Psychology

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Aqua sea foam shame and be all a pile of cheese

Okay, well, today I’m writing this blog post‒or at least I’m beginning it‒at the train station, having walked here, since I hadn’t done that walk yet this week.  Of course, I’m soaked with sweat and I will probably be in a lot of pain today, but I’ve been in a lot of pain anyway, so I might as well get some exercise.

I’ve had a terrible time with respect to pain, even worse than usual, lately.  Yesterday, after taking three aspirin and two Tylenol at once, about half an hour later‒and for all of less than twenty minutes‒my pain faded briefly away, and it was ecstasy.  It was better than a holiday and a great book and a good movie with one’s favorite person.  Then that effect went away and the pain resurged back to prior levels.  It’s quite frustrating, almost a tease, though I don’t think anyone or anything is actually, deliberately doing any teasing.

And of course, though my coworker was back yesterday, he did that same thing where, even if I just say that I feel tired and worn out, he says that he knows how I feel.  I want to say, “No.  You don’t.  Even assuming your current pain is as bad as mine, try having that for more than twenty years, try losing practically everything that was ever important to you partly because of that pain.”

I of course really don’t want him to do any of that.  I hope his pain steadily decreases and his life improves and his family prospers and so on.  I don’t think I would wish my subjective experience on anyone else, though I know to a near mathematical certainty that there are many people whose lives are far more unpleasant than mine.  Still, mine is unpleasant enough, and I don’t recommend it.

I keep wanting to warn people at the office that I really don’t feel that I’m going to survive for much longer.  That’s what I’ve been feeling particularly strongly over the past few days.  I also feel grumpy and angry and hateful and spiteful, so I dislike my own self more than usual, which is saying something indeed.  But if I say to others that I don’t think I will survive much longer, the few people who take it seriously‒locally, anyway‒are the people with whom I don’t really feel a connection at all, and indeed, are the people I find most irritating (which is unfair to them, but I can’t seem to do much about it).

It’s a bit analogous to this blog, though the analogy is very weak.  I air my depression and pain and despair here, hoping either to be told some new information and ideas or to receive some form of help, either from without or from within, but after a while, if you keep writing about the fact that you feel miserable and your pain is worsening and you have thoughts of killing yourself‒but you haven’t actually killed yourself or tried to kill yourself yet‒people stop taking it very seriously.  I suppose that’s not completely irrational or at all unfair, but it is rather frustrating.  It really makes everything one does feel even more futile than it would have felt otherwise.

That’s part of what makes me think I should just give up on blogging, and on anything and everything else.  I should stop blogging, and I should also just recognize that I am not going to do any more music, nor will I write any more fiction, nor will I do any more drawing or singing or anything else creative.  I will not master General Relativity or Quantum Field Theory to the degree I would like to, which is to a near-professional level.

And I will certainly not make any new friends or develop any new romantic relationships; I will not have any form of new life or family.  I won’t achieve anything else of value in my life, I won’t ever see or rekindle my closeness with any of my old friends, and they are surely all quite happy about that.

I should just stop trying.  I should stop blogging, I should put away, give away, burn or otherwise eliminate all the hallmarks of foolish pipe dreams, I should stop getting new books or manga, cancel my cable and internet and streaming services and Amazon and all that and just let go.  I’m hanging on by my fingernails, anyway, and it’s damned uncomfortable.

Sorry this post isn’t much fun.  I don’t recall the last time I did a post that I thought was probably fun for anyone to read.  I’m even sort of dozing off while writing this, even though I’m now on the train.  I can only imagine how boring it must be to read.

Anyway, this is all almost certainly a waste of my time and of yours.  Sorry.  I hope it hasn’t been too dreary.  Thank you for reading it, in any case.  I really appreciate your kindness and patience.  I wish I could be more worthy of them.

All apologies

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There’s got to be some kind of kvetch

It’s Friday, and I’m standing at the train platform, writing this post on my smartphone, waiting for the second train of the day to arrive (I’m hoping it’s not delayed).  It’s a very exciting, jet-setting sort of life that I live, I know.

It’s unbearably humid this morning, and once again, I’ve started sweating copiously just from standing still outside.  I don’t think it was ever this bad up North where I grew up, except perhaps a few days of the summer every now and then.  Down here in south Florida, it’s like this for a good chunk of the year.

I had a particularly rough night last night, sleep-wise; by which I mean it was worse and more fragmented than usual, even for me.  I don’t think I got so much as a single hour of uninterrupted sleep, though over the course of the night, if you string all my sleep together, I probably got a few hours in total.  So, I’m a bit despondent to start the day today.  What else is new?

I had a bad day, mood-wise yesterday.  It was somewhat worse than usual, in the sense that I felt almost completely shut down inside, empty except for malignant self-hate.  Yet, I think all that showed on my face was a blank expression.  I’ve often, in the past, wondered how it is that people cannot see how horrible I feel, when it feels like it’s screaming out of my every pore.  But I guess my emotions don’t show on my face or in my voice.  I try to make them show here, but that doesn’t seem to do me much good, either.  It feels a bit like trying to use active sonar from inside a whirlpool; no recognizable message seems to get out to anyone, even though one is screaming and shouting and about to be dragged into the abyss.

That’s consistent with a “meme” I saw on Facebook yesterday that I downloaded.  I’ve made a slight adjustment to it, and I’ll share that version below, but it reads, “This is what depression looks like”.  Below this, there’s a gridwork of nine black and white pictures of smiling faces…but they’re all faces of well known people‒such as Robin Williams, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, etc.‒who have killed themselves or died in ways more indirectly related to depression.  I didn’t recognize every face on it, but the gist was obvious to me.

The train was five minutes late, again.  This is not horrible, of course, but it is still symptomatic of the slipshod ways in which our society functions.  It would be one thing if it happened only comparatively rarely‒even once or twice in a week might be tolerable‒but it’s running late more often than it’s on time.  When one considers that trains were one of the reasons that coordinated times from place to place were put in place, leading to GMT and ever more careful chronometry, the people running the system should really be ashamed of themselves.  The fact that they are not‒if they are not‒is something for which they should be doubly ashamed.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  (I have my ideas, but most people probably wouldn’t endorse them.)

I had a halfway decent day pain-wise yesterday, but my back seems to be trying to make up for le temps perdu this morning, so far;  my right lower back and hip feel like they’re full of broken glass at the moment.  Again, what else is new, right?

Oh, by the way, if anyone out there is affiliated with Google or Microsoft or any of the other software companies, could you send them the message from me that they should please stop doing updates on their systems which make cosmetic changes that don’t improve functionality but that, if anything, make their systems more awkward and clunky and kindergarten-like?

