Psychology

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“Ashes and dust and thirst there is, and pits, pits, pits.”

I’m at the bus stop today, because I didn’t feel up to riding the bike this morning.  I almost didn’t feel like riding the bike back from the train station at the end of the day, yesterday, even though that would have meant leaving it in the proven-to-be-unsafe location of the station.  I wouldn’t have worried about that too much, though.  I’ve got two thick cables and a U-lock securing it when it’s there, including one threading through the seat, so vandalism seems more likely than theft.

I did end up riding back to the house last night, but I just didn’t want to ride this morning.  I’m feeling some extra strain and pain in my hips and lower back that may be from riding, and I also just feel like I’m not up to the intensity of exertion it entails.  Walking is more my speed at the moment, and it’s cool enough out—for south Florida, anyway—that certainly the walk to the bus stop isn’t bad.

I may walk back from the train station today rather than take the bus, depending on how I feel.  I know I’ve written before about how much time it uses up, but it’s not as though I do anything better with my time than walk.  Honestly, if I could just avoid my feet feeling sore so often, I’d be fine with walking every day, everywhere.

I didn’t just feel tired yesterday afternoon.  I also felt extremely—I don’t know…stressed, anxious, tense, some word along those lines?  All afternoon, I felt as if I were going to fly apart.  I don’t mean I felt as though I would explode in anger, just perhaps that I might collapse into a ball or something.  I told my coworker, quietly, amidst another conversation, that I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown.  I know this is sort of a vague and antiquated term, but it seemed to capture what I felt.  My mind (and body) felt on the verge of shaking apart at the seams.

I still feel like that this morning, though not to as high a level, and it’s probably the main reason I didn’t want to ride my bike.  I also just feel fatigued, mentally and physically.  I’m even sort of out of breath, though that’s mainly a subjective feeling.  I just feel uncomfortable.

I’m very tired of all these negative feelings all the time, but I can’t seem to find many positive ones.  It might help if I had a pet, but I don’t have the wherewithal to take care of a dog because of my schedule, and I’m quite allergic to cats, so that’s not going to work.  I’ve already had the long experience of having a cat, and I had to take allergy meds and decongestants every day for seventeen years.  When I first got the cat, I didn’t know I was allergic, and once I had her, I wasn’t going to get rid of her.  But I can’t put myself in that position again.

Plus, honestly, I can barely take care of myself, and that meager ability is deteriorating day by day.  I don’t have any business trying to bring in and care for any other life form.

Oh, by the way, I didn’t realize it at the time, but yesterday was apparently Adult Autism Awareness Day, though I have no idea in what way it’s celebrated or promulgated or whatever.  Certainly in Florida there are no clear public health resources or supports of any kind for anyone with any kind of chronic, neurodevelopmental issues.

They will happily put you in prison, though.  Our benighted governor even jokes about putting another one of these prisons—as if we were not already overflowing with the shit-holes—on land near where Disney World is, as part of his process of antagonizing and threatening the state’s biggest employer and single biggest bringer of money into the state.  This is in response to the corporation merely making a public statement—you know, exercising a First Amendment right, that thing that even corporations can do, and which the Supreme Court said is why it’s okay for corporations and such to spend oodles of money in support of specific candidates, because that’s a form of speech, and is protected by the First Amendment.

He’s just so interested in the needs and concerns of the people of Florida.  He’s plainly trying to make himself attractive to the hardcore Trump supporters in case he has a run for President, and he’s perfectly willing to sacrifice the interests of the state for which he ran for governor, and to which he has sworn allegiance, willingly, voluntarily, to do it.  These are not the actions of an honorable man (unless I’m reading the situation incorrectly).

So, he fits right in in Tallahassee.  But not in the legitimate workings of the United States of America, as I’ve thought of it most of my life.  And it’s not as though he has the excuse of being ignorant of the US Constitution or the Florida Constitution; he’s an effing lawyer.  He graduated from an elite law school, and he worked for the JAG corps, I think, if memory serves.

Oh, well, I really shouldn’t care.  The people of Florida—at least the ones who are allowed to vote—apparently chose him and the legislators who write these various imbecilic laws.  I rather hope that he either causes the state to be subject to a multi-billion dollar lawsuit from Disney and that then the company leaves the state and the state goes bankrupt and everyone in the future ties its final decline to his idiotic actions.  He’s antagonizing a very large company that brings jobs and income to the state, and he has the temerity to call himself a Republican?

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, I guess.  It certainly doesn’t have much effect on my non-life.  Everyone on both sides of the thing could burst into flames and die for all I care; the world would probably be a better place.  Then again, the world would probably be a better place if all humans burst into flames and died.  It would briefly raise carbon dioxide levels, but in the long-term, things would improve.

I should probably just put my money where my mouth is and lead by example.  It would be comparatively difficult to get gasoline right now, given recent flooding, but I think I have enough lighter fluid to douse myself quite thoroughly.

I doubt I’d have the courage to do that, though.  I need to find a better way.

In other news, tomorrow is my son’s twenty-third birthday.  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve seen him in person, or spoken with him, though we exchanged one email, more or less.  But he does always send along thanks for his birthday presents and other holiday presents, via his sister.  It’s been just as long since I’ve seen her in person, but I’ve spoken with her briefly on the phone, and we exchange texts and sometimes emails.

I doubt that I’ll ever see either of them again, or hear their voices, let alone spend any real time with them, which is the thing I would most like to do in the world.  They don’t want to do it, it seems, particularly my son, who doesn’t really want any kind of relationship with me.  How could I blame him?  I’ve surely fucked up everything important in my life, and they are the most important part of my life.  I’m no good at taking care of myself, either.

I’m really stressed out and tired and uncomfortable and lonely and confused and overwhelmed—the latter is ironic, because my life is thoroughly empty, so I don’t understand what feels so overwhelming.  But, it is what it is, as they say.  I used to want to conquer the world, and then sometimes I just wanted to destroy it.  Now, though, I just wish to be able to go to sleep and rest.  Why is chronic depression/dysthymia not considered a terminal illness for which one can avail oneself of physician-assisted suicide (not including oneself if one happens to be a physician)?

Well, okay, I guess the answer to that is fairly obvious.  Among other things, the whole nature of the disease calls the possibility of informed consent into question.  But goodness, sometimes the notion of a friendly IV mixture of opiates and benzodiazepines and barbiturates and digitalis sounds like the best, most delicious, most refreshing cocktail I’ve ever imagined.

