired of this, anyway, all of it.  The universe, even in a form recognizable as similar to how it is now, may continue for tens of billions of years, but even the small span of years since I last saw my kids‒about ten and a half of them‒seems functionally eternal to me.  And, of course, depending on the time scale one uses, it could seem huge to anyone, and on other scales it can be unnoticeably tiny.  If one proceeds along orders of magnitude, rather than some linear measure, then the human lifespan is somewhere in the middle between the Planck time and the life of the universe, at least as we know it**.  But that’s neither here nor there.

When one is feeling depressed and hopeless***, people are prone to say things like “Be strong” and “Hold on”, as if these were self-evidently good things to do.  But they are not self-evidently good.  They are very much context-dependent.

If one follows such advice regarding a feud or vendetta or some other culturally negative or destructive matter, one is prone to do far greater harm than if one just let things go and gave up.  Think of Ahab in Moby Dick.  And wouldn’t it have been better if Hitler had killed himself ten years earlier than he did?  If many of the mass-shooter/suicide perpetrators had skipped some steps and just killed themselves in the first place, would not the world‒and its memory of those individuals‒be vastly better?

I need to leave, I need to escape, I need to stop trying.  I’m too exhausted.  Above all, I need to stop even hoping to be upbeat and positive.  It tends, mainly, not to be profitable (metaphorically or literally) for me.

Okay, that’s enough crap from me for now.  I’m working tomorrow, so the plan is for me to write another bloody post then.  I doubt that I’ll be lucky enough (or that you will be lucky enough) to have events intercede and let me stop trying anymore before then.  But I can always at least hope for the final disappearance of hope itself, even in its flimsiest fragments, so I can just call it a life and be done.

Maybe I’ll get lucky.  If not, well, I guess I’ll write some more tomorrow.

*I don’t really think so, of course.  It’s just a silly thought.  Though he has apparently also had lifelong trouble with depression, so maybe that could be a more realistic connection.

**Of course, if one thinks of the time needed for even supermassive black holes to evaporate due to Hawking radiation, we are far closer to the short than to the long.  Then again, when compared to infinity, any finite number, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero.

***And particularly if one expresses the fact that they feel suicidal.

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“No, I mentioned the bisque…”

Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, it’s Wednesday, I walked 5 miles to the train station, the weather is decent with strong wind for the walk.  The 610 train is just arriving, and now I’m waiting for the 630 one so I can cool down and dry off a bit.

That just about summarizes current events.  Oh, also I can honestly say that walking a total of 8 miles yesterday in the New Balance shoes seems to have worked well.  My left foot is essentially fine‒though I woke up once during the night to realize that, lying on my side, I had the arch of my left foot pressed almost aggressively against the ball of my right foot.  It made me wonder if that strange posture was a regular sleep habit and if it contributed to the foot arch pain I’ve been having.

Evidently, though, based on the fact that the foot is fine now after my five miles so far this morning and eight miles yesterday and that sleepy posture, it didn’t contribute much, if at all.  So, alas, there seems no saving grace for the boots.

I had the temptation to retry the other, slightly larger pairs that I had stopped wearing because they had caused me trouble before, just to try to rescue the boot-wearing.  This is how stupid I can sometimes be, it seems.  I really need to get rid of all of those so that I’m no longer tempted.  I wish I could give them to a good home or something, but I don’t see how I would be able to work that out.

It is good, at least‒I guess‒that I’m able to have gone so far over a couple of days without my ankle or arch or knees or hips acting up at any atypical level.  I am, on the other hand, at least a bit surprised and even slightly disappointed that there was no trace of any of my old, typical endorphin thing yesterday‒my mood wasn’t even briefly bolstered by the long walk.  And, so far, I don’t notice any sign of it today.

Maybe it’s just that the seasonality of my affective disorder and my ongoing, generally deteriorating mental health is overpowering any tendency to get a boost from exercise.  I’ve never really been one of those people for whom regular exercise effectively treats depression*.  Indeed, even when I was running six miles at a time and was in great shape, I still had the same trouble with depression.  Well, it was not “the same”, I guess.  It’s evolved over time and is worse now in some ways than it was when I was younger, though now I’m at least more familiar with it.  In fact, it’s one of the few recurring constants in my life since I was a teenager.  No wonder people don’t like to be around me too long if they can help it.

Anyway, that’s that and it is what it is, and all those other tautological bullshit phrases.  Speaking of which, a whimsical question just occurred to me:  “Is slackology the opposite of tautology?” That’s a very silly and stupid thing to say, I know, but what are you gonna do?  I’m stupid.