For instance, the new download process on Chrome on desktop is not better; it’s actually worse than before, keeping track of downloads at the top of the screen and showing progress with a weird little twirling symbol that looks like a casino chip.  It makes me feel like I’m gambling about whether my download is actually going to work.  The old system had downloads showing at the bottom of the screen, which made sense.  You could see the things you had downloaded there, at the bottom, until you were ready to clear them or open them.

Also, this irritating tendency to round all the corners of search bars and input areas and all that bullshit is just pathetic.  It’s inefficient.  You don’t see rounded corners on books and the like, because in media that use print, those shapes don’t make sense!  They’re wasteful of space, they’re inefficient, and they look dopey.  The only books with rounded corners are ones with thick, cardboard pages that are made for babies and toddlers, who might be prone to poke themselves slightly with a hard corner of a book.  But you cannot poke yourself with the corner of a search bar on a computer or phone screen.

If the average person needs such daycare center style safety corners on digital material, then maybe the average person has no business using digital material.  Maybe such people should try to work their way up to Little Golden Books before trying to get online.

But, of course, I don’t think the average person actually does want or prefer such nonsense.  I think the average user is quite practical and hardheaded (in a good way).  I think these idiotic changes are produced by lazy software engineers who want to be seen to be doing something to justify their pay, so they do visually obvious things that they imagine are aesthetically pleasing.

It would be better if they could improve real bugs*, of which there are always plenty.  But that would require serious mental effort and work, and when updates would happen…no one would notice any obvious difference most of the time.

Of course, that really is the way updates ought to be.  Functions that work shouldn’t change.  The update should be more like an effective vaccine or other preventive medicine:  you don’t notice its effect really, because the main effect is that you don’t get sick when you might otherwise have done so.  All that people will experience when using a well-updated system of software will be a normal period of use, but with fewer occasions of frustrating dysfunction.

Speaking of frustrating dysfunction, that’s it for me, today.  Regrettably, I can’t say that’s it for me forever, though I guess that’s possible.  I don’t work tomorrow‒I won’t work tomorrow‒so at earliest, I’ll be back on Monday.  Have a good weekend.

depression2

*Perhaps some of them are, of course; I should give credit if it’s due.  Perhaps most of their work produces results as I describe which are invisible because they simply correct former dysfunction, but then the developers and engineers feel that they have to do something to show that they really did update the system, so they make cosmetic changes as well.  Maybe it’s the equivalent of people getting stickers and pins and stuff when they’ve been vaccinated.  But, oy, it’s annoying.

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If thou hast no name to be blogged by, let us call thee devil.

Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote blog posts even when I was spending my other days writing fiction.  I tended to start those posts with some variation of “Hello and good morning”, and the title was always a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.  I’ve kept up that Thursday template even now that I blog daily, because I like to stick to a pattern or routine once I’ve established it.

The above information is provided for the sake* of any new readers of this blog.  Apologies to any long-time readers for the redundancy.

I walked to the train station this morning, after having rested a bit yesterday (I only walked a total of about 3 miles overall), since I’d walked almost 16 miles over the previous 2 days.  Thus far, including this morning’s walk, I’ve done about 24 miles this week.  That’s not too bad.

It would be faster if I could jog the distance; maybe I’ll eventually be able to do that.  I used to really like jogging/running, and even when I was in residency I used to run on the treadmill in the mornings.  I had to stop eventually, as I went into practice and had a growing family; time just wasn’t really available.  And since my back problem began, running has tended to exacerbate it.  Maybe, if I were to get back into shape and lose a bit of weight, that wouldn’t be an issue.

(And maybe if we all wish hard enough, there will be world peace and happiness, and unicorns will appear that poop ice cream that provides all nutrients humans need without any health detriments, and they’ll also pee sweet tea with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol but none of the negative toxicity.)

I’m sorry that my posts have been such downers lately (if they don’t come across that way to you readers, then I’m really not expressing myself well).  I’ve just been feeling steadily and persistently more despondent as time has proceeded.  My optimism, such as it ever was, has declined and declined, and my hope even of the possibility of any rescue or revitalization is diminishing.  I don’t see how my life is ever going to turn around and improve.

I’m just tired, you know?  I’m really quite worn down and nearly out.  Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily keep me from walking to the train despite the heat, and sometimes walking back from the train in the heat, but some of that fact is because I’m able to think of it as a kind of self-harm.

Of course, it’s self-harm that could backfire and end up doing me good, but that’s the chance a person takes when doing such things.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.  Which just goes to show that it’s really not a great idea to try to get mice and men together to make plans for things.  Their priorities just don’t mesh.

As for my own plans, I guess I don’t really have any.

I’m getting close to my train stop, and I haven’t written much yet today, and I certainly haven’t written anything of consequence.  I haven’t even reached 600 words yet, let alone 800 or 1000.  Should I try to push for more?  Or is this enough?  Is it already too much?

My life has almost certainly already been “too much”, by any reasonable, objective measure.  I really should do something about that.  But, of course, I don’t really want to make too big a mess for other people to clean up‒though why I should be so considerate is sometimes beyond me.

Also, I have the faintest, residual hope that somewhere out there, someone has some answers, some purpose or meaning that I can learn, or that I can discover.  But it is a faint hope.  I’ve sampled most of the popular, ready-made suggestions and ideas, from religion to philosophy to psychology and psychiatry, and so far have been thoroughly disappointed.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to want to die.  But I also don’t want facile, delusional, banal pseudo-motivation.

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for me‒nor was it made for you, or for any or all of us put together, as far as anyone can tell‒so I don’t expect it necessarily to fit my preferences.  Honestly, I don’t know what I would ask of a universe if I were given the opportunity to special-order one.  Any change I might request would likely have unexpected consequences, much in the way that any pharmaceutical intervention in the human body brings side-effects that can be quite unpredictable.

Now, take that to a cosmic scale.  Everything in the universe has to fit with everything else without producing any actual contradictions.  No part can contradict the whole, nor can it contradict other, actual parts.  You can speak a contradiction‒the rules of grammar allow it‒but you cannot instantiate one.  It’s analogous to the way you can write a computer program with a syntax error or an endless loop or an old “return without gosub” error, but the program will not run.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I don’t know what I’ll title this, or what picture I’ll add to it, but of course, if you’re reading this, you know, which is kind of cool in its way, showing as it does a form of temporal relativity and multidimensionality that has nothing to do with Einstein.  I hope you all are feeling reasonably well and trying not to get too overheated (in any sense).  With that in mind, I’ll close with a rather “chilling” but pithy statement I heard from a climate scientist in a WIRED YouTube video:  “On average, this is the hottest summer you’ve ever experienced.  It’s also the coolest summer for the rest of your life.”***

TTFN

for your own sake

*That’s “sake” with a long A and a silent E, not the transliteration of the Japanese word  酒, which means, in Japan, more or less any alcoholic beverage, but which in the West is how we think of Nihon-shu (日本酒), the Japanese so-called rice “wine”…which would actually be more a kind of a beer, since it’s made of grain, whereas wines are made from fruit (interesting side note:  originally the fermentation was begun after the rice was chewed and then spit into a container, because salivary amylase starts breaking the starches into sugar**).  “Sake” is one of the few Japanese things that doesn’t really do much for me.  I’ve yet to try Japanese whiskey, but since it’s based on Scotch whiskey, and produced with typical Japanese attention to detail, it’s probably pretty darn good.

