Psychology

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“What the hell am I doin’ here? I don’t belong here.”

I apologize for my rather boring blog posts over the past few (or several) working days.  I was trying to be as upbeat as I could, and to stop dwelling quite so much on my mood disorder and my otherwise disordered mental state, such as it is, because I feared that I would end up just turning readers off.  So, instead, I’ve focused on walking and blisters and silly things like that which, upon occasion, and in passing, would give a glancing blow at some interesting (in my opinion) subject matter like yesterday.

The fact is, I’m having severe, ongoing, worsening problems with my depression, and I feel like nothing I’ve done here or said here has been of any benefit to it or to me.  Or, well, what I’ve said and done might benefit the depression in and of itself, i.e., it might have made it stronger.  But that’s not necessarily good for the larger organism (me).

This is referring to the depression as if it were a being or entity in and of itself, with a separate nature and goals and criteria for thriving and so on.  It’s not, of course.  It’s a state of my own brain/body, a sort of self-sustaining but destructive pattern of internal and external interactions in a brain that’s already not exactly functioning in quite what might be considered a normal, or at least normative, way.

I’ve previously likened depression, as a state or an “attack”, to a hurricane—a self-sustaining pattern that forms and grows when conditions are right and is very difficult to break once it gets going.  I think that’s actually a decent analogy.  It’s certainly vastly better than the popular “chemical imbalance” notion upon which I’ve spat my vitriol more than once in the past.

As with hurricanes, I think it’s not entirely unreasonable to think of depression as if it were an entity of its own that tends to act to sustain and strengthen itself, as if it had intentions and a will, as long as one maintains the implicit awareness that this is a metaphor.  It’s easy to get into the habit of using metaphors so often that they stop behaving like metaphors in one’s head and start being, effectively, literal interpretations of things that are fundamentally otherwise, and it’s important to try to avoid doing that.  That way madness lies, as they say.

And madness does lie—almost always.  That’s one of the big problems with it.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make and to which I’m struggling to stick, is that depression acts as if it has a life of its own, rather as a tumor more or less literally acts as an entity in and of itself within the body, with its own “agenda” of self-sustenance and growth.

I’ve said to others, and to myself, that my mind is not my friend.  This is one of the reasons, for instance, that though I’m intrigued by them, I don’t think I would ever seek out an experience with any form of psychedelic.  My mental state often already has the feel of a bad trip of sorts, as I’ve heard them described.  I don’t want to pour gasoline onto that fire.

But I’ve fought with this entity in my head for almost as long as I can remember.  My brain, my mind, has always been weird—to me, relative to the people around me, and to many of them as well—though others also often seem inscrutable and inexplicable to me, at least in the sense of feeling things “in my bones”, though I’ve read and learned many things that give me at least an academic, intellectual understanding of things people do.  But I can’t say I grok them.

I’ve often said that basic primatology—particularly that which applies to primates that live in large groups—provides a sufficient framework on which to hang the vast majority of human behavior.  I suppose this should not be too surprising, since humans are primates, after all.  But it’s disheartening how rarely humans fully depart from the simple, chest-thumping, fang-baring, hierarchy-climbing, mate-seeking, dominance-submission behavior patterns that could with only a little simplification be transplanted onto the average baboon flange.

I cannot claim any superiority, of course.  My own, apparently “neurodivergent”, brain* is erratic and irrational even by its own—my own—standards, and I certainly cannot claim to be a well-adjusted machine running in optimal condition.  There are aspects to my machine that really are well put-together, and I’m glad for those, of course.  But they don’t seem to be enough to keep the whole thing operational.

I decided to give up even trying to look for help or improvement or to expect myself ever to get any better, and I tried not even talking—or writing—about it.  But that didn’t make for very good blog posts, apparently.  So maybe this one will at least be more interesting.  It’s truer to my inner state, if nothing else.

So, welcome to Hell, population one—I would like to say welcome to Purgatory, but there is no process of cleansing or improvement—of purgation—going on here.  There is only malicious, sadistic, hateful torment meted out by the demonic overlord of a realm repurposed for the eternal excoriation of a lost soul that is also the demon itself.

Okay, well, that paragraph was gratuitously melodramatic and misleading.  Sorry.  It makes the whole thing sound more exciting and impressive than it actually is.  Oh, well.  At least it’s not boring.  Except when it is, which is actually quite a lot of the time, come to think of it.  That’s one of the many forms of torture it entails.  Actually, that’s one of the big issues about it; even things that ought to be interesting are utterly mind-numbing, or seem so because the mind itself is numb (not comfortably) in the first place.

This is all a bit of mess here.  Again, sorry.  Returning to an earlier point, I’ll say that though the hurricane analogy is good as far as it goes, hurricanes have a tendency to peter out, eventually, as they move through the atmosphere, certainly once they go over land and lose the source of their water and heat, and then they kind of just fade away.  Certainly, no hurricane is going to destroy the Earth itself.

Depression, on the other hand, can absolutely do the equivalent of such planetary destruction.  In this, it’s much more like a tumor than a hurricane.  It’s a slow-growing tumor, perhaps like an indolent prostate cancer—the sort of thing you can have, and not treat, and yet you still might die of something else before the cancer ever would kill you (though kill you it may).  But even if it doesn’t kill you, it certainly doesn’t make you stronger.  It affects everything else in the system.  It steals energy from all the “good” things, when there even are any, and it further whittles away at those few good things by making a person intolerable to the people and things that are good in that person’s life, until nearly all of them are gone.

I don’t have any answers to this problem.  I know of ways to end the problem, but not to cure it.  Unfortunately, I don’t see any evidence that anyone else out there has any good answers.  Believe me, I’ve looked, and I’m “qualified” to evaluate such matters, in more than one sense.

The world was not made for us; it was not made for anyone; as far as we can tell, it just happened.  Ditto with human beings and other forms of life—even weirdo, alien, replicant, robot, changeling, mutants like me.  Ditto with culture and civilization.  There’s no reason to expect them to work flawlessly or efficiently.  They just have to work “well” enough to be self-sustaining.  That’s natural selection, and it’s not pretty.

Well, it can be quite beautiful, depending on your point of view, but even Darwin noted how slow, cruel, wasteful, and harsh it all is.  Nevertheless, it’s the only game there is, as far as I can see.

I so just want to fold and walk away from the table.  Right now the blister on my foot is inhibiting that somewhat, but it’ll heal**.  Then maybe I can finally take a long walk off a short planet.  I don’t see any better options.