Oh, well.  I guess I’ll wait a little longer.  It wouldn’t do to have anything happen that might taint the happiness of my son’s future birthday celebrations.  I want nothing but the very best possible life for him and for my daughter.  I wish that included my prominent presence, but maybe no one’s life would or will be made better by having me in it to anything more than a peripheral extent.  I know my life isn’t made better by having me in it.

Well, okay, that doesn’t make sense, does it?  My life is whatever it is, and no matter what state it might be in, it will be that way with me in it, more or less by definition.  But I do suspect that, given my neuropsychiatric characteristics, I am not prone to be a benefit to myself—certainly not when by myself.

Again, “Oh, well.”  I am what I am, I’m my own special…cremation?  Probably not.

ashes and dust

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Above the lake, after the flood

It’s Friday again, but that fact in and of itself is no particular cause for celebration for me, because I work tomorrow.  Still, I’m up and at the bus stop today, unlike yesterday, which should imply that at least my back and legs are not as painful as they were yesterday.

I spent pretty much my entire yesterday lying down, just trying to rest and relax the muscles and joints in my back, my hips, my ankles, and my knees, all of which were hurting.  Of course, I availed myself of OTC analgesics, but I always use those, so it’s hard to make much difference using them without permanently disabling my kidneys and/or liver, which I am probably already doing based on the amount that I use every day.

It’s a bit frustrating finally to have sorted out most of the issues with my new bicycle and gotten it into a situation in which I can ride it comfortably and usefully only to have a week-long stretch of nearly constant rain.  I can’t even imagine how I would have gotten back to the house Wednesday night if I’d tried to ride the bike.

Just to give you some idea:  there is a small park area right near the train station in Hollywood (Florida), and a main feature of that is a river/lake that I suspect is artificial.  It runs under the main road as well as under some foot bridges.  Normally, the nearest foot bridge is the sort of thing you could imagine people rowing or canoeing or kayaking under easily, without needing to duck their heads.  Well, on Wednesday evening, the water in that lake was up to the bottom of the bridge, several feet above its baseline.  The water in the main road and the bus stop and the nearby fields was flowing—clearly, obviously, and powerfully—toward that lake, such that it looked as if soon the lake would swell its banks and the water level would engulf the sidewalks and the bus stop and the main road.

Of course, much of the road was underwater, anyway.  Particularly at the intersections and cross-walks, and along the edges where the bike lanes are, there were vast pools of water.  Even during the walk from my final bus stop to the house, which is just a bit under a mile, there were places I could not pass without stepping more than ankle deep in water.  And, of course, when trying to minimize the degree to which I had to do that, I skirted around edges of sidewalks and berms and roads, and met some very unsteady ground.  I’m sure it was more unsteady than usual.  So my back and knees and hips and ankles were subject to unusual stresses and strains that probably contributed to yesterday’s problem.

My Timberland boots would have been entirely useless for avoiding the soakers I had in both feet before I got even close to the house.  If I had worn my “motorcycle” boots, those would have kept my feet dry in anything much less than knee-high water—they’re pretty great for that.  However, they are not great for walking if you want to avoid blisters or ankle problems, because they don’t exactly grip the feet firmly, and they have elevated heels.  They look good, and they would be good for wading, up to a point, but they wouldn’t be good for any significant walking, and you certainly wouldn’t want to run in them.

Once again, here I go, writing about the weather, of all things.  It’s a reflection of the sorry state of my life that this really is the only interesting* stuff that’s going on with me.  Weather, commuting, depression, pain—these are the things I have about which to communicate.  At least, they are the things that come to my mind.  I’m not really learning anything new—not by my standards, anyway.  I still haven’t really written anything at length about sugar or whatnot, and I haven’t done any audio posts or “podcasts” or whatever you want to call that stuff.  I just don’t have the will to do it, any more than I have the will to write any new fiction.

It is an interesting fact that, most days, more people look at my blog than have bought, let alone read, all of my books put together.  I’m not counting the stupid purchases I made of my own books, which I then signed and gave to the people at the office.  As far as I know, only two of those people have actually read any of my books, and one of them subsequently died of a drug overdose; he was the closest thing to a real friend that I’d made in well over ten years.

That’s frustrating, to say the least.

I’m not sure what to do.  I don’t expect any epiphany or any other kind of spiritual or psychological breakthrough; I’ve been trying to explore the nature of reality and, to some extent, my own mind for most of my life, as far as I can remember.  I’ve read lots of science books, of course, but I’ve also read many self-help books and spiritual books and so on.  I’ve meditated and did self-hypnosis throughout my teenage years.  I’ve read religious works of various stripes; some of them were interesting and engaging and even profound in places.  But none of them were very impressive overall.  Shakespeare was better.  As was Milton.

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  When do I ever, right?  I know where I’m going in the long run, at least, which is the same place we’re all going in the long run.  If there’s something else waiting, I’ve never encountered anything close to good evidence or argument for it.  I have looked, but I’ve tried to do so without self-deception.

Maybe that’s my problem.  Maybe the only escape from dreariness and depression entails or requires some form of delusion or another.  Maybe Shirley Jackson was right, and no live organism really can continue to exist “sanely” under conditions of absolute reality.

But, of course, we never really exist under conditions of “absolute reality” in any serious sense.  We don’t have access to all levels of reality using just our ordinary, unaided senses, not even close to it.  But that (in principle, surmountable) limitation is one thing, while inventing stories about the “meaning” of life and reality out of wisps of desperation, fear, loneliness, loss, and pain is another thing entirely.  I have no intention or desire to do that.  It’s like trying to weave a sweater out of yarn spun from cotton candy.  It would be an interesting novelty, but at any real test—including just sweating while wearing it—it would melt and dissolve and draw swarms of flies and ants and just be disgusting.

That’s a weird metaphor, I know.  Sorry.  I’m not being particularly coherent here.  Which I guess is reason enough to call this post to a close.  I hope you all have a good weekend, and spend it relaxing with people you love and who love you.  What else is there?  A lot, I guess, but none of it is quite as pleasant, and it’s not more important.  Not that anything is important; or rather, on a cosmic scale, either everything is important or nothing is important.

On the scale of an individual life, though, things can be quite different, and in an entirely reasonable sense.  So, if you can, enjoy your weekend.