**You can test this for yourself.  If you take an unsweetened white cracker (no pun intended) or, say, a bit of potato in your mouth and just kind of keep it there, perhaps chewing it, it will eventually start to become noticeably sweet…unless you’re so overexposed to sugary foods that your taste buds are too insensitive to notice.  Don’t do this experiment around other people, though‒you’re likely to get some odd looks.

***Of course, he is basing his predictions on current technology.  And though, as he pointed out during the video, our current carbon capture technology is woefully inadequate to turn things around on any reasonable scale, one must not underestimate the power of human ingenuity when Mother Necessity is standing over the world with a ruler, ready to rap everyone on the knuckles until they bleed.  The next Manhattan Project may well be geared toward developing newer, much more potent, means of carbon capture that could be effective on a scale big enough to correct climate change in a sensible time frame.  This won’t happen on its own and it won’t be cheap, but as more and more‒and richer and more powerful‒people start suffering from the effects of climate change, distractions will tend to fall by the wayside.  If they don’t, then I guess the human race will get what it deserves.

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Numbers and trains and colicky pains, those are of what this blog post is made

It’s Tuesday morning, August 8th, 2023.  I was writing out the numerical date combination as I saved this post draft, and of course writing that date, 8-8, is a tiny bit of fun, not least because it is the same whether in European or American configuration.

What’s also interesting‒to weirdos like me, anyway‒is that if you write 8-8-23, you can consider the fact that 2 to the 3rd power is also 8, giving you three 8s in a row, in a sense*.  It requires a bit of twisting to make it work, obviously, and just as obviously, you have to ignore the first two digits of the full year to make it even come close to working, but it can be done.

Such is the way with all such numerology (and bible codes and the like); they all involve tortured logic to the degree that you can find almost any sort of pattern you might want to create if you’re dedicated enough.  But those patterns are clearly all in the eye of the beholder.

There’s nothing wrong with seeing and finding patterns in things and being amused by them, but don’t imagine that those patterns are actually “real” in the sense that they are put there deliberately by someone or something other than the one who finds them.  To imagine that some other power is trying to communicate with, or about, you is called, if I remember correctly, “ideas of reference”, and can be a hallmark of delusional psychopathology.

People are prone to self importance, unfortunately.  Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism against the heartless meaninglessness of existence, but it is rather amusing and often pathetic.  Even Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight falls prey to this, though he is fictional and certainly not sane in any ordinary sense.  He says that he is an “agent of chaos”…as if chaos would need an agent.  Trust me, it gets plenty of work without any help.

Especially in fantastical literature, from myths, to heroic epics, to horror novels, to comic books and the like, people are often claimed to be “agents of…” various things, such as Death, Evil, Good, “The Balance”, that sort of thing.  In the real world, though, forces of nature and philosophical ideas do not operate through nor do they require “agents”.  Just imagine someone claiming to be “an agent of Gravity”, or “an agent of Electromagnetism” or “an agent of the Fine Structure Constant”.  It’s rather laughable.

Anyway, I’m not writing this on the night before posting‒that would have been the 7th‒but am sitting at the train station to write it.  I got to the station for an early train, but it is in fact delayed almost to the scheduled time of the next train, which is absurd and pathetic.

They’ve only just now begun an announcement that it’s going to be late, now that it’s already five minutes past its due time, and they say it will be delayed 15 to 20 minutes (currently the tracker estimate is actually 22 to 23 minutes late).  Then they say, “stand by for more information”.  They always say that.  But more information never arrives.  It’s just some kind of boilerplate that sounds quasi-military or official and impressive but means nothing.

I don’t understand why there are delays so often.  It’s their own schedule.  In Germany or Japan the people running this show would have been fired long ago.  And this is one of the best run things I know in this part of the world.  It would be enough to make me fall into despair-oh, if I weren’t already there**.

I had a bad day yesterday.  Though I did walk to the train, and that was fine, by the time I got to the office, I started having worse, and new, pain in my left mid to lower back.  It was very spasmodic and squeezy in nature, and quite severe.  I suspect I might have been passing a small kidney stone, given the character and location of the pain.

At my request, my boss tried to get me some urinalysis stuff from the local drug store so I could see if there was any microscopic blood in my urine, but all they had was UTI tests.  I didn’t have a UTI, to no one’s surprise.  Though maybe, just maybe, there was a trace of leukocyte esterase, which might indicate a tiny few white blood cells such as might accompany slight bleeding.

Anyway, the only thing I could do was drink lots of liquids, which I tried to do, and take lots of OTC pain meds, which I did.  It seemed gradually to progress and decrease, and now mostly there’s just a small remnant ache, overlying my usual pain.  It’s too bad I didn’t hurt enough for me to go to the hospital, but all they would have done at most would have been to give me IV fluids and maybe some pain meds.  Probably not.  There’s nothing much to be done.  Life is pain, as the Dread Pirate Roberts said.

Well, they have canceled that late train‒apparently due to mechanical troubles‒and now it’s started to rain heavily.  The 540 train is going to be doubly crowded now.

I hate crowded stuff.

Then again, basically, I hate my life and I hate myself, which is the ironic, opposite counterpart of the mantra which, as I mentioned yesterday, I formerly tried to train into myself.  In the morning, I feel miserable about going to the office, and in the evening, I feel just as miserable about heading back to the house.  There’s nothing in either place that gives me joy, and sleep for me is neither very long nor unbroken nor restful.  I don’t remember the last time I slept more than 2 hours before I started waking up repeatedly, not at all refreshed.

At least at the office there are people with whom I can talk, though not really about anything in which I have any interest.  I can call my sister sometimes in the evenings, when she’s off work and I’m not too tired and I get off early enough.  Or on a weekend.  That’s good.  It’s infrequent, though, and my poor hearing is annoying when using cell phones.

Otherwise, my life is empty, as you all know by now, I’m sure, and there’s no prospect of anything new or good or interesting in the future.  What does one do with something once it’s empty?  Well, if it’s recyclable, I guess one can recycle it.  I am not a recyclable container, as far as I know, or if I am, I’ve already been recycled a few times, if you can call major, sometimes catastrophic life changes to be “recycling”.  The usual practice after recycling is done, I think, would be to throw the empty container away.

That’s enough blogging for today, I think.  It’s probably more than enough for any day or any lifetime.  I’m really sore, and I’m really tired.