*Every time I take new or repeated tests to check on whether it’s accurate to describe it that way, I keep getting results pretty resoundingly supportive of that hypothesis.  I recognize that I am not performing scientifically rigorous evaluations, since the one administering and the one to whom the tests are being administered is the same, and it’s only too easy to introduce bias.  But I don’t have ready access, nor the mental wherewithal to take advantage of it, to resources to get a more objective assessment.  And when I go online and watch videos and when I read books and articles, when I go to social media and look at available resources and groups there, and so on, I find that, while these people all make somewhat more sense to me than most other people do, I still feel severely weird even in comparison to them, and I could not feel comfortable among them or interacting with them.  I feel no sense that I could connect to the related communities—to any communities, really.  I feel like a creep and a weirdo relative to every potential group or person with whom I could consider engaging.

**I almost accidentally wrote “it’ll heel”, which would be funny, but the blister is on the ball of my foot, not the heel, so as a joke, even an unintentional one, it just wouldn’t work.

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Oh, yeah, Happy Presidents Day, by the way

It’s Monday morning, again—a fact for which surely we must all have cause to celebrate.

I’m beginning this blog post sitting at the train station instead of at the bus stop, in the fashion in which I always used to write it, waiting for the second train of the day*.  I feel quite weird and tense, almost anxious, interloping back into my old venue.  I worry that I’m going to be taking someone’s seat at the station by taking the seat I always used to take, or taking someone’s newly usual seat on the train by—hopefully—taking the seat I always prefer to take.

I don’t like things that disrupt my routines, and by extension and logical coherence, I don’t like to disrupt other people’s routines.  I also feel nervous about possible social interactions, e.g., someone saying something equivalent to “long time, no see,” and asking where I’ve been and what happened.  Thankfully, I’ve never been publicly sociable, so there’s no real precedent for anyone to say much, but it’s not impossible.

The base of my right thumb is really acting up today (and it was yesterday) and that’s frustrating because I have been doing my blog posts on my laptop—as I am doing this one—and that definitely gives my thumb comparative rest.  Also, I’ve done something to irritate my right shoulder rather badly, probably the supraspinatus and/or related structures, and raising my arm laterally (aka abducting it), even a little, is quite painful.

It’s frustrating to have all these new pains occurring.  They distract me from my usual, chronic back pain, with which I’m at least familiar.  Unfortunately, they don’t make it go away; they just add to it and sap the energy I usually have to be able to deal with it.

I’m not sure what to write about today, which is somewhat ironic given that I’ve written over three hundred words so far.  Perhaps this is my writing equivalent of small talk?  I’ve never been very good at doing small talk in real time, or at least in being able to understand the point, or endure it when nearly anyone is doing it.  But maybe this is my version of that, and maybe other people find it just as mind-numbing as usual small talk is for me.  In my ethical defense, though, I will say that no one is socially pressured** to read my blogs.  No one corners anyone at a party or in an office or whatever and shoves a computer or phone or tablet under that person’s face and insists that the person read this blog.

Do they?  Has that happened to anyone out there?  If it has, I want to extend my thanks to the person who did that to you—they’re really helping me out!

I’m kidding.  That would be a horrible thing, and I would feel guilty-by-proxy for their deeds.  Or, rather, not “guilty”—since one cannot even in principle actually be guilty or responsible for the deeds of other minds that one has not forced or otherwise caused them to commit—but I would feel chagrined, embarrassed, and just generally bad.

That raises a little tangent point I would like to emphasize:  No person, human or otherwise, can be held morally culpable for the deeds of others, especially for the deeds of the dead, because one cannot be morally culpable for anything over which one did not have even the possibility of control***.  This is why the insanity defense exists in criminal law, for instance, and in this case, the law in neither a ass nor a idiot.  You won’t find me all too often praising the law and its general practices, so enjoy that little aberration.  In most cases, I come not to praise the law but to bury it.

Well, no, burying the law would probably be a mistake.  Even a somewhat dysfunctional legal system is probably better than no laws at all.  Indeed, I suspect that, were the governments of the world to be suddenly abolished and all their power stripped completely away—perhaps as a practical joke or experiment done by immensely powerful extraterrestrials—after a period of horrible violence and instability, with mass starvation, disease, and infrastructure collapse, new systems of laws would come into place.  Even in places where there is gang rule, the gangs (as the previous term suggests) tend to institute “rules” of their own.  It just happens.  It’s an evolutionarily and game theoretically stable strategy, and it works for tyrants as well as for egalitarians.

One big trouble is that the individual people who want to set up and control governments are rarely the ones best suited to do so.  It would probably be better for us, in general, only to elect to our higher offices individuals who saw government—legislative, executive, judicial, what have you—as an unpleasant but necessary chore, like cleaning toilets, mopping floors, or mucking out horse stalls, rather than as a personally desirable thing to do, a means by which to achieve social status and the like.

Becoming president, in particular, should be done almost like jury duty.  No one who wants to do the job, for personal reasons, should probably be allowed to do it.

Perhaps we could arrange it so that no one could be nominated by anyone in their family or whom they knew personally, but could only be nominated by other people, people to whom they were not beholden and who were not beholden to them.  States could each go through a mass nomination process, by which a certain minimum number of people are suggested by those around them, and then strangers look into their character and nature and a public debate among people in general takes place, pro and con, but in which the nominated people cannot take part.

Then, at some point, a state holds a vote among nominated candidates, and the top twenty (or whatever) candidates are then put again before a public debate, in which, again, they cannot participate.  Only others can promote or detract from them, stating their qualifications and shortcomings.  Then, there would be a newer vote, and the recipient of the most votes would be that state’s candidate.

Then their would be a nationwide equivalent to select the office-holder.  No one would be allowed to refuse the job except based on legitimate and confirmed severe health difficulties.  But that would probably all shake out in the initial nomination and election process.  I suppose, to make it worthwhile, it would be best to have slightly longer terms of office, maybe with the new term overlapping the previous, so the new incomer could learn from the predecessor.  And only one term would be allowed****.

Anyway, that’s all silly fantasy stuff, so don’t worry about it.  I’m just tired and mentally unstable.  I really don’t think I can do this very much longer.  By “do this” I mean “exist on this planet”, not “write this blog”, though the former subsumes the latter.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no one coming to take me back to my home-world, or to the mother ship, or whatever, so I’ll need to figure out some other way.

I’m working on it.

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*The irony of the bus-to-train schedule I’ve been doing recently is that it actually all but forces me to get up a little later than I used to, because the buses simply don’t start to arrive as early as trains do.

**Except by me, within my blog, of course.  But that’s a very nebulous kind of social pressure, and comes from someone who, while not anti-social, is surely dis-social.  I’m not sociopathic by any means, but I am “patho-social”, i.e., there seems to be some dysfunction in my ability to socialize, even with people I like.  It’s not pleasant.