*I use that term hesitantly.  Perhaps I should have written that it is the closest thing to being something interesting that’s happened to me.

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Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky…

It’s Tuesday morning, and instead of sitting at the train station, I’m sitting at the bus stop.  It’s been quite rainy out, and after riding my bike back to the house from the train station yesterday afternoon in a non-stop deluge, I decided to walk to the bus to the train and so on instead.

I’m a glutton for punishment, obviously enough, but everything in my body aches now after the wet ride yesterday, and I was up more than usual during the night with back and hip and leg pain.  That’s not really anything new, but it felt clear that it was exacerbated by the thorough soaking, and then of course, by nearly slipping on the wet floor in my room, which is hard, smooth tile.

I say “nearly slipping”.  I guess I actually did slip, but I caught myself before getting very close to falling.  I suppose that’s a good sign of improved physical strength and agility from all my walking and biking and everything, but it doesn’t mean I don’t feel the consequences.

Even my supposedly water-resistant boots were literally squishing inside by the time I’d gotten back to the house, only five miles from the train station.

This is boring, isn’t it?  I keep realizing how boring it is that I’m writing about this stuff, and I do apologize.  I guess it’s the sort of thing about which most people talk to their friends or their spouses or their family in general when it happens, but I don’t really have any such people to whom to talk about it on a daily basis.  I suppose I can mention it at work, and people will probably listen politely, as they will when I tell the about a physics article describing the extreme roundness of an isolated electron and so on.  But no one really interacts about it.

No one really interacts much about anything I’m interested in; I bore people pretty quickly with them.  I, in turn, have a hard time getting interested in anything in which they are interested.  Certainly, typical matters of gossip or popular entertainment are pretty lost on me.

The closest thing I really have to regular, daily social interaction is reading and leaving comments and getting responses on Jerry Coyne’s website Why Evolution Is True.  But yesterday, at least, every comment I tried to leave disappeared.  I don’t know if that was a technical glitch or just that my comments were blocked or whatever by PCC(E)*.  I sometimes get the impression, on the rare occasion when he responds to one of my comments, that he doesn’t like me (this is not an unusual attribute), so he may just be disallowing my comments.  Thus, even that little outlet is fading or at least is glitching.

It’s irritatingly windy this morning, and the wind is blowing water from nearby trees even here to the middle of the bus shelter, and it’s getting on the screen of my computer some.  I may have to stop and finish this later.  It’s frustrating.  But what do I not find frustrating?

I felt horribly depressed almost all day yesterday.  In fact, ironically, I was probably least depressed while I was riding through the rain, partly because my locking mechanism for the seat of my bike had worked, and partly because it was just kind of hilarious how wet I was getting, from above and below.  I would have been less soaked if I had walked, because I could have used an umbrella.  It’s hard to use an umbrella on a bike.

There were a number of times during the day yesterday when I thought about how much I hated my life and hated the world and (mainly) hated myself, and how I wanted to just swallow all the Tylenol in the bottle I have at the desk** or slice myself open with one of the box cutters I have, or douse myself in lighter fluid and set myself on fire***.

None of these are great options, and I would prefer to find something less painful.  Of course, the governor of the sunshine state and the goobers in the legislature are, I think, working on making it so that I’ll legally be able to purchase a gun again soon, if they haven’t already.  Anyway, there are plenty of people in gun shows and so on who probably wouldn’t care about restrictions on selling guns to people like me—you know, non-violent “ex-felons” or whatever the proper term is, even though my “felony” charges were ones to which I pled guilty only because of extortion by the legal system.  I never knowingly or willingly “trafficked” in drugs; I was trying to help people with chronic pain in a society in which those with non-lethal causes of pain are expected simply to keep soldiering on despite constant misery, even though—ironically—their pain will continue much longer than will that of a person with, say, terminal cancer.

It’s hard to say, though, whether I could use a gun to kill myself.  I have too much knowledge about guns, and have used them with respect, shooting competitively and for pleasure—never once having so much as fired at another living thing, unless you count scaring squirrels or raccoons off with a low-power bb gun.  I did once play Russian Roulette, but only once, and afterwards, though I was obviously horribly depressed, my hands were shaking.  I didn’t do it again, though if I had succeeded, at least I wouldn’t have gone to prison, not that I knew that at the time.  I had no clue what was coming.

I don’t know why I’m talking about all this, or rather, writing about all this, sitting at the bus stop waiting to go to the train to the walk to the office.  I don’t have a therapist anymore, so that’s part of it.  I don’t have a personal physician of any kind, either.  I don’t have any local emotional support, and I don’t make a good friend, so I’m not likely to obtain any new ones or any other form of a social circle.

I keep wishing I would catch pneumonia or some other severe illness and be killed by it.  Maybe that’s part of why I was so amused by getting so wet when riding last night; there was just the bare possibility that my resistance would go down low enough that I would catch something.  But of course, that isn’t really how infection works, and I know it only too well.  You have to be exposed to an infectious agent, and I don’t seem to be all that susceptible.  Probably I have lots of antibodies and whatnot from medical school and then medical practice.

I’m just so tired.  I can’t sleep at night for more than about an hour at a time, then I wake up and try to go back to sleep and sleep at most another hour, and then eventually just watch the clock reach the time for me to get up.  I want to be able to sleep and just stay asleep until I feel rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  That would be like…well, I was going to say “like a dream”, but it’s not quite accurate.  That would be wonderful.  That’s what it would be.

rainybikebandw

*This is how many of us refer to Professor Coyne.

**This is probably not a good choice.  It takes a long time to work, and if it fails it can still cause terrible liver problems, and it’s a long and drawn out death even if it works.  It’s very unpleasant.

***That’s something best not to do indoors, of course, and it was rainy yesterday, so it probably wouldn’t have worked outdoors if I had tried.  Also, it’s not got too high a fatality rate, or if it is fatal, it too can be a long, drawn out, and very painful death.  My point, overall, is to try to diminish and avoid or escape chronic pain, both physical and psychological.

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Here we go again, still.

It’s Monday morning, and I’m on the train as I write this, though I had meant to miss the train that I rode on Friday and start writing while sitting at the train station, because that somehow feels better to me.  I’m not sure why it feels better.  Maybe it’s because, for a long time, when I got to the train station early, it was where I started writing my fiction on a given day.  I don’t know.