I must say, the 630 train is noticeably busier than the earlier ones tend to be, which makes sense, I guess, since it’s getting closer to the typical time for a workday to start.  However, the Tri-Rail people have adjusted for that, and this train has an extra car compared to the usual ones (the others all seem to have 3 passenger cars, whereas this one has 4).  Thus, though there are more people, it’s not more crowded.  Well done, Tri-Rail!

Okay…well, I think that’s that**.  Nothing interesting is going on, really.  I’m still reading Sapolsky’s book, and I listened to some LotR this morning.  It’s a good story to hear while walking, since it’s about a great journey (among other things).  God knows how many times in my life I’ve either read or listened to The Fellowship of the Ring, specifically.  I had read it more than 20 times even before I finished high school.  I almost surely must have passed 50 at some point in the more than 30 years since.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing much does.  So I’ll call that enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Though, of course, I cannot know that I would not have been even worse had I never engaged in regular exercise in the past.

**To repeat the tautological cliché from before.

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How can one walk in such a State?

Well, here we all are again.  I’m at the train station, having walked here this morning.  The weather’s not bad for walking; it’s warm, but not terribly humid, and there’s a good breeze.

I fear that the following conclusion is inescapable:  I will have to dispense with my boots for any serious walking, and possibly indeed for simple, day-long wear.  Though I walked a total of less than two miles yesterday, and had on knee supports and whatnot, my left foot and my right Achilles tendon, and my hip and back all were quite uncomfortable by the end of the day.  They were all still rather stiff and in pain this morning as I started out (now wearing my New Balance walking shoes) but by the time I’d gotten close to the station, that seemed to have been mostly wobbled out.

So…I feel better after 5 miles in these shoes than after just a physically idle day in the boots.  It’s very sad, and I’m probably far more disappointed than makes any sense at all.  I like those boots a lot.  But I have too much chronic pain already through which to fight to try to get anything done, so I really cannot expose myself to that extra damage.

I really ought to get rid of the boots just to eliminate the temptation to use them, lest I wear them in a fit of unjustified optimism and set myself back significantly.  It would be good to be able to donate them to someone or something, but I don’t really have the wherewithal to do so.  I have no usable vehicle, nor a driver’s license* to drive to an appropriate place for donation, nor anyone to drive me there, and I don’t want to take an Uber for such a purpose, and certainly not to renew my state ID.  If I’m not going to seek medical or psychological/psychiatric help for my much more serious concerns, then I’ll be damned if I’m going to supplicate myself to the bureaucrats of one of the most benighted states‒ironically so, given its nickname‒in the US.

I arrived at the station in plenty of time for the 610 train, but I let it go, as I did the last time I walked here, to give myself time to cool down and dry off a bit before the 630 train.  Also, of course, I’m writing this blog post.

I’m reading Robert Sapolsky’s new book, and it’s quite good and interesting, though so far it’s made no points nor discussed any facts with which I wasn’t already familiar.  I almost “flipped” ahead to the last chapter, because Sapolsky says he’s going to be discussing some esoterica about depression there, and I know he is both personally and professionally interested in that subject.  I hope‒not much‒to maybe learn something new, though I don’t expect it to help me at all.

I also listened to Sean Carroll’s latest podcast yesterday, and it was interesting, but quite short.  I took note and sent myself emails about 2 books, one that the guest recently wrote and one that he mentioned, about which I’ve heard before.  In that moment, I thought they sounded interesting, and I’m sure they would be.  But now that I’m past that first instant of intrigue, I know that I’m not going to get them.  Nothing is particularly interesting; even nothingness itself is not terribly interesting.  I’m reading Sapolsky’s book because I’ve been waiting for it for months, and I liked his earlier book, Behave, and I enjoyed his “Great Courses” course.  He’s an interesting individual.

But there’s only so much I can do to maintain engagement.  I don’t have anyone in my day to day life with whom I can talk deeply about pretty much any of this stuff, and my own company isn’t adequate to keep a conversation going.

I don’t really watch any TV shows or movies or anything‒I mainly just watch “reaction” videos on YouTube, because that’s almost vaguely like watching the movies or shows with a friend who hasn’t seen them before…but not really.  There’s no back and forth, obviously, unless one counts the comments sections, which I don’t.

Also, I have to face it, pretty much none of the people whom I enjoy watching react to various movies or shows would probably want to hang out with me.  They all would surely have better things to do with their time, and certainly better people with whom to do whatever they do.  I’m not just making a snap judgment here; this has been my consistent experience in life.  Most people get tired of being around me before too long, even if they like me (or love me), and in all fairness, I have to admit that I find being around most other people quite stressful and tense much of the time, even if I like them.  A big part of that is, of course, born of fear, and the fact that I sense and recognize how much they think I’m weird and unpleasant, but it’s not as though I can just choose not to fear and sense and recognize those things.