***Thus, the notion of “original sin”, for instance, is pure ethical bullshit.

****This makes me imagine another contrafactual scenario, in which candidates for office hold an anti-debate, in which each one is required to denigrate themselves and their own party and give convincing reasons why the other party’s candidate is better, to argue with the other against themselves and their party’s positions.  It would at least be amusing.

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Words, and spice, and a futile device…that’s what this blog post is made of

Well, it’s Friday again, and so tomorrow is Saturday, in the system by which we name our days.

The days themselves don’t know or care about what we call them, anymore than all the various plants and animals and fungi in the world care—as far as anyone can tell—what we call them.  Our names of things are solely for our convenience, to make communication easier and more streamlined—paintbrush handles of thought, as I think Eliezer Yudkowsky described them.

But, of course, having finite minds, as surely do all creatures, we tend to get so used to thinking of things by their names that we think the names and the things are interconnected in and of themselves, and even that the names have inherent power.  This is akin to all the old magical ideas that knowing someone’s or something’s true name gives you power over them in some mystical fashion.  It’s also related to our (depressingly) current notions of names or other words being capable of causing actual, physical harm, and being taboo—even words that are basically innocuous.

I can certainly understand why people might want to avoid using a term that’s been almost exclusively associated with historical injustice, oppression, and literal violence; that’s just a matter of trying to be polite, as far as I can see, and politeness is rarely a bad thing, as long as people don’t get too carried away.  But the tendency of humans to get hung up on some mystical (and fictional) power of names often becomes a problem, and is the error of thought which required the creation of the formerly popular and very important corrective, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

That’s very true—unless you’re dealing with Paul Atreides or some other Bene Gesserit person.  Alas, those are fictional beings.  I say “alas” not because I think that it’s too bad that we don’t have the Bene Gesserit and so on, but because it would be great if there really were people/creatures like the Guild Navigators, with the ability to fold space thanks to long exposure to the spice mélange.  That would be tremendously useful for space travel, obviously.  In our world, though, “He who controls the spice controls the universe” just refers to KFC and Colonel Sanders’s secret original recipe for fried chicken, which is tasty, but is not going to get us interstellar travel, at least not anytime soon.

Similarly, as far as we know, in our particular brane-world, there are no orcterlolets, with their ability to manipulate space directly (no spice needed).  And if Simon Belmont is real in our universe, he’s keeping his knowledge and abilities quiet, probably wisely*.

Anyway, coming back to the subject of the day and days, I hope you all are going to have a good weekend, and that you get some time off from work and so on.  I’m going to work tomorrow, unless some highly unusual situation develops, and so I will be writing a blog post tomorrow.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve been using my laptop all this week to write, and it’s definitely helping my thumbs, though they are not fully recovered yet.  I will say, even I am struck by how much faster and more eloquently I “speak” when typing than in any other fashion, including actual speech, as far as I can see.  As you may know, I’ve tried to work on doing “audio blogs”, since more people seem to like to listen and to watch things than to read—see yesterday’s post for my lament about that fact—but it’s not nearly as natural to me.  I did find it gratifying to read aloud my last post from Iterations of Zero, which I turned into a “video” on YouTube and embedded here, but that’s as much because I really was trying to get that message out…yet again, perhaps for the last time, after so many, repeated failures.

Apparently, I’m not very good at making myself clear.  Then again, the reason for that, and the emphasis on that reason, was a big part of the point of that last IoZ blog post and the fact that I read it aloud and shared it in different format.  I’m probably wasting my time, though.  Even if someone actually gets the point I’m trying to make, why on Earth would anyone act on it?  Why would anyone even try to save the prisoner in my thought experiment?

Let him die, I say.  He’s a worthless little piece of shit, anyway.  I hate him.

With that, I’ll wrap up this rather bizarre and somewhat short Friday blog post.  I didn’t have any agenda going in, and I think I’ve achieved that agenda nicely, and in fewer words than I usually take to do it.  If you’re spending the weekend with family and/or friends, please do your best to appreciate your time with them.  Make the most of it.  Don’t take them for granted.  Take nothing for granted.  The universe only makes one promise to everyone—and we can’t even be completely, mathematically, epistemically certain of that one.

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*The immediately preceding few sentences were references to my “fantasy” adventure book, The Chasm and the Collision, in case anyone was confused more by them than by references to Dune.  To learn more about what those references mean, you should buy and read my book!  Heck, buy them all!  They will change your life, I promise you…at the very least in the sense that you will own several more books than you had owned previously.  That’s technically a change, right?

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They have blogged at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so I’m writing my traditional blog post, which I used to write between writing fiction (or editing it) on every other working day of the week.  I suppose it’s possible that now I’m still writing my daily blog between writing fiction, but if so, it’s a very long between, and I see no hint of a far end of that break, at least not one that involves me starting to write fiction again.

Practically no one—perhaps literally no one—has shown any real interest in that possibility, nor is anyone outside my family really reading any of my fiction.  Perhaps few people read fiction at all anymore.  I do have to wonder, how many of the people who buy even the big best-selling fiction works actually read them?

I recall back when Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was a huge best-seller* that many people just bought it to have it on their coffee table or book shelf, as a social status symbol, just as they might wear Nike shoes or drive a particular make and model of car, or frequent a particular restaurant where they could be seen with other people who were going there to be seen.  They were peacocking, so to speak—it wasn’t just males, of course, because humans have different social structures than birds as a general rule.  But the status, hierarchy, and symbolic drives are all quite reminiscent.  One could say similar things about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Hell, back in the day, there were probably oodles of people who had sets of high-quality encyclopedias on their bookshelves, that they never used or expected to use.  This is a true shame, because I can tell you that just picking a random volume of an old-school encyclopedia and thumbing one’s way through it, stopping and reading when one encounters something interesting, can be quite a wonderful experience, and lets one learn about things one might never have thought to explore.  Wikipedia does have a sort of “random article” feature, but it’s just not the same.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent.  The point I’m making is that I think almost no one reads at all, or at least few people read anything longer than a few hundred words at a time**.  People seem to prefer to watch people speaking in order to get their news, which is far less efficient than reading actual words, which are a comparatively concise and precise means of conveying information.

There are some things for which video is especially well-suited, of course.  Conveying complex scientific ideas can be boosted tremendously with high-quality animation of concepts, especially in physics.  Also, of course, explorations of the natural world as undertaken by the likes of David Attenborough can be used to give people a more direct exposure to things they never would have been able to see for themselves.

But still, words have their power, the written word especially (or so I think).  When you come down to it, every aspect of the internet runs on written words—computer programs and commands—which convey literal, step-by-step instructions from one place to another about what pixel to put where and when, how and when and with what power to vibrate a computer’s speaker, and of course, what ASCII or similar character to call up and put where on what screen.