Anyway, I dilly-dallied at the house for a bit, doing some minor chores that I don’t normally do in the morning, before leaving a little later than usual.  But it turns out that the train was, as the automated announcement said, “fifteen, twenty minutes late”.

I don’t know why it’s not programmed to say, “fifteen to twenty minutes late”.  The way the announcement comes across, one might be excused for thinking that the train was going to be one thousand five hundred twenty minutes late.  That’s 25 hours and 20 minutes.  One might as well take an extra day off today and come back tomorrow!

So, I got on the train I had tried to miss by a bit, after waiting…well, about fifteen or twenty minutes.  And now I’m writing this blog post, for which I have no particular topic, on the train.

I don’t understand why even a relatively well-run system like the Tri-rail in south Florida is so often behind schedule or has trains cancelled and so on.  This is not the norm in many other parts of the world*.  In some parts of the world, they don’t even have to punish people who screw up and make a train system late, thus inconveniencing thousands to sometimes tens of thousands of people and more.  The people running it would be ashamed and humiliated to allow the trains to run late on their watch, and if something unavoidable were to happen, such people would scramble and struggle to correct it as fast as humanly possible, and not rest until it was fixed.

I’m not, in general, a fan of the emotion of shame, but a little bit of shame in the right place can be a good thing.  It exists because it can serve a purpose in social animals, and humans are social animals.  A person should be embarrassed and even ashamed if, through laziness or carelessness or inattention they cause problems that affect the lives of a large number of people.  If that seems like too minor a thing about which to worry, remember, statistically speaking, if one causes delays for enough people, often enough, there will be consequent serious suffering and even premature deaths—deaths that would not have happened if one had done one’s job**.

Speaking of deaths:  honestly, I didn’t really expect to be alive, myself, at this point.  Or, at least, I didn’t mean to be continuing to muddle through on my usual daily so-called life.  But I’m still here just standing on the ledge or the balcony, or the bridge-side, or whatever, looking down, trying to decide what to do.  It’s scary to jump—for good, sound, biological reasons over which I have very little control—and so I hesitate.

But I don’t have a strong desire to turn around and walk away from the edge, either.  I guess, at some level, some part of me is wondering if someone can give me a good, motivating, convincing reason to step away from the edge.  Not a request, not a cajolement, not an emotional appeal, not a pep talk—none of these things are means by which I want to be easily influenced.  I’ve looked at most of them already, and in any case, they don’t really solve the problem, they just push it back a little.  I don’t want to believe, I want to be convinced by evidence and reasoning, or by something that doesn’t rely on the exhortation just to keep buggering on because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I’ve been buggering on against dysthymia and depression for almost forty years, certainly since my early teens, and against chronic pain for about twenty.  I don’t seem to have gained much ground, if any.

If I were still in medical practice and were treating a patient like me who came in, I might well recommend hospitalization.  I’m certainly a danger to myself—I hate myself, I consider myself my enemy.  But I cannot afford some kind of voluntary psychiatric hospitalization, certainly not in any kind of very good facility, and I don’t have any insurance.  And, of course, I’m not in medical practice anymore.

I don’t know what to do.  But my train stop is coming up next, and since I have to pause my writing at least for a while when I get there, I might as well stop this post now.  I hope you had a good weekend and that you have a good week.

no belief

*Though, admittedly, there are also parts of the world in which this is much better than the norm.  But the US is the world’s largest economy; we like to think of ourselves as advanced and innovative and productive and “great”, but—to reference a cliché that wasn’t even true about the person about whom it was often said—we can’t even seem to keep the trains running on time.  It’s embarrassing.  Or at least, it ought to be embarrassing.  If we are not embarrassed by it, that fact should be embarrassing, too.

**It’s possible, of course, that there are deaths that will happen when the trains run on time that would not have happened if they had been late, but people don’t tend to see as morally culpable on the people keeping things running on time when there are benevolent reasons for doing so.  Running things on time was the intent of the system, it was part of the stated goal from the start, and it was thus because it was potentially useful for many people.  It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.  But when it fails in its promised service, and because of that failure someone dies (or suffers) unnecessarily, it seems reasonable to consider it a morally culpable situation.

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Was Sisyphus afraid of moss?

I’m sitting at the bus stop this morning, waiting for the morning bus.  There are a few reasons for that.  Actually, I suppose if one were to drill down, one could probably find many reasons—or at least, many causes­—but the main ones are:  1) I’ve walked over 24 miles in the last two days, and though my left knee support thingy is helping, there is still some twinging in the knee, and B) I am trying out a new pair of shoes.

By that, I mean, I am trying a new model of shoe, so to speak, though they are from the same company as usual.  I didn’t want to give them the full 12 miles on their first day, in case there is any chafing or rubbing in new areas that’s going to be likely to cause new blisters.  I really don’t want that, since my other shoes—the ones I haven’t discarded—are not causing blistering, even with the new ankle supports, even with a full 12 mile days.

I should let you all know, I have bitten the bullet and ordered a new bike post and seat.  They don’t come together as one “item”, which strikes me as odd, but maybe it’s not; maybe that’s the usual way things go in the world of bicycles.  There may be good reasons for it.

Anyway, I don’t know if reading Matthieu Ricard’s book is helping me, or if it was a comment/suggestion of encouragement from my cousin—most likely some combination of both things and just a general stubbornness on my part—but I decided to try it, to get a new seat.  It’s nice to be able to get back to the house before eight o’clock sometimes rather than at about nine (or even later).  I just have to remember to run my locking cable through the seat base when I park the bike.

I don’t know that this will change any of my long-term plans (if that’s even the right term).  Certainly if I get this new seat and post and something else goes wrong, I’m going to be quite perturbed.  That interference with my expected plans is a large part of what made me so upset—maybe that’s part of my possible undiagnosed Asperger’s or something, I don’t know.  On the other hand, a large part of it is certainly down to my dysthymia/depression, with which I’ve had to deal since at least my mid-teens.  As it turns out, that can be secondary to/a complication of Asperger’s, so it could all be intertwined.

I’ve recently come to the realization, which I’ve commented on before, that apparently I have a rather blank expression on my face a lot of the time, even when I feel like I’m conveying severe misery.  The closest I came to being expressive, recently, was last week, when I was having an exceptionally bad, three-sigma at least, outlier day with respect to pain, and I was just miserable and in agony, despite far too much medicine and stretching and back massage machines and whatnot.