*By the way, 8 to the 3rd power is 512, which astute readers will note is also 2 to the 9th.  This makes sense because 2 to the third is 8 (as noted), and taking 2 to the 3rd to the third is the same as taking 2 to the 9th.  It’s some minor fun with exponents, and with powers of 2 and 8, which certainly is pertinent to bits and bytes in computer science.  On the other hand, 8-8-8 is just negative 8, and 8-8-23 is just  negative 23, which is at least a negative prime number (so to speak), but otherwise, it’s all rather dull.  In any straight arithmetic process, 8-8 is always going to be zero.

**Here’s a bit of an amusing note: the 515 train is now expected to arrive 5 minutes later than the 540 train, which appears to be moving steadily and on time.  Did that train pass the other?  Did they switch official route numbers?  Why is the other one having trouble?***

***As we now know, it had mechanical problems.  Perhaps they need more, better, and newer cars and engines.  They could increase local gasoline taxes to fund them, thus providing disincentives for driving and encouraging more use of public transportation at the same time, all of which would be at least a bit good for the climate.  But people would whine about that, wouldn’t they, and no one likes to hear babies crying, so we give them pacifiers.

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This post was written on Sunday night. That may be the most interesting thing about it.

I’m starting this blog post on Sunday evening, which is obviously not when I usually write my blog posts.  I’m writing it on my phone, because I didn’t bring the mini laptop with me when I left work early on Thursday, and though I could use my full-size laptop, I have no desire to bring it along with me tomorrow.  I tentatively plan to walk to the train in the morning.  I’ve given up on the boots; I think they do exacerbate my back pain.  It’s very sad, because I like them, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

I still have a bit of a low-grade fever this evening, but that’s okay.  I’m not particularly interested in trying to protect my health.  I’ve been here in my room‒with some outings to the store of course‒since Thursday evening.  I’m not very good company, not even for myself, I’m afraid.

It’s rather amusing; I have recently gotten suggestions for videos on YouTube about dealing with trauma from being in relationships with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and probably also because I liked a video by a self proclaimed NPD person who did a good video about the Doctor, especially the 12th Doctor, as an example of someone with autistic characteristics.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve been in any relationships with anyone with NPD,  and I certainly don’t have anything akin to NPD myself.  Quite the contrary.  When I was younger, I used to sort of pretend to be an egotist and to have a huge self-image and I (jokingly) pretended to think I was great and wonderful.  I’m pretty sure no one who knew me really took me seriously.  I’ve certainly never acted like a real narcissist or psychopath or anything, but there have been times when I envied them their self-love.  I’ve even tried‒especially when I was in prison‒to do auto-suggestion with a mantra saying, “I love my life and I love myself.”

After a while, though, I couldn’t even think the words in my head, not while trying to mean them, not while trying to believe them.  It feels like telling a foul and terrible lie.  I am often amused by people and literature and the like that speak of the (supposedly) ubiquitous sin of self-love.

I don’t think I have ever loved myself, not in my entire life.  Not in my oldest memories do I have any sense of feeling that I liked or loved myself.  It almost feels like a category error.  I never thought of myself as the kind of entity or being or concept such as that to which love might pertain.  I don’t think of myself as some identity, really.  Who am I?  I’m just the specific being that is asking that question, that’s all, whatever that is.

I’m a weird, complex four-dimensional braid in spacetime, comprised of the swirling patterns of all the particles that come together and form this long time-space tornado, bits coming into it and going out of it, everywhere, all the time, the pattern changing as one moves from past toward future, but only gradually.  And the overall pattern is continuous, and presumably will last for a bit longer before it can no longer be self-sustaining, and then it will fray and scatter and dissolve, the former bits going to be temporary parts of various other spacetime braids.

L’dor v’dor.  Amayn.

I certainly feel continuous with the kid crying in bed with his leg aches when he was little, and who always kind of was watching everything from outside.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a good upbringing and a loving family.  I had good friends in school, and we did fun and interesting things together.  And I loved learning things, and I still do love that.  But I’ve always been weird, I know that.

I’ve felt…well, I wouldn’t say I felt different because it wasn’t really about any comparison.  Again, it feels almost like a category error.  I recently coined a term unsane as a contrast to the term “insane”, to mean something, someone, to whom the very concept of sanity doesn’t really apply.  I’ve often sort of thrown that (in my head) as an epithet at the deeds and behaviors of so many people and things around out there in the world.  But maybe it really applies to me.

I feel like maybe I’ve always been at right angles to every dimension of all the people around me.  But I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself, not even for a moment, though there are plenty of other people and things I love.

I think the person I’m most like, in raw aspects, is my Dad.  I had the advantage of being the youngest of three children, and so had support and people I could watch to see how things were done (and sometimes to see what not to do, what sorts of things didn’t tend to work).  My Dad was the eldest child in his family, so I guess he had to pick up a lot of things on his own.  But to his credit (and to hers) my Mom was with my Dad from when they were married until the day he died.

But he was often the one who in many ways made sense to me, even when I was really mad at him.  He was the only one who ever wanted to spend as much time at an exhibit in a museum or a zoo as I do.  Everyone else always moves along way too fast.  But somehow it’s not as much fun to see such things alone.  

I don’t know that for certain, actually.  I don’t think I’ve ever tried to go to a museum or library by myself.  The closest I’ve come is going to a bookstore by myself, and even that is just blah.  When I’m by myself, I have no will to get out and do much of anything at all.  I don’t do things for myself.  I have no desire to do things for myself.  I wish I didn’t have to obey the urge to eat or drink or breathe for myself.  It’s all quite boring.  I don’t even like to look at myself in the mirror*.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.  It’s just what this entity does at this point in spacetime, because of the various internal and external interactions among the various forces and “particles” in this particular spacetime weather pattern.  Why does that eddy in that river swirl about in that particular way at that point in a stream?  Because of physics.  There’s nothing deeper as far as I know.

That doesn’t mean I think it’s simple.  It’s ridiculously complex.  No system‒as I think I’ve said before‒can ever be complex enough to understand itself completely, for that would require an infinite expansion of complexity.

Anyway, this is already long enough for a full blog post.  If this is not the last paragraph**, it will mean that I’ve added something tomorrow morning.  I don’t know whether that will happen, but if you’re reading this, you will know the answer, but it’s further down the braid than where I am now.  I’m planning to walk to the train in the morning.  If I get hit by a car (or a bus or a truck, I’m not picky), or if I have a heart attack or a stroke, or if I’m sicker than I feel and collapse because of it‒none of which would break my heart, except perhaps literally‒I’m unlikely to add to it.  Maybe I’ll put this up on WordPress and set it to auto-post in the morning.  That way it will go up whether I’m alive or dead or something in between, and some mystery will remain.  I guess you all will see.

[Addendum:  I made it to the train station, and I did walk.  Better luck next time.]

*Though, curiously, I find listening to my own songs and covers relaxing.  Damned if I know why.