It’s a conundrum indeed, to want to have friends but to have such a peculiar character and  such specialized and rarefied interests that like minded people are hard to find and that in any case one has difficulty maintaining relationships with other people even in the best of circumstances.

Oh, well.  Life is shit, but the world never promised that it would be kind or fulfilling or just or fair or pleasant.  It promises only one thing.

On that note, I’ll bring this post to a close.  It’s already overlong.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Also, my state ID expired Friday, and the stupid website for renewing it has been dysfunctional for as long as I’ve been trying to request a renewal.  I will probably try once or twice more, but I have no desire to try to make an appointment to go to the offices‒none of them are anywhere near where I live or work, and I obviously cannot drive to them.  There’s not really any point to getting the thing renewed, anyway.  It’s not as though my identity itself was granted to me by the state of Florida (AKA America’s syphilitic penis).  The whole state can drown for all I care…and before too very long, much more of it will indeed be underwater than already is.  I’d rather see it burn, but you can’t always get what you want.

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And damn’d be him that first blogs, ‘Hold, enough!’

Hello and good morning yet again.

It’s Thursday, of course, and‒being a bit compulsive, as I am‒I could not fail to start this blog post with some form of “Hello and good morning”.  For those of you who like that consistency, you’re most welcome.

I did not walk to the train this morning, though I am wearing my New Balance walking shoes, because when I awakened for the first time during the night‒sometime between 1230 and 1 am‒I already noticed that, despite a modicum of rest, my right Achilles tendon was sore and burning when I moved it.  It is still a bit sore this morning.  So, apparently, my interventions yesterday, such as they are, were not adequate to stop the boots from causing my weak spot trouble*.  I will at least say that the arch of my left foot seems reasonably okay, but even it has a bit of a twinge.

So, with regret, I fear I need to retire my boots for any serious long walking, which seems ironic, but such is life.  Anyway, the NBs are lighter and easier to carry along in any case.

As for other things, well…I don’t know.  I really don’t have much to report.  The weather is slightly warmer today than it was yesterday‒I’m not wearing a hoodie at the train station right now, but I’m comfortable‒but it’s nowhere near the oppressive heat and humidity we’ve had until recently.  It would’ve been a decent morning for walking, but there’s not much to be done about that.  I don’t want to exacerbate my heel.  “He’ll let the heel heal for a bit,” one might say of me.

I’m not sure if I’ll write a post tomorrow.  I’m not sure if I’ll go to the office tomorrow.  I almost decided not to go today, but I want to bring my laptop computer back from the office, and I forgot to do that yesterday.  But tomorrow, if I still feel like I do this morning‒or worse‒I may not go in.  You’ll know, if there’s no blog post tomorrow, that I haven’t gone to the office.  And, of course, as I have said, I don’t work this weekend.

After that, who knows?  I don’t have any vision of next week, frankly.  I have some vague notions and ideas, but I don’t know what will happen.

I also don’t know what else to write about today.  There’s nothing going on.  I’m still not writing fiction or singing or playing guitar or “piano”.  I haven’t done any drawing in a very long time.

I also haven’t been reading this week, really.  I haven’t made any more progress in Robert Sapolsky’s new book, though I was looking forward to it.  I’m certainly not looking forward to any other books, nonfiction or fiction.  There are no movies or shows of interest to me.  Not even the upcoming Doctor Who specials are of interest, nor the new season.  And though Loki season 2 has been okay so far, I could miss the rest without much regret.  I certainly don’t see anything coming down the movie pike that’s worth anticipating.

I think I’m just about down to the dregs.  I don’t have much to offer but muck and sediment and sand.  There might be people out there who are into that kind of thing, but I’m not sure who they are.  I appreciate all of you reading even when I’m writing absolutely nothing of value.  I wish more people could have read my books; I think there are some decent stories there, and it would be nice to share them with more people.  Oh, well.  I guess most authors feel that way, at some point.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, I think.  It’s a short post, but surely that’s a relief if anything to dedicated and loyal readers.  Have a good day and, in case I don’t write a post tomorrow, have a good weekend.  Please.

TT(FN?)

Welcome Home Medium in prog (2)

*It is, of course, an appropriate location for a weak point.

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“Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor?”

I didn’t walk to the train today, nor did I walk from the train yesterday evening.  I just felt too mentally fatigued‒no worse last night than this morning, and no better.  Also the weather is still just disgusting.  It’s almost as hot this morning as yesterday, and it’s just as muggy.  I am, however, saddled up (so to speak) for walking back from the train this afternoon.