Someone in the office asked if I was tired, because apparently that’s what my face was expressing.

I’ve never really thought of myself as expressionless, but I do remember, for a long time, practicing smiling in the mirror, partly just so I could think of myself as someone who was happy (or at least looked happy) and partly because I wanted to have a good smile.  That’s long gone, of course; I don’t tend to smile at myself in the mirror anymore.

If anything, I feel rather surprised sometimes when I look in the mirror, as if thinking, “Oh, yeah, that guy.  I forgot that’s what he looked like.”  You would think I would be used to my face by now.  But it very much doesn’t feel like me when I see it, though as my sister has pointed out (quite correctly), that is not so surprising since I don’t normally have access to it; I’m on the inside, or words to that effect.  Maybe this is everyone’s experience, I don’t know.

It’s been a very long week so far, already, and it’s only now Wednesday morning*, which means today I have to do the payroll.  I haven’t even gotten started on the payroll this week so far, because I’ve just been too discouraged and despondent and tired.  Hopefully, taking the bus this morning will conserve at least a little of my energy and make things somewhat easier today.

Either way, I’ll do it, and I’ll probably do it quickly and accurately and well, and it will look easy to those on the outside, because I’ve been doing it for a while, and I know how to do it.  When I’m supposed to do something, however miserable I feel, I just tend to do it, to keep going, and only occasionally grumble a bit but not really make any kind of stink—and apparently it doesn’t even really show on my face that I’m in despair.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I think it bears repeating, or re-exploring, that the horror of Sisyphus’s punishment in the myth is not merely that he was forced to keep rolling his boulder up the mountain, or hill, or whatever, only to have it roll down again each time.  The true horror was that he felt compelled to do it, somehow.

It’s not as though an ordinary person would keep doing it, surely.  They’d be all, “Blow this for a lark” and let the boulder fall.  I’m sure that some other punishment would be enacted, but even Prometheus could recognize that, though he suffered horribly every day, it wasn’t his own doing.  His own mind had not been made into the vessel and source of his torment.

Sisyphus was a bit like all those people who walked calmly to the stake or to the gallows or to the guillotine or to the electric chair or whatever.  Why did they do that?  Why do people not at least force their executioners to drag them to the place of execution?  Why do they not fight?  Would I be the same in such circumstances?

It’s bizarre.  I mean, good luck trying to get a cat or a wolverine, or even a squirrel, to go along with you toward a situation that it even suspects is a danger to its life.  You will not come away without wounds.  Yet even unjustly sentenced humans go quietly most of the time.

It’s pretty stupid, if you ask me.  Which may in turn sound stupid coming from someone who often feels suicidal.  But if it’s my choice and I’m the one doing it—to whatever extent that even makes sense—then that’s at least a choice of some kind.  But you can’t tell me that, if Prometheus got a hand free, he wouldn’t have done his best to throttle Zeus’s eagle.

That, again, is the horror of Sisyphus, even though his punishment is less gory.  He has become his own hell.  Maybe that’s true of us all.  It’s certainly often true of me.

sisy

*A fact that I cannot state without triggering the beginning of the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home in my head.  As my ex-wife might have said, this is one of my buttons, and when you push them—even when I push them myself—there will be a programmed response.

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Never mind

I’m not sure at all what I’m going to write about this morning, but it’s a work morning, and I’ve just arrived at the train station, so writing my daily blog post is what I’m going to be doing, at least for the time being.

My hands and fingers are a bit sticky and sweaty as I start this.  Obviously that’s not going to be evident in my writing—other than the fact that I’m telling you about it.  I walked just under 12 miles yesterday, total, since my bike is no longer an option, and I’ve already walked about 5 miles today, which explains the sweatiness.

17 miles isn’t all that much when you’re riding a bike.  Even I could probably do it in an hour.  But my bike is inoperable right now, and when walking, 17 miles is the work of over five hours, which is a fair chunk of one’s time, even over a day and a bit.  Not that I have anything better to do with my time.  My time is pointless.

I more or less deliberately arranged things to get here just after the time for the train I caught yesterday, because I wanted to have a moment in the station where I could start writing this post.  I like starting my posts at the station better than starting them on the train; I’m not sure why.  There is an occasional nice breeze blowing at my back and cooling me down, but it wasn’t blowing when I made my decision, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would happen, so I don’t think it was part of the calculus.

I’m working on adapting to new, slightly larger (and thus less tight) ankle braces, and the knee brace I got seems to be helping my left knee, though I woke up in the night last night with marked left knee pain, and had to put Icy Hot with lidocaine on it.  I think that was mainly because I had been sleeping with my ankles crossed, as I often do.  I guess I should probably break that habit.

It doesn’t really matter much, of course.  No habits really matter much right now.  I don’t expect to have any long-lasting habits.  What I’d like to do is be able to summon the gumption just to walk until it kills me (or to walk until I get back to where I grew up, or something along those lines).  That would at least be an interesting way to go.  The main obstacles to starting have been blisters and so on, and soreness in my knees and ankles.  But I think I’m at least getting past the blisters, mostly, and trying to find ways around the soreness.  If I pace myself, the soreness shouldn’t get in the way.  I hope.

I had almost, after getting myself into better condition by working my way up toward this idea, decided to take “another route”, what with the bike and all, and see if I could make it through to continuing with life.  I have even started reading one of the books by Matthieu Ricard, the French-born Buddhist monk and so-called happiest man in the world.

It’s an interesting book, but he isn’t saying anything I haven’t heard before.  I’ve done meditation, quite a bit; when I was younger, I used to meditate and/or do self-hypnosis every day, usually more than once a day.  Weirdly enough, meditation seems to tend to make my depression worse, though it does calm my anxiety somewhat.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll find any worthwhile answers.  I don’t expect to find any, though I’m not ruling it out.  But there needs to be some better reason to carry on than just the vague notion that “people care about you” or “people would miss you”.  While there are people who will be saddened if I am gone, it’s not going to be a deep or very direct sadness, because there’s no one with whom I spend any significant time.

No one else’s day to day experience will be changed significantly whether I live or die or whatever.  The vague notion that there are people who care about me is a nice thing and a good thing, as far as it goes, but it has no local consequences, and it’s not a strong enough reason to stay alive.  It’s like the old saying, “That plus a buck fifty will get a cup of coffee.”  Of course, nowadays it would be more like at least “that plus five bucks”, but the idea is the same.  It’s not really consequential, because it’s really just an idea, some kind of abstraction.