It happens very fast, of course, but it happens that way.  The very reason video signals can be so high-fidelity but low power—phone signals as well—is that they are transmitted as languages, with redundancy and error-correction implicitly (and deliberately) built in, so that even when part of a signal is lost, the rest can “easily” be reconstructed.

I put “easily” in scare quotes because while it happens readily once everything is set up, it took some of the most brilliant minds ever in the world to figure out how that sort of thing works and what to do to make use of it, and others to figure out how to bring it to the available use of so many of the billions of humans worldwide.

Meanwhile, most of those humans don’t think about the exquisite and astonishing machinery involved in their smartphones, or their “smart” TVs, or their GPS (which requires Special and General Relativity to function!).  Most people use their phones as distractions and—perhaps primarily—as yet another instance of peacocking, of status demonstration.  How else can one explain the push to buy the latest iteration of the latest smartphone, when one hasn’t even taken full advantage of the features of the phone one currently has?

Humans very rarely seem actually to think for themselves.  I’d say almost all of them do it some of the time—occasionally—and some few of them do it much of the time.  But that last population is vanishingly small.  Yet they, I suspect, are the ones who drive most advances in most fields, and produce the improvement of science and technology and art and society.  What a shame that they’re usually just making precious ceramic sculptures to be tossed about by troglodytes.

Oh, well.  Obviously I’m not in an upbeat and optimistic frame of mind today, if ever I am.  And it’s because of facts and thoughts such as these that I think I’m not writing this blog between writing fiction but rather after having written all the fiction I’m going to write in my life.  That’s okay, I suppose.  It doesn’t actually matter much to much of anyone, anyway.

It’s just as well, I guess.  The one person I met at work who actually talked to me about the substance and the ideas in one of my books—Son of Man, in this case—was also a person who died of a drug overdose not long afterward.  It wasn’t the fault of my book; he had a drug problem already.  But he was smart and curious, and he actually read the book and thought about it and asked me questions related to it, and debated points with me.  That was kind of cool.  Small wonder that he died a self-inflicted death; he was too much a kindred spirit to me.  What else could one expect?

So, with that in mind, I—who, regrettably, cannot seem to develop a life-threatening addiction to drugs or alcohol—don’t expect to do much more creative shit in my life.  I could be wrong, of course; I make no claims to absolute epistemic certainty about anything.  I’m not even entirely convinced by cogito ergo sum argument.  I can vaguely conceive of the possibility of myself being a figment of someone else’s dreams, albeit someone with a very vivid (if somewhat dreary) imagination.  Of course, in a sense, an imagined being, if the imagined nature of that being is instantiated in the imagining of independent thought, does exist.  So I guess Descartes’s conclusion, in sum, was still correct as far as it went.

I don’t know.  I’m tired.  If someone is dreaming me, I wish they would have a better dream.  Maybe I wish they would wake up.  Presumably I wouldn’t know that the dream that I was in ended when it ended, anymore than any of us would know if the vacuum state of the universe tunneled to a lower energy level and wiped out everything preceding it, because the wave front of the phase change would progress at the speed of light, which would mean that the first hint of its existence for anyone would be their instantaneous obliteration, faster than they could even potentially know it was happening.

Swift, painless, without the possibility of fear because fear cannot move faster than light—it’s not too bad a way for the universe to go.  To read more about it, please look into The End of the Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by­­­­­­­ Katie Mack***.  It’s an excellent book, and quite fun.  Buy it even if you’re just going to put it on your coffee table to impress the Joneses.  At least the author would get a bit of money.  And some day, you or someone in your family might accidentally pick it up and learn something.  There are worse accidents than that!

TTFN

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*Admittedly, that is nonfiction, but it serves my point more generally.

**Though, to my surprise, on the train this morning I saw no fewer than three people actually, actively reading paperback books.  Perhaps I’m too pessimistic.  That would surprise almost no one.

***You need not worry about the possibility of such a phase change much.  It’s far from certain that it even could happen, and even if it can, the best science indicates that it’s vanishingly unlikely over anything like the current lifespan of the universe.  Dr. Mack explains it far better than I could.

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Brief thoughts on candy, carbon, communication, and a shared “video”

Well, it’s Wednesday, the day after Valentine’s Day.  I know it’s not technically the Ides of February or anything—at least I think I know that—but there ought to be an official day for the day after Valentine’s Day, some equivalent of Boxing Day after Christmas.  Maybe we could call it Barfing Day; that might be both fun and appropriate.

I was thinking that yesterday would have been an excellent day for me to have a heart attack.  It seems an appropriate potentially fatal healthcare crisis to have on a day when everyone is sharing “heart-shaped”* treats, many if not all of which are not great for the coronary arteries.  However, though I did in fact find myself once sprinting to beat a light and then later sprinting to catch a bus—one can’t get much more cliché than that when it comes to myocardial infarctions—I felt not a hint of chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, or what have you.  Disappointing.  And the only nausea I felt was that sort of subjective nausea that isn’t a true physical feeling, but which is a projection of disgust over the very silly and stupid things people say and do.

This queasiness was not in response to Valentine’s Day activities!  Don’t get me wrong.  I thought Barfing Day was a good follow-up day because eating too many sweets in one day can lead to GI upset.  For the most part, I think it’s nice that people express love, romantic and/or otherwise, to those important to them.  It may be frustrating that it’s such a ritualized, scheduled expression of love, but unfortunately, if it were not for such rituals, it’s probable that many people would never make or think of any such expression at all.

Sometimes, it seems, humans need rituals to make them realize their own feelings, and perhaps even to confront their own feelings.  This can apply to bad feelings as well as to good, as when, on the approach to a holiday such as Valentine’s Day, someone realizes that the person with whom they are currently linked is someone with whom they don’t really feel that strong a bond.  Hopefully such a realization occurs before too much has been invested in a relationship.

I suppose the need to act in recognition of such a fact can sometimes lead to a stereotypical Valentine’s Day breakup, which is harsh, but perhaps better than the alternative of a long, unpleasant relationship with increasing acrimony and emotional (if not physical) abuse.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I don’t know; I’m making this up as I go.

In distant parallel to the above, I sometimes think that maybe we should lace all Valentine’s Day candies with hormone blockers or something along those lines to diminish the sex drive of those who eat them.  Surely, anything that can be done to decrease the breeding of new humans is probably going to be a benefit for the rest of the planet, and evolution just isn’t likely to get to that solution on its own.

On second thought, that may actually be a foolish notion.  Honestly, I’d worry more about people if they didn’t have any children, because the nurturing of children is one of the most potent triggers and encouragers of love—not to mention forethought—in humans.  As I think Fagin said in the musical Oliver, I think I’d better think it out again.