**Not counting footnotes.

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There is no gravity–the universe is just warped

Here I am again, at the train station, waiting for the train, writing a blog post on my smartphone.  I didn’t walk this time, because by yesterday afternoon, I was getting extra stiff and sore again, and that could well have been because I walked the 7 miles I walked yesterday in my hiking boots.  Ironically, they may well have been causing me more trouble when “hiking” longer distances.  It’s rather discouraging; I like those boots.

Today, I’m wearing the new shoes of my other type that were supposed to have arrived the day before but only got there yesterday during the day while I was at work.  I didn’t walk in them yet because I’m still in a bit of exacerbated pain.  I’ll physically rest for today, then walk again tomorrow.  The good thing is I seem to be mostly past any tendency to blister.  Thank goodness for small favors.

So, basically, the thing I look forward to‒practically the only thing‒is doing more walking.  I guess that’s a reasonably good thing as far as it goes; it’s better than looking forward only to one’s next martini or one’s next hit of heroin.  But it’s still pretty dissatisfying.  I really hate my life.  Everything stressed me out.  I’m tired.  I want simply to stop.

It doesn’t help that my coworker who shares some of my duties is still out of the office, though I don’t know if he will be out today (I hope not, since it’s payroll day).  What I mean is, he was out yesterday and Monday.  So, I got called in on Saturday and since then (actually, since Friday) have been doing more work than usual‒while in more pain than usual‒for the last 4 work days.  Even before that, I was already at the threshold of cashing it all in.  So, I’m not exactly working toward a more positive outlook.

There’s a defective announcement sign (that I wrote about the other day then deleted from the final draft of the day’s post) cycling away with a moderately distorted message obviously meant to be the same as all the other boards.  I recognize the similarity of its garbled stuff with the intended message.  If I knew the system and its programming, I could probably figure out what’s wrong and possibly even fix it.  But it will likely take the Tri Rail people a while to get to it.  Only yesterday did they apparently fix a malfunctioning check-in kiosk, the one I used to use regularly, that’s been just off, without power, for well over a month.

I guess all these things take effort and money, but it’s frustrating.  I look around at our society and see the deterioration of infrastructure, and the diminution of what little pride we seem to take in running things well.  Even with a reasonably well-rounded system like the Tri Rail, it seems the trains are late almost as often as they are on time.  And, indeed, my train was supposed to have arrived by now, but it has not, and there’s no sign of its light approaching.  On the tracking software website they offer, there’s not even any indication that the train is coming.

Okay, just now its light is becoming visible.  So it’s not too very late…only about 5 minutes.

I don’t understand how it happens that, when they make their own schedule, they can’t seem to keep to it even the majority of the time.  It’s like at work‒our hours have been the same for years, but people can’t seem to get them right.  Of course, it doesn’t help that the boss doesn’t enforce them, or apply any penalty for being late or for staying late.  I can’t understand it, and I don’t want to understand it.  Of course, everyone encounters unexpected things from time to time.  But if it happens regularly, frequently, then probably the person to whom it is happening is partly causing it.

I can’t, of course, hold it against my coworker that everyone in his household is sick‒including his one year old daughter.  It happens, and there is only so much people can do to avoid it.  But people who are late to work nearly every day are just getting up and/or leaving their houses too late.  The correction to this is obvious, and one should really be encouraged to enact it, rather than be indulged.

Oh, well, the world is shit, or at least the human world is.  And the average person is going to get more and more mentally lazy as LLMs and the like do more of their “thinking” for them.  I’m not convinced that these things in any sense actually think or create, but then again, there are plenty of humans who don’t convince me that they think.

I guess I can’t hold it against the computers.  They didn’t make themselves.  Neither did the humans, of course, but at least many of them have access to resources with which they could make themselves better.  The fact that, for the most part, they do not make themselves better I hold as a defect or failure on their part.

I can say what I want about them, in any case.  They don’t read, so they’re unlikely to ever encounter my criticism.

Well, that’s eight hundred plus words, now, so I’ll start drawing to a close.  I wish I could do that overall, honestly.  I wish I could just lay me down to sleep, as the old nursery rhyme prayer says.  And if I should die before I wake, well…that wouldn’t be so bad either.  It wouldn’t break my heart.  And I doubt it would break anyone else’s heart, though a handful of people might be temporarily slightly sad.  And people at work would be in a bit of extra stick for a while.  But for them, in that, I have only a little sympathy.

And the rest of the world can go to Hell, which is what it’s steadily doing to itself, anyway.

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Bouncing tangents on walking, boots, pain, technology, science, politics, and probably other random stuff

Well, here I am again, writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here this morning.  I had intended to do this wearing a new pair of shoes of the same make and model (so to speak) as the pair I wore yesterday, but that pair, which was supposed to have been delivered yesterday evening, is instead delayed until this morning, after 8 am, which doesn’t do me any good whatsoever.  Anyway, it forced me to do an experiment walking in my boots this morning, which is what I did.

I had switched from my boots because I feared that they might have been responsible for last week’s rather extreme flare-up of my pain.  However, as I changed from them, I also changed chairs in my office.  That’s not a good way to do science, obviously:  varying two parameters at the same time.  It makes it hard to tell which one‒if either‒is having the dominant effect, if indeed there is one.  However, when dealing with severe exacerbations of already-maddening chronic pain, one can easily become impatient.

I’m not excusing it, but I am explaining it.

Anyway, I have come to the suspicion that, just maybe, it wasn’t the footwear at all but mainly the chair that was making things worse.  And now I’ve been forced into doing a better experiment.  If, after today, my pain gets significantly worse, that increases the credence that the boots are the problem.  However, if my pain level is stable‒and certainly yesterday’s walking didn’t seem to exacerbate it‒then maybe the boots aren’t causing any trouble.

I will say one thing about how quickly I’ve gotten into a state of readiness:  though I wore boots, which are heavier than the shoes I wore yesterday, I made slightly better time on my walk today.

Oh, I forgot to note that today is the first day of August‒named for Caesar Augustus (Née Octavian) who followed Julius Caesar (after whom July was named).  Welcome.  Summer is almost half over, at least by dates.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the start of this month, other than rent and other bills being due, and the prospect of facing another long, dreary month with nothing interesting happening, other than bad things out in the world, which always seem to happen, anyway.

Of course, the US is more and more comically and tragically stupid than it used to be, but that’s been happening for a long time.  I remember when they canceled the Superconducting Supercollider in the late nineties, and I thought to myself, “That’s it, the United States’ days of being an intellectual and scientific and progress-oriented world leader are coming to an end.”