The vague fact that there are people hundreds and even thousands of miles away who care about you and would be sad if they learned that you were dead is not enough of a reason to be alive.  After all, they would only be sad if they learned that you were dead.

And they would only learn it indirectly, because they are not actually present here in my life.  No one I really care about is actually here, nearby, and frankly, I don’t blame them.  I don’t want to inflict myself on other people.  I hate myself severely.  One of the last (or least) things I would want to do would be to inflict myself upon those whose happiness is important to me.  I don’t bring people happiness.  People who are around me tend to become more unhappy.  I’m no fucking good, and I never have been.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m getting at.  None of this makes very much sense, and it’s certainly not worth the effort to try very hard to make sense of it.

I hope you have a good week, and if you’re celebrating any of the upcoming holidays, I hope you enjoy them.  Take heart in knowing that that they’ll be a little bit better than they might otherwise be because I won’t be present at your celebrations.

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Whatever.

Well, it’s Monday, the beginning of the first full week of April in 2023.  I walked to the train today.  This was not out of any cross-training notion or related goal.  Rather, it was a consequence of something that happened on Saturday.

When I arrived at my destination train station after work on Saturday, walked to where my new bike was double-locked to the bike rack right at the main entrance of that train station, and where people are coming and going and waiting for trains all day on the platform, I found that my bike seat had been stolen, post and all.  Since I am nowhere near good enough a rider to bike back to the house in a standing pedaling posture, I had to walk the bike back to the house on Saturday evening.

So, that’s that.  I give up.  I’m not going to get a new seat or anything; just flush the money I spent on the bike down the toilet, and good riddance to it.  I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like relying on external, physical mechanisms, because worrying about maintaining them makes me tremendously stressed out.  Well, that was true, and this whole debacle has driven that point home.

I don’t mind relying on my computer only because computers are so comparatively easy to replace nowadays, and the information in not solely locally saved but is online in various senses.  If all of that goes haywire, the problems will be very large scale indeed, and personal irritation and inconvenience would probably be only a minor part of the situation.

Anyway, I’m writing this on the train now—not the first or second train of the day, but still one earlier than I would have caught if I had taken the bus to the other train station.  I’ve already walked five miles, so that’s good exercise, at least.  I have a new spandex knee brace on my left knee, because that knee has been given me some trouble with all the walking.  I think the brace is doing me some good, so far, but I’ll know better at the end of the day.

I don’t really see too much point in trying to avoid pain.  I’m never going to be able to avoid it, anyway, and my attempts to do so seem often just to trigger worse pain of new kinds.  Not that I think I deserve any better, but pain does get in the way of some things.

There’s only one way to escape pain completely.

I’m trying to read and listen to some heartening books and/or podcasts and so on, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to find books or podcasts or blog posts—or shows or videos or anything else—that are interesting.  The world basically feels like a wasteland; it’s dry and barren and dusty and dismal and as far as the eye can see—my eye, anyway, and its paired partner—there is no source of life, no oasis, no water or food.

It’s not even particularly hot or cold; that would make it more interesting than it is.  It’s just stupid and pointless, and so am I.  I’ve failed at all the things that matter the most to me in the world, and at many things that matter less.  I’m no good at taking care of myself, and frankly, I don’t feel motivated to try.  I’m just eroding and decaying and cracking into bits, slowly but inevitably.

I should be angry about having my bike seat stolen.  I’m mostly just discouraged and fatigued.  Not but what I think whoever did it should be punished, though I doubt they ever will be.  I sometimes think I would gladly kill the person who took it if I could do so without any chance of facing legal consequences.  I recognize that it would be out of proportion to the specific action, of course, but little, petty thefts like these undermine the very substance of civilization, and lead people like me steadily and inexorably closer to despair, and for what?  Someone gets a new bike seat for which they didn’t have to pay.  Maybe they pawned it for a small amount of money and used that to buy drugs or alcohol.  If the former, I can at least hope that they got something laced with enough fentanyl to kill them.

I probably wouldn’t kill such a person even if I could get away with it, to be honest.  I have very strong impulse control, and as I think I’ve said before, I don’t think I have any right not to be uncomfortable.  The inability to feel self-righteous prevents a lot of terrible deeds in the world, I think.  So many atrocities are committed by people who believe they are good and are doing good, or doing right, or think they are justly vengeful because they think have been wronged in some real, important way.  And so they will wrong others, propagating cycles of cruelty and revenge and malice.  It’s pathetic.

The world is a shithole, and there are fewer and fewer things in it that make up for that fact for me.  But it’s not as though I deserve anything better.  I give up.  I’m not going to try to improve or grow or entertain any possibility of reclaiming or rebuilding my life.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics always wins, anyway.  It always will.  I’m tired.  I’m tired of trying.  I’m just about out of gas.  And the week is only just starting.

weird wasteland

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And, in this upshot, purposes mistook fall’n on th’ inventors’ blogs. 

Hello and good morning.  I hope you’re all as well as you can be—which is sort of self-fulfilling, since you can’t in principle be better than you actually are at any given moment, and so you’re always as well as you can be, however disappointing that fact might seem.

I walked to the train station this morning—making quite good time, it ought to be said—because I had more issues with my new bike on the way back to the house yesterday evening.  It was raining, not insignificantly, when I arrived at the train station in the evening, but I was reasonably okay with that.  As I’ve written before, I’m a veteran of riding a scooter in thunderstorms and even tropical storms*, so the rain, though irritating, was not a terrible bother.  If anything, it can help one’s endurance, supplementing the cooling effects of sweat.  I also wrapped my computer quite thoroughly, and as you can tell from the fact that I’m using it to write this, my protective covering worked well.

No, the real issue was the bike seat—although now at least it rests on a post that hasn’t fallen into the frame.  But it simply would not stay level.  I had done my best to tighten the thing down when assembling it, but perhaps the rain made that tightening less secure.  So, all the way back to the house from the train, I had to perch myself just so on the seat to keep it from suddenly tilting backwards, and I didn’t always succeed.  This did not make the process of riding through the rain and puddles any easier.