Anyway, that’s all for you guys to worry about.  I’m giving up on it, and with any luck, none of what humans do will have any impact on me, other than perhaps to alter slightly the rate of decay of my corpse.  Though it would be useful, I think—and as I’ve written before—to enact a policy, or even a tradition, of storing the bodies of the deceased in deep ocean subduction zones, to get them out of the carbon cycle.

Cremation seems like a terrible idea; it just gives everyone one last lunge to increase their individual carbon footprint!

It probably doesn’t make much difference, though, honestly.  Such minor sequestering and the like on local, individual level is unlikely to accumulate into anything of significance to the global atmosphere.  I think it will only be the development of new science, technologies, and processes that will engineer out the excess carbon from the atmosphere, perhaps using some adjusted and enhanced equivalent of photosynthesis on an industrial scale (among other thing).  After all, photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide and water—potent greenhouse gases—from the atmosphere and ultimately converts them into carbohydrates and fats and such.  These can then be sequestered, if necessary, or converted to bioplastics, and biofuels, to use for things we currently do with fossil fuels.

The local energy for those processes can be derived from the products of the photosynthesis (ultimately from the sun) and so on, so that even when not truly “carbon-negative” it will be at worst “carbon-neutral”.

Of course, it’s stupid to be carbon neutral as a matter of personal, aesthetic judgment.  Carbon is the backbone of life as we know it, and probably will be for most if not all other life in the universe, if there is any.

I know, in these matters, “carbon” is just a shorthand for greenhouse gas reduction and whatnot, but I wonder how many people really think about that when they use the term, especially when one considers that water vapor, which is more potent than CO2  as a greenhouse gas, has no carbon in it at all, and methane, which is also more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, has only one carbon atom for every four hydrogen atoms.  And a molecule of methane burns to make one molecule of CO2 and two molecules of water.

If more people were more scientifically literate and careful in their thought, a great many of our problems would probably be diminished, so my biggest local lament here is that many of the more vocal activists on all sides may refer to things like carbon and economics and communication and the like without even really thinking about the words they are saying.  Such words in such cases aren’t tools of communication, but are, as Eliezer Yudkowsky notes, just soldiers going into battle.  What a horrible bastardization of the greatest invention of the human species.

In closing, I just want to let you know that I recorded myself reading aloud the last blog post I made on my alternate blog Iterations of Zero, and I’ve turned it into a video to put on YouTube.  I’ve embed it here, below.  It’s only three minutes long, and some of that is a lead-in moment of silence.

You can read it or listen, whatever you like, but I hope if you “watch” it you’ll give it a “thumbs up” on YouTube.

It’s a brief discussion of a thought experiment or story of a person trapped in a peculiar prison and trying to send messages for help without alerting the jailer, but it’s not as simple as it seems, and it’s not actually fiction.

Enjoy.

*And they are truly sort of heart-shaped, especially if you look at the interior shape of a heart.

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Some 義理チョコ from me to you, with 感謝

It’s Tuesday, February 14th, which means that it’s Valentine’s Day, a day that is “celebrated” in the United States and Japan at the very least.  I think it’s observed in many other places, but I’m not at all certain of anything specific.

I guess it’s appropriate, given that it’s a holiday nominally about romantic love, that it falls on a twos-day this year.  Ha.  Ha.  Excuse me, I think I have to throw up.

Anyway, to those of you who are having, or planning to have, a lovely day with your significant other—or others, I suppose that’s possible—I hope you have a nice, even a terrific, day.  Honestly, I do.  I’ve gotten to the point in my depression where I certainly don’t feel envious or spiteful or anything.  I’m just mostly empty.  So do whatever you like with each other, with your civilization, with the world, whatever.  Ruin it, save it, let it slowly grind away, gasping and limping, to its inevitable end.  I don’t really care.  I have no skin in much of any game, anymore, not even my own.

It’s curious, the form in which Valentine’s Day was imported into Japan, at least according to every light novel, manga, and anime I’ve seen that deals with it.  It’s a day on which girls give chocolate to friends and/or to those with whom they are infatuated /romantically interested (usually boys, but not always nor exclusively).  That’s giri-choco (義理チョコ) versus honmei-choco (本命チョコ)* if I recall the terms correctly.  Subsequently, the standard practice is for one who received chocolate (usually a boy) to return some kind of gift on March 14th, which is called “White Day”, and appears to be a holiday that solely exists in Japan.

I doubt anyone much planned for any of these things to happen, of course, despite frequent complaints, there and here, that such holidays were invented by greeting card companies or the like.  As with most human institutions—indeed, as with civilization itself—they are spontaneously self-assembling systems.  They are not even in any kind of stable and/or dynamic equilibrium.  Certainly there are people and organizations that benefit from Valentine’s Day, and they will encourage it to continue and to grow to the degree they can—candy manufacturers, florists, greeting card companies, those sorts of people and things—but that happens very much spontaneously.  As with most actual “conspiracies” it’s not planned, it just occurs.

There is no shame or crime in any of this.  Who among you, given an opportunity to benefit yourself (and by extension, your family and others you love) through the honest production of goods and services that reinforce and spread the memes of a holiday which is at least nominally a positive and cheerful one, would not do so?  Making a living while supporting love seems like a win-win situation.

No one forces you to buy candies, or cards, or decorations.  No one forces you to be in a relationship**, no one forces you to buy holiday-associated clothes or treats or jewelry or whatever.  You may feel strong urges to do such things, but you can’t blame those who recognize those urges and make products that respond to them.  You can’t blame McDonalds for the fact that you feel hungry but don’t want to go to the trouble of eating somewhere else, anymore than McDonalds can blame you if you do choose to eat somewhere else.

I don’t know how I got off on that tangent.  I think I was arguing with myself, past and present, as much as anything else.  It’s all academic and moot to me, now, really.  I have no romantic interest, haven’t had any for quite a long time, and I don’t expect—or really, want—one any time before I die.  I’m a cat whose feet have been burned too painfully to risk walking across that stovetop again.  It was all always confusing and counterintuitive to me from the start, to be honest.

Speaking of walking, my feet still have a little bit of soreness from Saturday, but I got through my four miles total of walking yesterday without much trouble, and my blisters are resolving but not gone.  I think if I undertake such long walking—or longer—in the near future, I should probably do an hour on, an hour off, and so on, at least until I get used to it.  I know I can walk for an hour at a time without any real trouble.

I should also make sure to apply sunscreen.  My nose and forehead are peeling, and that’s not appealing at all.

Sorry.  Stupid pun.  I don’t like it, either, but I have a tendency to punish and hurt myself, and unfortunately, you readers got caught in the process this time.  I apologize; I try not to cause harm to innocent people when I self-harm.  I generally try not even to let people know about it.  But, of course, in the ultimate, it’s a tricky conundrum to go the final distance, so to speak, without at least inconveniencing or worrying some other people, and that’s frustrating.