We’ll see what happens.  My current self thinks it’s a pretty good idea, but my afternoon self, faced with his immediate set of metaphorical force vectors, may arrive at a different vector sum than the one at which my current self wishes to arrive.  It’s always easier to discount future costs than present ones, even if those future costs might be extreme.

For good, sound, biological reasons, we’re “designed” to weigh present costs and benefits far more seriously, to find them much more salient, than future costs.  But things like game theory and other decision theory matters can make it clear to us that, sometimes at least, we should override those weightings of present cost/benefit relative to future ones.

However, knowing what we “should” do and doing it are not the same.  And then, of course, there’s always the is/ought separation, pioneered by Hume, which some people find worrisome, but which I think doesn’t make much difference in most cases.  Anyway, we all know that a person saying, “Starting next week, I’m going to give up desserts” (and really meaning it when they say it) is much different than someone actually turning down an offered slice of one’s favorite cake (or whatever) in a given moment.  Different parts of our brains dominate at different times.

The urge for cake is a strong one*, especially if it’s a habit, and to suppress it in the moment requires effort, what one might call willpower.  But willpower, in some senses, is like muscular strength and endurance.  It has limits, and it can be fatigued.  For instance, it’s harder to resist temptations at the end of a busy day, especially if one had to concentrate and think and focus a lot during that day.  There are likely to be exercises that one can do, so to speak, to make one’s willpower stronger and improve its endurance, but they will not engender perfect willpower any more than weightlifting can give one limitless strength and never-ending endurance**.

This is one of the reasons it pays to have the people around you on your side if you’re trying to break some bad habit you don’t like.  Make sure no one offers you dessert, or drinks alcohol in your presence, or smokes near you.  And for gosh sakes, stay away from the crack dens if you want to break that habit!  Eliminate temptations as well as you can, unless and until you’ve broken that habit for a long enough time that your new habit of not having that old habit is consistently stronger than the old habit.  This can take a long time.  Sometimes it can take longer than one’s remaining life, and in such circumstances, one should never be complacent while one is alive.

Are the dead complacent?  Are they indulgent?  I suspect the answer is that they are neither, and that to ask such a question is a kind of category error, or at best something like a Zen koan.

How did I get onto this subject?  Oh, yeah, I was talking about my hopes and dreams for my future actions.  They’re not exactly inspiring or impressive future hopes and dreams.  But then, I’m not a particularly inspiring or impressive person, so I guess that’s appropriate.

My own personal future horizon, at least as far as I can see‒which I guess is sort of what horizon means‒is starkly limited, and often seems obscured by an impenetrable fog.  I have no feeling, no intuitive sense, of any real future for me.  I don’t really have any dreams or goals or wishes right now, other than negatory ones:  I want to stop, I want to escape, I want to cease having to try.  I’m tired 

I have thought, at times, that depression and dysthymia are, in some sense, disorders of the will, perhaps analogous to some type of muscular dystrophy or ALS or similar.  They can be progressive, relapsing/remitting, ebbing and surging, and yet overall persistently degenerative, depending on the individual and upon variables many of which are not well known.

In neuromuscular or related illnesses, one can probably improve one’s function or slow deterioration by doing physical and occupational therapy, including exercise of various kinds, taking appropriate medications, and so on, and this can make a real and substantial difference in the life of a person with a given disorder.  But unless one can correct or remove or even reverse the cause(s) of the disorder, assuming that cause is not an isolated event, then deterioration will continue, and the disorder will progress.

The rate of progression and its ultimate outcome will surely depend on many variables, and that rate might in some cases be brought to such a slow progression that it becomes irrelevant on the scale of one’s remaining life.  That’s the situation of someone whose depression is successfully controlled by ongoing therapy and medication.  It’s not cured, but it is held in check, and the result can at least be satisfactory, even if not ideal.

Some people don’t have that luck.  Some people have faster and more persistent progression.  It is not by their own doing; it is not something for which they can be blamed.  I think I can fairly say that no one ever made a fully informed choice to suffer from depression‒the disease itself affects one’s ability to choose rationally, and this is part of its corrosive power.  So cut them some slack if and when you can do so.

That’s about it for today, I think.  Have a good weekend.

foggy road 3 with fuzzy border

*If cake and other desserts don’t do much for you personally, then substitute some other less-than-perfect habit.  If you’re a smoker, consider the process of quitting smoking.  If you have other drug or alcohol problems, that will surely be a pertinent related concept.  If you just waste too much time on your phone rather than doing things you would have preferred to have been doing in hindsight, consider that.  There are probably at least some analogous situations that apply for everyone.

**Sorry, fans of One Punch Man.

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Annotations Pending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know what to do**.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Here we go again, it seems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“…no one here but me, oh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*I even had minor chest pains at one point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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