By the way, there are no fenders on this bike, so there’s a fair amount of mud splash now on my backpack.  I don’t mind the cosmetics, but the grittiness is nearly maddening when I get it on my hands.  I hate grittiness and stickiness.  I always have, but I was raised, or trained myself, to avoid indulging in avoiding such irritations, though they make me feel disgusting.  I basically take the life approach that I don’t have any right to be comfortable.  This makes me able to endure a lot, but it probably contributes to the fact that I have needed to endure a lot, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I had already noticed a little wobbliness to the seat despite my best efforts, and so ordered a decent socket wrench set—since I couldn’t find the one I used to own—which was supposed to be delivered yesterday afternoon.  Obviously, since I bothered to bring it up, and since I said, “supposed to be”, it didn’t arrive.

Perhaps the rain contributed to the delays in deliveries, but it was quite irritating, especially since one of the things that kept me motivated to keep riding was thinking that once I got back to the house, I was going to get out my new socket wrench set and tighten that seat into place until nothing would make it budge.  But I couldn’t.

The anger I felt toward the seat while riding probably helped with my speed back to the house last night.  I certainly didn’t feel as fatigued as I had felt the previous night or yesterday morning, though perhaps the rain helped that, too.

In any case, it wasn’t as though I could sensibly choose not to ride the rest of the way to the house.  At least, I couldn’t do that without just giving up on everything entirely, which I do consider on a frequent basis.  There are many times when I just want to be like the man in the video for the Radiohead song, Just, and simply lie down where I am and let the elements take me.  I still might do it someday.

Unless I’m going to do that, though, I have to get to where I’m going, and sooner is better than later when it’s raining, so I pedaled away.  I was soaked completely through by the time I got to the house.  And my new socket wrench set was not there.

So, anyway, now I’m writing this on the train, having walked this morning, and the train’s electrical system seems to have begun to have issues.  The air conditioning and some of the lights keep going out with a sort of humming groan as they fail, then popping back on after a moment or two, only to fail again.  It’s actually rather funny.  As long as it doesn’t affect the train’s ability to move, I’m relatively okay with it, but it is irritating that it keeps coming on and off.

At least the fact that I walked this morning allowed me to wear my new hat, which I rather like, but which couldn’t be worn when biking, since the relative wind would almost certainly make it fly off.  You have to take your silver linings where you can find them—if you can find them.

But so much of life is irritating.  It’s always been thus.  Maybe my tendency not to try to correct or avoid things that irritate me, out of some cultural tendency or implicit stoic philosophy or whatever, has led to the accumulation of more irritations than are tolerable, until finally they have worn me down almost completely, and soon I will crumble and blow away in the wind.  I can’t say that would be terribly disappointing for me.

I suppose, if I do give in and fail soon, you’ll more or less be able to tell by the fact that I’ll suddenly stop writing.  I wouldn’t think that would be much of a loss.  In the meantime, I’ll keep boring you with my idiocy, and you can indulge your masochism by reading it.

TTFN

overlaid hat pic with distortion smaller

*No full-fledged hurricanes, though; even I am not that ridiculous.

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Dreary is as dreary does, as we say in…well, nowhere. But it’s true nonetheless

Well, it’s Monday morning again, and I’m sitting now at the train station.  I seem to be getting in better shape.  Though I left at the same time as usual, I’ve arrived at the station in time for the train earlier than I usually catch—only to hear the announcement that this particular train has been cancelled.  That means I’ll be catching the next one, which is likely to be more crowded because of the cancellation of the prior one (and I really hate crowds) though there seem to be rather few people waiting at the station than usual.

It’s not an auspicious way to begin the week, though I suppose an optimist might think that it’s likely only to improve from here.  I am not an optimist, however.  Maybe I used to be, but I’m not one now.

Anyway, I’m on my way in to the office, one way or another.  The blisters that had formed on my feet when I wore the shoes that I’ve since thrown away have mostly resolved, or are on their way out, and they certainly didn’t trouble me on my walk this morning, though my right ankle is twinging.

That’s my old injury from college, acting up.  Ithaca, New York, it turns out, can be a perilous place to play an aggressive game of catch, because the land is hilly and irregular, and if all your weight comes down on your right foot after it’s reached an unexpected dip in the ground, well…let’s just say that when it happened to me, it made a sound that my friend, with whom I was playing catch, heard from where he was, quite a ways away.  We thought my ankle might be broken, but it was just a very bad sprain.

Of course, student health was partway up Libe Slope, so it was good that I had friends back then to help me hobble up.

Today my new bicycle is supposed to arrive, so I don’t expect to be walking back from the train station this evening, but rather to be riding.  I’m sure there will be at least some minor soreness related to using a bike for the fist time in nearly a decade, but at least it’s low impact exercise, and I’ll gain some time back from my walking.

I’m still listening to The Lord of the Rings as I walk, though I also listen to some podcasts sometimes.  This morning I heard the entire chapters relating Merry’s and Pippin’s meeting of Treebeard, all the way to and through the end of the Entmoot, and on into the beginning of the next chapter, to just before Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli meet “the White Rider”.  It’s an exciting part of the story, and we’re approaching the bit that I usually like best, the battle of Helm’s Deep.

Unfortunately, I found myself feeling very melancholy as I listened this morning.  That may be partly because I’m starting a new work week, even though Saturday was supposed to be a day of portent*, and I was really hoping for something momentous or dreadful or revelatory to happen to me.  But at least part of my melancholy is just that The Lord of the Rings was a love I shared with my ex-wife, and I have a hard time still enjoying the things we used to enjoy together.

That’s rather dreary, I know, but I’m just not the sort of person to make deep attachments easily, and especially not to be able to let them go easily, and without much severe pain.  Reminders of them make me rue my ongoing life.  Certainly it hasn’t been worth much since at least the time I was invited to be a guest of the Florida DOC.  I have experienced much more negative than positive since then, and really, it was mainly negative (though with more positive to counter that) for quite a long time before then.

Alas, I have not yet been cast into a volcano, but we can always hope for something of that sort to happen.  There was a time, as I said, that I was relatively optimistic, but now I feel just worn out, and in pain, and even my attempts to get into shape cause issues for me.  And before me I face only the rolling, grinding, dreary passage of the weeks to come, doing the same pointless things, which bring no ultimate benefit to anyone.  I don’t write fiction or play music or draw or anything of that sort anymore, and I don’t have any friends, and I don’t see my kids, and the rest of my family is far away.

I really ought just to call it quits here.