I don’t know quite how I’m going to get past that.  But I’m going to have to try.  Because my tank has long since been hovering near empty, and the little warning LED has been lit for miles.  There’s no gas station in sight that I can reach, as far as I can tell, and I’m in the middle of the desert, so walking to get a can of gas to bring back is risky.

But it still may not be a bad idea.  Walking to get gas may succeed, it may be useful, with a great deal of luck.  And if it doesn’t, if it isn’t, well…a desert is at least a relatively unbothersome place to die.

I don’t know what I mean by all this.  Have a good day, please.

valentines3

*See the title of this blog post.  Giri choco means, more or less, “obligatory” chocolate, though I don’t think that usually implies insincerity.  It certainly doesn’t with me for this post.  Honmei choco is “true feelings” chocolate, basically saying to someone that you have romantic feelings for them.  It is important to make clear which one you’re giving.

**Not most places, anyway.  If that’s happening, it is indeed a crime and a violation.  But forced marriages or any other variations of such things are generally not what people mind about Valentine’s Day.

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Brief thoughts on habits, and locality of points of view, and the causes of headaches

I’m going to try to make this short today.  Of course, it won’t be as short as yesterday, when I didn’t write a blog post at all; my apologies for that if you were disappointed or concerned.

I was “at home” yesterday with a migraine headache, which I suspect was triggered partly by the tension from my sore thumbs, though obviously that’s not the whole story.  Then again, when is anything the whole story?  If the universe is infinite, and especially if there are multiverses‒of various levels‒then even describing everything in our visible universe would not be “the whole story”.  We’re left relying on some analog of perturbation theory to try to make sense of most things in the world.

I’m also going to try to make this short because‒stupidly enough‒I’m writing this on my phone again.  I had intended to bring my laptop with me when I left work on Wednesday, but I was stressed out, and (ironically) distracted by the pain in my hands, and by the usual person who keeps us late, who kept us late.  So, I was a bit rushed when leaving, and I screwed up and left the laptop behind.  Habits are things of powerful inertia, which is a good reason to cultivate useful ones.

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day lying in my room with the lights out, listening to some YouTube videos with the sound low.  My brain still feels rather soggy and squishy, like a wrung-out, beat-up old sponge, but I doubt that comes across as being any different than how I usually come across.

Hopefully no one was too worried about me when I didn’t write my usual blog post yesterday.  Honestly, someone who reads my blog regularly enough to notice that I didn’t write one as usual would probably long since either have seriously started to worry about me in general or would simply have given up on me as a lost cause.  They would not be unjustified in either case.  I don’t know what to say to such a person, since I don’t really know what to say to myself.

I’m not sure what topic readers might be interested in discussing, today.  I’m too frustrated to want to get into politics, because frankly, most politics seems to be a panorama of billions of apes who could easily get together and come up with workable solutions to their problems, or at least with working solutions, things that could be tried and adjusted and tweaked, but they simply are not in the habit of rising above their immediate monkey natures.

It’s not so much a problem that they respond to local pressures and incentives‒that’s the nature of reality itself, and me indeed be a good definition of locality; it can’t be avoided, any more than a closed system can choose to ignore the conservation of momentum or the 2nd law of thermodynamics.  It’s that they don’t even try to lift their heads up and look out beyond their own habitual points of view, their own emotional reactions and pre-digested judgmentalism, to try to get a bigger and deeper awareness of objective versus subjective reality.  Ironically, this would have the effect of potentially making those more distant pieces of information into local pressures and incentives, because they would be in their heads.

I don’t have high hopes for the human race, though there are occasional glimmers of promise here and there.  Unfortunately, it seems that too many people think that anyone who doesn’t agree with them about all matters other than purely aesthetic taste‒and sometimes even that becomes a dividing line‒is not merely wrong but is actually evil.  But no two people will agree on absolutely everything, because the phase space of possible thoughts and values, if not infinite, is vastly larger than the space of all thoughts that have ever been.  So, this attitude effectively balkanizes the whole human race into 8 billion individual instances of solitary versions of “Us” set against a vast sea of Them.

Maybe we should take a hint from George Harrison and have all people who so “proudly” display their pronouns on various social media* simply use “I/Me/Mine”.  Most of their little proclamations appear‒to those of us observing humans from the outside‒simply to be akin to the non-functional constructions of bower birds or the dances of bird of paradise, not the well-considered but provisional positions of creatures with sophisticated minds.  They might as well pin a leek on their lapels or put a sign in their shop windows reading “worker of the world unite”.  Or they could just whistle “Dixie”.

Okay, well, I guess that’s what I was going to write about today.  Who would have guessed?  Who would have bothered to make a guess?  Probably no one.  Why would anyone bother thinking about a creature like me?  I wish I didn’t have to think about me, frankly, so I can’t hold it against you if you don’t want to do it.  I’m tired of the whole mess already.

Oh, and incidentally, my pronouns are “It/it”…other than first person pronouns, obviously.  Those are “I/Me/Mine”.

*Which, I suspect, most of them do as a badge of fashion‒like wearing a ball cap with the emblem of a sports team‒not as any deeply thought out statement about the importance of such tags and identifiers.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

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Walking words, a bad “life” habit, and cheapened love

I don’t recall if I already mentioned it, but yesterday I did a little trial recording, using my headphone mic, while I was walking to the bus stop.  I said nothing of significance, of course, but then, the argument could be made that there is nothing that of real significance.  But let’s not venture down that path of inquiry for the moment.

I just wanted to let you know that I had done this recording, and that I am probably going to edit it (for noise reduction, at least) and post it here and probably as a YouTube video, unless it’s really just too embarrassingly dull or stupid.  Maybe there are those who will find interesting the words I self-consciously mumbled to myself on the way to the bus stop.  Maybe they really are interesting.  Perhaps I have world-changing insights when I do my walking, and I just haven’t realized it because no other person has hitherto heard them.

I wouldn’t recommend betting much money on that, but I cannot say that it has a literal zero probability.  I can just say that it’s probably close enough to zero for all practical purposes.

If I were following usual human protocols, I would tell you that I uploaded the recording to my Google Drive and then downloaded it to the desktop‒both of which are true statements‒but that I didn’t have the chance to edit it yet.  This last bit is a cop-out fiction, one of a type to which it seems almost everyone from toddlers to centenarians turn.  If I were to say I hadn’t had the chance to edit it, that would be not merely an error, but technically a lie.

I had chances to edit it; I even had times when I was relatively idle and could readily have edited it, but did not.  I simply had no will to edit it‒it’s that “executive function” thing, or whatever the current jargon is.  For most of the day yesterday, if I’d had to use mental effort to breathe, I would have suffocated.  And I would not have felt disappointed to do so, though I guess it would have been uncomfortable…for a short while, anyway.