It wasn’t just my physics bias that led me to that conclusion, though that had its impact.  It was mainly the idea that, before, a large part of the ethos of the country seemed focused on constant improvement and leadership, in the sciences, in the arts, in technology, and in prosperity in general, including the traditional “American dream”.  But it turns out‒or so it seems‒that all of that seemingly intrinsic love of education and innovation and hard work was simply born of the post WWII era Cold War competition with the USSR.  We didn’t love these things for their own sake, not in general, not on average.  We just wanted to outcompete the “Godless Communists”.

Indeed, after the Soviet Union fell, the religious right poisoned the Republican Party more and more‒or so it seemed to me‒and turned their hostility inward on their own nation.  And some of the people on the left, without having to worry about being compared to the US’ enemies, became more leftish and pseudo-religious in their own Orwellian ideas.

Of course, most people were, and probably still are, much more centrist/moderate than you would guess, based on people in the news.  But now that we have no opponent against whom to unite, ideologically and physically, we can turn on ourselves more and more, and the most extreme voices aren’t curtailed out of the necessity of unity against a serious enemy.

China doesn’t present the same kind of opposition as the Soviets did, at least in our collective mind, probably because they’re far away and also they are our trading partners, and aren’t of European descent and are culturally different enough to avoid a metaphorical uncanny valley problem.  Also, they’ve not really openly declared any ideologically motivated intention to “take over the world” or to “bury the West”, at least not as far as I’ve heard.

That’s good, as far as it goes, of course.  The Cold War was dreadful;  I honestly grew up thinking that civilization was going to be destroyed by nuclear war at any moment.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I honestly and seriously thought about what we might do to survive after WWIII.  It wasn’t a joke.  And in my late teens, as part of a youth orchestra, I traveled to Lübeck, on the East/West German border, and got to see the fence line, the barbed wire, the mined “no man’s land” area and the machine-gun towers on the Eastern side‒not for keeping people out, but for preventing people from leaving.

That was pretty scary.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of the USA, but I don’t have high hopes for the rest of the world, either.  Our greater technology and abilities haven’t left the average person more respectful of science, because they don’t even understand the basics of the science that dominates almost every aspect of their lives.  Clarke’s Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but I wouldn’t have thought it would apply to the technology we have today.  Yet many people seem as incurious about real science‒and mathematics, and philosophy, and other fields of intellect‒as they would be about a world run by wizards.

There are flat-Earthers out there, for crying out loud, even though the refutations of that hypothesis are trivially easy to recognize, and many have been known for thousands of years!  There are people who have been so protected from deadly diseases by successful programs of vaccination (and sanitation and so on) that they actually think vaccines, and those who create them, are the enemy.

It really is depressing.  It’s like the fall of Camelot‒and I don’t refer to the JFK White House culture that people called Camelot, but the mythological Camelot related to the legend of King Arthur.  Though, come to think of it, RFK, Jr is a worthy spiritual heir of Mordred, in being the nephew of the man who declared the intention to have America land on the moon and yet who himself is now working toward the corruption and downfall of all for which his progenitors stood.

Oh, well.  I guess if the people in America and the rest of the world don’t wake up and drink some strong, black coffee and take responsibility for knowledge and growth and improvement, they will get what they deserve.  If they don’t change direction, they will end up where they’re going.  Unfortunately, they will take helpless innocents in vast numbers along with them.

Anyway, that’s my series of tangents for today, like a random plot of the scattering of elementary particles.  I hope it’s been worth your time.  Have a good day.

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What could compare 2 A future of cyber super-stupidity?

Well, I’m back on my smartphone to write this blog post, but I’m not going to do the whole indenting thing this time.  It was a cute little indulgence, but it doesn’t really add anything, and it’s a minor pain, and I’m just not going to do it.  So, there.

I didn’t bring the laptop with me yesterday, because I was still in a lot of pain by the end of the day, and didn’t want the extra burden.  Of course, I’m still in a lot of pain now, as I write this, and I’m sweating even as I just stand still outside.  I don’t think I’ll be using the laptop again any time soon.  But I guess I might change my mind again, depending on how I feel and how things go.

I’m certainly changing up my shoes again, trying to find a pair (and a type) that gives me the least trouble.  I don’t know how much, if any, difference it will make, but I have to keep trying things, just in case something works; I’m too stubborn to do otherwise.  I also widened my pull-up stance this morning to see if that helps, and maybe it will, and maybe it won’t throw my left shoulder into a tail-spin like it did the last time I tried it.

I know, I know, all of this is boring.  I’m a boring person, what can I say?

I did get out the guitar just a little yesterday, because one of the new people at work asked me about it, after recognizing that I was listening to a Radiohead song (Climbing up the Walls).  I’ve downloaded the chords for Nothing Compares 2 U again.  I frivolously imagine that I might do a video of me playing and singing it in honor most specifically of Sinead O’Connor, who just died, making her the third and final person I associate with that song to die (the other two, of course, being Prince, who wrote it, and Chris Cornell, who did my favorite version of it).  Hey, maybe if I do a good version, and people enjoy it, I’ll get caught up in that group, so to speak.

Fingers crossed!

I have tomorrow off, so I won’t be doing a blog post.  I’ll have a full weekend by myself to do fuck-all on my own.  I hope at least to be able to go for a walk if my back cooperates.  Other than that, I really have nothing.  I guess I might watch a movie or something.  I’m not going to go to the theater to see Oppenheimer, though it looks like a good movie.  After my last visit to the theater by myself, I just don’t see it being much fun.

Oh, but I do plan on calling my sister this weekend!  That will be good, so there’s something positive, at least.  Sorry, I didn’t mean to disparage her or be dismissive.  Talking on the phone to her is pretty much the only thing to which I look forward.  I still always get anxiety before using the phone, but that’s not her fault; that’s my defect.

Here’s something darkly amusing:  the Google Docs autocorrect is now urging me to add a “to” after the word “forward” at the end of the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph.  This is the state to which we’ve fallen; the pseudo-helpful editing software system suggests that I change a perfectly grammatical sentence by adding a preposition (sans object) to the end of that sentence!  Why?  I suspect because that’s what almost everyone else does out there in the trash heap of humanity*, and that’s the source of the system’s recommendations.

This is the crap from which such LLMs as Chat GPT and the like are compiling their informal and inscrutable linguistic rules and predictive language models, and to which they are then going to be adding their shitty, shitty, derivative writings and recursively worsening the deterioration of human reading and writing (and thinking) ability.  Maybe we should burn them all down, along with pretty much everything else.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no Luddite by any means.  I’m quite a fan of useful technology, including computers in general, and of course, I love science.  But technology that decreases people’s need to discipline and improve themselves in writing, in reading, in thinking, and in seeking out reliable information makes me nervous, to say the least.

People tend to be mentally lazy much of the time‒thus the current and recent polarized and moronic political climates. The way many people use technology that they don’t even remotely understand is not improving that tendency.  So, what if our future dystopia is not, for instance, the rise of a super intelligent AI that either reduces humans to its dependent pets or eliminates them entirely but an actual artificial stupidity that people think is smart, and which is more efficient and potent at being non-intelligent than humans are, as well as at giving humans what they “want” in the short term?