Of course, I’m hopeful that I’ll enjoy riding my new bicycle enough that it’ll at least give me some fun for a bit.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too much.  But at least it should give me some extra time, and a bit of freedom to go farther in the time that I have, while still exercising, and that’s something, at least.

Of course, what I really want is to go very, very far from where I am, so far that I can never return, even in principle.  But I’m a bit of coward, and I also don’t want to be rude.  So, instead, I’m trapped where I am, hoping for illness and/or accidents.

It’s annoying.  And, again, it’s a dreary way to start the new work week—as is, no doubt, reading this blog post.  I can only apologize; but I can’t pretend to be other than as I am.  What would be the point?

glass-spilled-water

*Nothing interesting happened then, though.

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For a blog of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Hello and good morning.

It’s the first Thursday of Spring in the northern hemisphere, and of Autumn in the southern, so I’m writing my more traditional Thursday blog post, though there will be little to set it apart from all those that I write on any other day.  For that, I apologize.  I think my writing must grow tedious after a while (if not sooner).  My own words are nearly always tedious to me, as is my own thought.

I’m sitting at the bus stop, today, because yesterday I decided to re-try a pair of shoes I haven’t worn in a while.  They are quite nice in that they are lightweight, and also because they are porous, and so “breathe” well.  However, after my eleven miles of walking yesterday, they gave me several new blisters, albeit small ones, and that’s terribly frustrating at this stage.

I’ve treated the blisters, more or less, but they are still annoying, and today I’m wearing my Timberland boots, which at least didn’t give me blister when I last wore them.  But they definitely don’t have the porosity of the other make of shoe, and they are heavier as well, though for boots they are remarkably light.

I threw away the shoes I wore yesterday, and the other pair I have like them.  I don’t want to be tempted to try them again after a few days.  They had done their time, in any case, and the soles were getting rather worn.  They weren’t bad shoes, by any means, but for longer walking—at least if you’re using my feet, about which I have no choice—they seem to cause trouble, even after long months of use.

I know, I know, this is all very boring, and again I apologize.  I’m a boring person; what can I say?  At the very least, I’m certainly not pleasant.  I’m just a glitch in the program, a flaw in the crystal, a smudge on the written page, a grain of sand in the bottom of a shoe, or a spot of bird droppings on an otherwise beautiful painting.  I might be a curiosity for a bit, and even, from certain angles, seem to add something here or there, purely by chance.  But after a while, there’s only so much interest anyone can have in looking at feces on a canvas or tolerating the effects of buggy computer code.

Before long, everyone who is very close to me much of the time gets weary, and they go away, to save their sanity or their mood or whatever.  Apparently, I’m something of an emotional toxin or allergen.  I’m even allergic to myself, frankly—which makes me a sort of mental autoimmune disorder.  Well, I can’t change the nature of reality, I suppose.

This Saturday is the 25th of March.  According to Tolkien’s calendar, that is the day on which the One Ring fell into the Cracks of Doom and was destroyed, causing the final downfall of Sauron.  It’s an auspicious day.  Regrettably, there are no handy volcanoes in Florida—nor anywhere reasonably close to Florida, as far as I know.

I think I’ve heard that people in Japan sometimes throw themselves into Mount Fuji, but I may be misremembering that.  Anyway, falling into an active volcano is not a peaceful sort of thing, unlike what happens to Gollum in the end of the Peter Jackson movies.  One doesn’t have a soft, gentle landing on the surface of the lava, to sink slowly into it, apparently not even quite realizing what’s happening.  No, this is molten rock we’re talking about.  It is much denser than any flesh, and a human—or other animal—will not sink into it at all.

The initial impact of a fall onto lava seems likely not to be much gentler than a fall onto solid rock.  And then, of course, it is very hot, searing and boiling the flesh that hits it almost instantly.  There are YouTube videos in which you can watch this demonstrated (not on a live creature, but on a bag of stuff that’s roughly the same composition as a living animal), and it pops and skips about, flaming and sputtering like splashes of water dropped onto a very hot pan bottom.  Only worse.

One wouldn’t suffer for long in such a situation, of course, and it would certainly be quite spectacular, though I doubt a participant would appreciate the spectacle.

But anyway, though the Ring might of course first rest gently on the surface of lava before melting into it, Gollum would not sink at all.  He would, rather, be incinerated violently.  In this, interestingly, the makers of The Rings of Power, seemed to understand volcanoes better.  They trigger the initial eruption of Orodruin by rerouting a river so that its water flows through underground tunnels before emptying into the lava chamber and boiling explosively, setting the whole thing off.

It wasn’t quite a realistic depiction of such an event—I think if water fell on a flat, placid lake of lava such as we see in the show, it would certainly boil, and probably explode, but I don’t think it would trigger a general eruption like we saw, since it was above the magma, and would remain so, because of comparative density.  But they had to make it clear what was happening, so I guess we can give them some slack on that front.

Also, I don’t think the surface of the lava would actually be red hot liquid, unless it was actively flowing.  If it were exposed to the air, as it seemed to be, I would think it would crust over a bit, with the very surface darkening.  But I might be wrong about that.  I suppose that depends on just how hot it was.  I’m no volcanologist or geologist or whatever, so if anyone out there is an expert, I would welcome your input.

It doesn’t really matter, though.  I’m not going to be encountering any volcanoes, I shouldn’t think.  And though I have often toyed with idea of going to stand before the entrance to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in lighter fluid and gasoline, and setting myself on fire, I don’t think I have the willpower to do it.  It’s an intimidating prospect.  It would be hard for people to ignore, I have to admit, and maybe it would make people stop and think about the horrors perpetrated upon so many people by Florida’s badly managed criminal justice system, and the flawed priorities of such systems in general in the modern world.

More likely, people would just think I was crazy.  They would, no doubt, be correct, as far as that went.  But that wouldn’t necessarily mean my other points were wrong.

Anyway, I don’t expect that I’ll do that; I’m a bit too much of a coward.  But it would be nice if something momentous happened this Saturday.  I won’t be at work, so I won’t be writing a blog post, which means I’ll basically be lying around with nothing of interest to do.

What else is new?  Hopefully the rest of you are enjoying the beginning of the new season, whether it’s Spring or Fall.  Some major holidays are fast approaching, at least among the western religions.  If you celebrate them, and have family and/or friends with whom to share them, I hope you look forward to them and enjoy yourself tremendously.  You might as well.

TTFN

volcano 3 in 3D