My life is really uninteresting to me‒not in its specifics, necessarily, but in its mere fact.  It doesn’t hold any inherent interest.  It’s just a matter of habit, and I don’t know that it’s a very good habit.  It might, in fact, be a bad habit, though I guess you couldn’t call it a self-destructive one, at least not by the usual meaning of that term.

I can’t quite kick that habit yet, but I am working on it, and it is my intention to do so.  It’s just not good for me or for those around me, this life business.  Every illness and pain and sorrow that exists comes as a consequence of being alive.  I can’t recommend it as a habit.  It’s uniformly fatal, for one thing.

At the very least, we should protect the children from exposure to it‒in media, in toys, in advertising and so on.  Although…protecting the children would eventually become a moot point if one does that.

Obviously I haven’t yet thought this through fully, and also, my tongue has been in my cheek for the part where I was making recommendations for others.  I’ve no business doing that about such matters.  On the other hand, the preceding description of my personal attitude and intentions is not at all untrue; for me it’s just a matter of preparation and a bit of working up my courage.

Switching gears to other matters, but returning to notions of usual protocols among humans: is it just me, or is it just in south Florida, or is it something else, or are people saying “I love you” to coworkers and other non-family members a lot more often than people used to say it?

I don’t like it.  I could sometimes say that I hate it.

I think it’s perfectly okay for spouses and siblings and parents and children to say they love each other‒these are people one knows well, deeply, intimately, people who are integral, important parts of one’s life.  Loving them is natural, it’s good; they are in a sense part of one’s identity.

But when I hear people at work telling each other they love them, as while saying goodbye for the day or whatever, it cheapens the concept, it seems disgusting and disingenuous.  Sometimes it even seems manipulative, as though it’s an attempt to invoke a familial level of fealty and benefit by invoking such a powerful term.

To me, love is serious and important, maybe the most important non-survival-related thing in the human world, though it’s certainly not all you need*.  I don’t want co-workers telling me they love me, but sometimes they do say it.  My internal process when this happens‒in addition just to feeling squirmy and tense and uncomfortable and almost grossed-out‒is to think, “You don’t even really know me, you don’t share any common interests and experiences with me other than work, you certainly don’t seem interested in anything in which I am interested, you haven’t read my books or my blog or anything else I’ve written…you simply can’t love me, not in any sense that means anything.  You’re lying to me, to yourself, or to both.”

I suppose these people might think they are fulfilling some kind of Judeo-Christian edict of loving their neighbor as themselves or summat, but I don’t think that’s actually what they’re doing.  I think the words are a mere verbal ritual without meaning, and people throw them around haphazardly, as though giving their pre-school children plastic explosives and arc-welders as toys.

I even had a coworker‒who had requested feedback about something for the eighteen thousandth time and to whom I gave a rather sharp and impatient response‒who laughingly said, “I love you, too.”

I know it was a sarcastic, jokey remark, but I simply had to say, “I don’t love you.  I don’t hate you, either.  You’re fine.  I love my brother and sister, and I love my kids more than I knew I could love anything, and I loved my mother and father and my ex-wife and my extended family.  You are a coworker.”

It’s one thing if you’re honestly committed to the philosophy of lovingkindness, if you practice metta meditation, if you live your life not just saying the words but acting on them.  Then I think I wouldn’t be bothered by someone saying they love me, because it would not be some personal claim, or some attempt to achieve a claim upon me.  But otherwise, it’s almost insulting.  I don’t even love myself; I don’t need some person who barely knows me to claim to love me.  It’s not helpful to someone who hates himself for other people to fakely say that they love him; if anything, it merely highlights the notion that no honest person ever could really love me.

Him, I mean.  Him.

*With apologies to the Beatles.  No disrespect intended.

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She told me to walk this way…

It’s Saturday.

I say that just in case you didn’t know.  I hope most of you are relaxing at home with your family and/or loved ones as you read this.  As I write it, I am of course sitting at the bus stop.

You may recall that yesterday my back was acting up especially badly.  It did so all day, pretty much without relent, despite copious use (probably to toxic levels) of OTC meds.

In the evening, after I had ridden the train back down south, I was waiting for the bus and watching the app that tracks arrival times at any given stop, with real time updates on delays or earliness.  The timing of the train’s arrival had been such that there was a bit of a wait (about twenty minutes or so) before the next bus.

But the bus didn’t show at the predicted time, and when I looked back at the app, it had just skipped ahead to the next bus time, half an hour later.  It seemed they had simply canceled that bus without notifying anyone.

I waited about five more minutes before getting fed up.  My patience was far from its peak in the first place, after a day of significantly elevated pain, and the lack of notification‒much more so than the apparent bus cancellation‒irked me mightily.  I figured, “You know what, I don’t feel like waiting for the next bus,”  So, I started walking.

Of course, as I’m sure you could have predicted, within another five minutes, the bus on which I had given up went rolling past me.  I guess it had just been ten minutes late, but its transponder, or telemetry, or whatever they call them, wasn’t connecting with the system that updates the app.  That’s irritating, but I suppose it sometimes happens when you put naked house apes (i.e. humans) in charge of technology.

It wasn’t too bad, though.  I decided I would just continue my walk for the 4.5 to 5 miles back to the house.  I took a route through the neighborhoods, some of which I had never passed before, though I knew the way.  It was just after sunset when I started; there was a fairly stiff breeze, and the temperature was in the sixties, so it was a pleasant walk.  It felt almost reminiscent of being out trick-or-treating back up north in my childhood.

Regrettably, of course, there were no Halloween decorations, and no kids in costumes‒I was mainly by myself on the sidewalks, listening to my shuffled “favorite songs” list on YouTube Music‒but I did see, through the large picture window of a third-ish floor “luxury” apartment building, that someone still had their Christmas tree up, and it was fully lit.

That was actually rather nice, although slightly odd and certainly unexpected.  I can understand why someone would want to keep a festive, brightly lit item around even after its traditional moment had passed, especially during the comparative holiday desert that follows New Year.  Sorry, Valentine’s Day does not count as a festive holiday!  And Saint Patrick’s Day, in America at least, is mainly a drinking holiday‒though corned beef and cabbage can be a quite wonderful dinner if one has it!

Returning to the original topic, though, I found that, as I walked, my back began to relax a bit, and before a few miles had passed, the pain had reduced to a much vaguer sensation, then finally it became insignificant relative to my normal tendency even to notice it.  My right Achilles tendon began complaining slightly* by the end of the walk, but it tends to do that anyway, almost since college, after I badly sprained my right ankle while playing catch.