What if those wants become self-reinforcing and ever more intense, as any supra-normal stimulus can cause to happen?  What if this leads everyone to a mutually dependent culture of stupid eloi and stupid morlocks with neither truly victimizing the other, but both perpetuating a clueless, increasingly incompetent civilization of human and artificial minds that cycles about in increasing ignorance of the greater universe, and is eventually obliterated by some entirely avoidable catastrophe?

In many ways, this scenario seems worse than takeover by truly super-intelligent AGI, because at least with the latter there would be super-intelligence, and it would have the potential to endure and learn and grow and spread and perhaps even become cosmically significant.

(This is all somewhat reminiscent of ideas discussed in the excellent video Dystopias Don’t Go to Heaven from the YouTube channel Highly Entropic Mind.  I encourage you to check out his stuff.)

I think it’s better to use complementary technology to the degree possible, as David Krakauer refers to such things as abacuses and bicycles and actual maps that enhance our abilities.  I think computers in general, and search engines, per se, are complementary in that, to an active mind, they allow much faster access to and use of legitimate information.  But systems that write (and sometimes just make up) stuff for people to consume without ever going anywhere or knowing anything about the quality of the information source, and which can even potentially make fake video and audio, could easily just lead everyone into a virtual world of spiraling, increasing idiocy.

Maybe this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends‒not with a bang but with a singularity of self-reinforcing non-intelligence.  It would be ironic at least, and I do appreciate irony.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  I guess I’ll write to you Monday if I’m still doing what I do.  Have a good weekend, please.

*I’ve even read formally published books, released by respected publishing houses, that contain sentences that end in duplicated prepositions, e.g.: “…to which I was looking forward to.” And people wonder why I often just want to die.

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A somewhat more positive blog post. That may not be saying much, but take what you can get.

Well, it probably won’t surprise those of you who read my previous post to learn that I left the office early yesterday‒at lunchtime‒and came back to the house where, after eating a bit, I took a melatonin and half a Benadryl.  I’ll say this for that group of meds:  it was only a few minutes after taking them that I felt a strong pressure to sleep, and so I did.

Some of that may just be fulfillment of expectation, and I was, of course, very tired, but they are supposed to be rapidly dissolving melatonin tablets.  Benadryl never seems to act very quickly on me, so I hesitate to credit the fast onset of sleep to it.

I did wake up quite a lot during the night‒about like usual‒but at least the night was effectively longer, and I don’t mean that in the sense that it felt like it lasted a millennium, as I said yesterday about Monday night.  I mean that I was in bed for a good ten hours roughly, and that at least is something special.  I regret to have to inform you that my pain is only slightly abated, but with a bit of rest, at least it’s slightly easier to tolerate.

I’m writing this on my phone today, by the way, because there was no way in hell I was carrying anything I didn’t really need to carry when I left the office, and that meant no laptop computer.

I think I’m going to try to take just a melatonin in the evening tonight, to see if it works to help me drop off.  The fact that I still reawakened frequently throughout the night at least somewhat assuages my fear that I might oversleep if I take it.  I’m too tense about oversleeping anyway, so short of a general anaesthetic, I’m unlikely to sleep through my alarm.

That raises an interesting point for me.  I clearly have a sense of chronic tension, almost all the time.  I suppose it might be called an anxiety syndrome, but that never feels like quite the right term to me.  I don’t feel “anxious”, like I constantly want to run away, figuratively, but more that I’m constantly ready to fight.  Maybe that’s just an example of different people’s reactions to the same process‒the sympathetic nervous system function of fight or flight, which in me seems to tend powerfully toward “fight”.  Thus, in my song Breaking Me Down, I sing, “I always want to hit someone, but I never get in fights.”

I was strongly trained by my father not to get in fights unless it’s truly, absolutely necessary, and I think that’s good training.  But I always feel ready to fight (not necessarily physically, though that’s always an option).  I even keep weapons (nothing that can accidentally go off!) at my side when I sleep and in the office.

I know, that’s a bit weird.  It’s not that I actually expect to be attacked.  Of all the people I know in the office‒and most other places, really‒I am the one most likely to be inclined to violence, but I have always had exceptionally good impulse control.  I’m not even prone to act on wholesome impulses!  But if I need to get in a fight, I do want every advantage available.

In a sporting situation, fairness is important, but in “real life” I have no interest in fighting fairly.  A fair fight is one where you have a fifty percent chance of losing.  I want to bring that chance as close to zero as I can if things really matter.  I will cheat in any way I can if it’s a fight about something important, and I will feel that I have done right.  The leopard doesn’t offer its prey a head start if it can help it, nor does the prey wait until the leopard has a fair shot at it to run away.

Anyway, enough of that pseudo-macho stuff.  I just mean that, almost all the time, I feel defensive/semi-aggressive, though I strongly dislike getting in arguments (or fights, really), and even feel mortified and ashamed and self-hating if I make a heated comment online.  Sometimes I even feel nervous when I make a positive comment, as though I fear having to deal with anyone responding to me, even if that response is also positive.  It’s weird.  I suppose, to some extent, it’s probably simply the fact that I have always felt weird, like I’m crazy, like I don’t quite function like the people around me, even within my own family.  I think I’ve mentioned that here, before.

All that tension does wear you out, though, and if not tempered, or at least counter-balanced, by positive things, it can make life very unpleasant.  I’m not sure what to do about it, though.  Meditation can soften it, but as I’ve mentioned, meditation often seems to make my depression get worse.  That’s not much of an improvement, if at all.  So, I have my ongoing conundrum.

I don’t know, also, how much‒if at all‒that tension contributes to the worsening of my chronic pain.  It’s possible that it does a fair amount.

In any case, I would say that I probably have some version of chronic anxiety, but that it doesn’t present as what I would call “anxiety”.  I don’t feel worried or afraid, I just feel hostile and often even hateful.  If the Force were real and I had any affinity for it, I don’t see how I could avoid the Dark Side.

Anyway, I’m going in quite early to catch up on things I let go yesterday because I could not focus at all on anything important.  But this pain and this tension and this depression are really grinding me down, and I don’t know how much will and energy I have left.  I’m very, very, very tired.  Maybe if I use the melatonin every day, I’ll gradually feel at least a bit better.  Just because it’s not globally useful doesn’t mean it couldn’t help for certain people in certain circumstances.

If it doesn’t help, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I keep speaking (or writing) about giving up and dying, but I keep on trying to find solutions or at least palliatives to my physical and psychological difficulties.  And I keep retrying lots of things that have failed before, in a sort of desperation to do something, anything, to see if I can feel less unhealthy.  I’ve not had a lot of luck, but maybe I would have been worse without the various things I’ve tried.  There’s no way to know, since I can’t compare alternate realities.  There’s also no way to know that I might not have been better than I am if I hadn’t tried to combat my dysthymia and pain.