Sorry, I know, this is all rather boring for a blog post, but I felt like having a mild celebration of the fact that I had soothed my back some by walking.  It hurts more again, now, starting as soon as I woke up, but it’s not as bad as it was yesterday, and hopefully it won’t become so.  If it does, I guess I know what to do about it at least.  Just having that degree of available control makes things a little better, even if one doesn’t use it.

I keep thinking about better types of subjects about which to blog‒as you know‒including medical topics and physics and philosophy and psychology and whatnot.  I still owe you all a blog post or audio blog/podcast about sugar.  I haven’t forgotten.  I just have to decide to buckle down and do it.

But motivation, or executive function, or whatever they call it, is apparently often difficult for people with ASD, as I suspect I am, and also, of course, for people with dysthymia/depression, as I know I am.  That’s not an excuse, so to speak, though both are things I certainly didn’t choose.

Who would willingly choose to be depressed?  It’s truly a thing of horror, but it’s not even exciting or interesting or even disgusting horror.  It’s just a lack of any connection, a sense of learned helplessness that precedes any learning.  And, of course, it includes an inability to be optimistic or to feel certain of anything other than how horrible a person one is.

Maybe everyone, if they could see themselves without filter, without excuse, without delusion, would grow weary of themselves, would be disgusted, would end up hating themselves, and hating the world by reflection or projection.

I’ve read that the modern Catholic conception of Hell is not Fire and Brimstone, but merely a state without any connection to God, a complete removal from God’s presence, cut off from the source of life and light.  It’s rather like the Void in Tolkien’s universe, where Melkor wandered and first began having thoughts unlike those of his brethren, and to which he was consigned after the War of Wrath.  Anyway, that Catholic notion feels like a good metaphor for depression.  It’s not fire and brimstone; that’s all too dramatic, even melodramatic, and interesting in its own way.  Dysthymia and depression are much drearier and more dismal than that.  And yet there is pain.

Oh, well.  Maybe even in the Void, a good long walk can help temporarily ease some kinds of pain.  That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

*You wouldn’t think that something named for the mightiest warrior of the Iliad would be prone to whine, would you.  Then again, he was a bit of a snotty character, and he was invulnerable other than his heel in the original story, so he probably would have moaned a lot when in pain.

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This is a virtual, placeholder title that has become “real”. Can an event horizon be far away?

Yesterday, as I noted when I started my post, I wasn’t sure if I was going to bother to find a Shakespearean quote to alter to make my title, nor to find a picture to add to the post, both as I usually do on Thursdays.  Then, near the end of the post, after I had spontaneously quoted King Lear, it just felt appropriate to find something a little later in that same speech to use for my title.  So, I did.

Once I did that, I figured I might as well find some picture of King Lear in the storm to use at the bottom of the post.  But most of the ones I found had the Jester there next to him, and various other sorts of bric-a-brac, so none of them suited.  Therefore, I did what I often do, which was to find bits and pieces of images that I could throw together and manipulate with the GIMP program to turn into what roughly suited my purpose.

My pictorial version of Lear, if you will, got transplanted to what looks like south Florida, based on the palm trees and the apparent hurricane.  This seemed appropriate, since I was channeling King Lear by quoting him.

I don’t know why I’ve decided to go into the mechanics of those processes, but it was a pretty good way to jump start today’s post.

I forgot to mention yesterday that it was Groundhog’s Day.  Or should that be Groundhogs’ Day?  Is it the day of some Platonic ideal of a groundhog?  Or is it a day named for‒and belonging to‒all groundhogs collectively?  Or is there some other apostrophe convention that applies?  Also, how much ground would a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground?*

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Anyway, it’s Friday, but I’m working tomorrow, so it’s not as though today is anything to celebrate or feel particularly good about for me.  On the other hand, it’s not as though time off is any more engaging for me than work time‒actually, it’s less so, though the physical rest can be useful.

As long as I can remember, I’ve always only socialized, if that’s the right word, with people in places where I was present for some other, underlying purpose, like school or work.  I liked my school friends a lot‒and then to a lesser extent my work friends‒but I’ve never been able to socialize with people purely for socialization’s sake.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a friend just for the sake of making a friend, though I’ve had friends who were very important to me.  But when I’m not local to them, not seeing them semi-automatically, I don’t know how to keep in contact or maintain friendships; I don’t even know how to try, really.  It feels awkward, and I feel intrusive and idiotic; I can’t seem to figure out what to say or do.  Also, I don’t really have anything to add to anyone else’s life, particularly from a distance, so I feel like I would just be a taker, or at least a beggar, even if I were able to reach out to people.

I’ve also never had a romantic relationship with someone who hadn’t approached me, really, and again, someone from “school” or work.  I have no confidence along those lines, frankly‒and no real impetus, either.  I wouldn’t even want a relationship with someone with whom I didn’t share a lot of interests and attributes in common, and whom I didn’t know well.  What would be the point?

My attitude is, generally, that having sex with someone with whom you’re not truly close, and whom you don’t know and care about a good deal, is just complicated masturbation.  And most of the time, I think people can do that better alone, and without risk of STDs and arguments and heartbreak and infidelity and all the potential nightmares that can come with a relationship.

I don’t know, I guess that’s one of the areas in which I’m particularly weird.  I am lonely, of course, but I’m not really able to do anything about it.  And I don’t think it’s that irrational to be “once bitten, twice shy” about romantic relationships, especially when one is neurologically ill-equipped for making such relationships work, and when the previous instance(s) in which one was “bitten” were severely painful, with deep and chronic ill-effects.

Better to die alone than to try to seek out a life partner when one is constitutionally ill-equipped to bring anyone joy, and when one’s previous attempts have all exploded catastrophically in the long run.  Who needs that extra-spicy, sour and caustic pain, enhanced by the fact that you thought your significant other would be as loyal to you as you were and would be to them?

Speaking of pain, my back is really killing me this morning.  Just in case you were wondering.  I’m not really sure what made it flare up.  I mean, it hurts pretty nearly all the time, but the amount isn’t constant, and I’m always trying to discern patterns in things that make it worsen or improve.  It’s the single most consistent aspect of my life, but I certainly wouldn’t miss it if I could cure it.

Still, I think there’s ultimately going to be only one escape from my pain, and though it couldn’t be called a cure, at least it’s an erasure.  Pain can be endured when one has reasons to endure it, or things that counterbalance it.  I’ve lost most of those, however, if not all of them.  All that’s left are attempts at distraction, and those are rapidly losing efficacy.  All the while I’m stuck between the poles of trying to find the courage to end it all and wondering if it’s even conceivable, let alone possible, for me to find any convincing reason to continue.

Oh, well.  I’ve got nothing on either pole right now, though I think I’m much closer to the former than the latter.  I guess I’ll “talk to you” tomorrow.

*Credit to James Acaster for that joke.  He’s very funny, in a purposely bizarre way.  His version of Pinocchio is priceless.