Oh, well.  I’m probably wasting my time and my efforts.  But, if anyone out there knows of any brilliant new ideas, please let me know…but remember, they should probably be truly new, or at least not cliché.  I’m a trained MD, and I’ve read about and tried a lot of things beyond even that extensive training and practice.

The world isn’t made for us, and certainly we were never born to be comfortable.  It’s the feelings of dissatisfaction that prod us to act to stay alive and to thrive and to reproduce.  That’s good engineering, like smoke detectors being hyper-sensitive and fire alarms being extra jarring.  But if the smoke alarm gets stuck in an active position, leaving the alarm always going, eventually you’re going to want to cut power to it, and to hell with the risk of fire.  And if you can’t shut it off no matter what, eventually, you’re either just going to deafen yourself completely or leave the house.

That’s metaphor, of course.

I hope you all have a good day.  If you’re able to get good nights’ sleeps regularly, please make sure not to take it for granted.  And have a nap in my name, if you can!  I know it does me no actual good, but somehow it seems like a nice idea.

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“I thought you died alone a long, long time ago”

Happy Day of the Moon, everyone.

A weird thing happened when I began this blog post.  As I was trying to write a footnote to explain that by writing “Day of the Moon” I simply meant “Monday”, the little spell-checker in the footnote marked Monday as a misspelled word.  Now, I have in the past temporarily forgotten how to spell a common word, for causes unknown—the last time I clearly recall such an instance was when I could not for the life of me remember how to spell “sure” when I was a kid—but Monday?

I tried to figure out how I could have messed that up.  And when I right-clicked on the word all the options offered to replace it were French.  It turned out that somehow, the proofing language in that section of the post had flipped to French, and I had to reset it and start the post over.

That seems truly bizarre to me.  It’s not because of anything I did, at least nothing obvious, because I have never used French in writing anything, as far as I can recall.  I know only a very limited number of words in French.  Unlike many people, I don’t find it a particularly beautiful language, and the very fact that the French government tries strictly to control the language’s grammar and lexicon by law is frankly (Ha ha) laughable.

Anyway, that’s all a weird, contingent tangent* that had nothing to do with anything I was planning to write.  That’s okay, though, since I didn’t really have anything planned to write.  That’s how I usually begin these posts.  When I do deliberately try to write about something, it’s usually a subject that not many people seem interested in.

My post from last Thursday was a good example—when I pondered whether reality is more truly described by continuous functions or by stepwise changes iterated at such a minute level and in such short intervals that we, the macroscopic, cannot tell the difference between them and the truly continuous, and how one could tell the difference.  It seems like an interesting question to me, but I don’t appear to have anyone with whom to interact who has any particular thoughts about it, or has anything to add to the conversation.

I did talk to my sister on the phone last night (not about that subject), and that was really nice.  It’s hard to find the time to do it when we’re both available, so the frequency of those interactions has been lower than I wish, but then again, a great many things in the world are quite different from what I would wish them to be.

I took melatonin and Benadryl in the evening on both Friday and Saturday nights.  I don’t know how well it helped me rest—I certainly woke up several times during both nights, but at least on Saturday morning I let myself stay in bed, though awake, until comparatively late in the morning.

Last night was rough for sleep, mainly because I got spasms and pains alternating down first my right side from my lower back to my hip and knee and ankle and foot, then switching over to my left side a little later.  It’s rather maddening, but I’m probably “mad” anyway, so it’s not like it’s going to make me insane in any new or different way.  It will just pound away at the gravel that’s all that remains of any monolith of sanity I used to possess, until it’s eventually turned into sand.

Related to that pounding, a rather odd thing happened yesterday, or it seemed odd to me.  I often watch “reaction” videos, especially to songs that I like, because it’s neat to see someone apparently experiencing a piece of good music for the first time.  It’s almost (but not quite) like listening to a song with a friend who hasn’t heard it before.  Anyway, after the second or third one I watched, the YouTube algorithm offered me an actual song, not a reaction.  In this case it was the original, David Bowie version of The Man Who Sold the World, and I played it and sang along with it, then with Ashes to Ashes, then with Karma Police, by Radiohead.

The weird part was that, as I sang these songs—none of which are especially sad, though they’re not especially happy, either—I started to cry.  With each one, there were several places in the course of the song in which I had to catch myself and hold back tears and even sobs, and I’m not at all sure why.  I haven’t done any singing in quite a while, really, other than rare and brief moments, just as I’ve only played guitar once or twice in the last six months or so.  But I don’t know why it felt so horribly sad and despair-inducting to be singing.

I stopped playing songs after that.  It was too weird and disquieting; I’m not sure what it signifies, if anything.  But I do feel more sad and hopeless as time goes by.  This blog—in its current form, anyway—was meant in part to be a cry for help, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might have the desire and the ability to do or say something that would rescue or at least assist me out of my downward depression spiral and my thoroughly empty life, which is devoid of anything deeper than work “friends”, commuting, and YouTube videos.

I get the impression that people don’t think I’m savable, which I guess I can understand.  Or maybe I make arguments that are too convincing, or at least too persistent, about my own lack of hope, so much that people think they could never talk me out of despair.  Maybe they couldn’t.  Maybe talk isn’t what’s needed.  I certainly think I would need something more than just talk, but my judgement is far from sound.  Still, I really feel like I’m wasting time, more and more, if what I was doing was trying to ask for, or to seek, or to wish for, help.

As far as I can see, help is not forthcoming.  And while it may seem, from the other side of the blog post, that this is something with which I’m sanguine and of which I’m coldly accepting, this is not the case.  I am not quite dead yet, even internally.

Time’s been my way when I’ve rescued other people—actually, I’ve done it quite often, and I did it for quite a while.  Still, apparently there’s no counterbalance for my having saved other people’s lives and relieved other people’s suffering—or else maybe I’m even more reprehensible than I often feel I am.  Whatever the case, I don’t seem to be eliciting any assistance from anyone who can do much of anything.

Maybe I need to be in situation where there’s immediate danger to life and limb before I can actually get anyone to help me.  Maybe I just am not going to get any help.  I’m certainly not able to help myself.  I’ve been doing it and trying to do it for years or decades, depending on how you draw boundaries and define your terms.  I’m at the end of my psychological resources.  I’m also caught in some kind of mental block, where I can’t seem to reach out (directly) to anyone in any way, or to explain how badly I’m doing, or even to call 988, which I often want to do.  I just feel like I’d be wasting their time.

Anyway, that’s already too much for today.  I’m going to head to the bus stop.  Maybe something will happen on the way to work that will bring things to a head, and I’ll either get help or get gone.

Almost certainly that won’t be the case.

*Which might be a good name for a band.