Same Old Boring Categories

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Please don’t take this post to heart; it’s not aimed at you.

Hello and good morning.  There’s no Shakespearean quote-based title today.  My apologies for that and for what follows.  I’m just having a rough time right now.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing this on the stupid mini lapcom again.  It’s “stupid” because I have to deal with changing the base font and type size every time I create a new post now, because Microsoft Word changed its defaults to the shitty little font Aptos Narrow, which sucks hugely, and they now want to start the font size automatically at 12, when for ages it’s been 11, which works just fine and is a prime number.

I swear, it’s almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple computer.  But I’d really rather not buy any more computers, nor any new smartphone, nor any more clothes or shoes or cups or silverware or shampoo or deodorant or any of it.  I hate having to get new things that have to do with the present bleeding into the future, when I don’t even want to be here in the present.

But, of course, one is not supposed to want not to keep living.  That’s taboo.  One tends to get shamed and cajoled about it if one even mentions it.  One is offered no help, of course.  It’s rather reminiscent of the “pro-life” movement, who want to make sure that babies are born if conceived (and many of them want to eliminate contraception) but have no intention to take responsibility for the lives they are forcing to continue.

Well, fuck them in the neck until they are “aborted” is how I feel about that, and when I’m feeling very uncharitable, I’m inclined that way about the other.  I mean, people don’t want you to die, but they don’t offer any actual help, and they don’t offer any serious reasons to stay alive.  At the very least, they don’t offer any convincing ones.

I’ve been dealing on and off with suicidal thoughts and hatred of myself starting when I was in my teens.  It has waxed and waned over my lifetime, and is resistant to the various and sundry treatments I have tried.  At least, they never have seemed to work for very long.

I have learned rather recently that this is common in people with ASD, particularly relatively “high functioning” ones, because of the exhaustion and ego-dystonic effects of constant masking, pretending to be human, pretending not to be seriously bothered by the things that bother us, trying to make our quirky habits of thought into jokes so people aren’t bothered too much by them.

It is at least good information to have, that one is autistic, but it points to no solution.  Indeed, data appears to suggest that ordinary treatments for depression that work reasonably well on NTs are often not useful in people with ASD.  But of course, it’s not as though one can cease to have ASD, any more than one can decide to be no longer right handed.

Anyway, the point toward which I was moving is one I’ve mentioned before:  I have been dealing with depression and self-hatred for more than three quarters of my life, and I am a bookish, rather studious sort of person who likes to try to understand things as much as he can.  I am also a trained medical doctor, who obviously has given special attention to such matters when he was/is studying, since it’s of real personal interest.

I’m not saying that no one out there could possibly find some answer or treatment that I haven’t encountered or tried or whatever; that would be astonishing hubris.  But if one is going to go for obvious or stereotypical things (or worse, to try to give religious reasons for one not to take one’s own life) it’s unlikely to be successful.  Indeed, the fact that it just reiterates things that have been tried and have failed already, makes everything all that much more depressing.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to demean or disparage or denigrate or dismiss (or any other d-word) people who want to help those who are in distress.  But it gets frustrating when, for instance, one logs onto Instagram or whatever and a pop-up message says “Someone out there thinks you need help” and it directs you either to—wait for it!—the suicide help line* or to suggestions for seeking therapy or suggestions for how to help oneself that include things like “talking to friends” or such like.

It’s almost as if it were taunting you.  It’s almost as if it were saying, “Aw, are you not doing too well?  Well, here, take a look at these various things that you have tried and found unsuccessful in the past.  Or you can talk to your family or friends, though you live alone and have no local friends**, and your nearest family members are more than a thousand miles away and have their own shit with which to deal.”

Sorry, everyone.  I’m angry and grumpy and gloomy and unpleasant today—more so than usual, I mean.  And yet, other people still come to me with their problems, and I do my best to help when I can, and I even expend my own resources to help.  But no one even asks me if I have any problems, and if I start to mention any, people just get awkward or make some joke or dismissive comment about it all.  If I had a drug problem, there would be available resources, but I don’t have one***, alas.

I get it.  Everyone has their own things happening.  That’s definitely true.  I don’t have any right to impose my troubles on anyone.  But if people aren’t going to do anything, then they should shut the fuck up.

Anyway, again, I’m sorry.  Really.  Forget about that crap from me, please.  I know that none of you out there are doing anything to try to cause me consternation.  I’m the one with the bad hardware and software.  You’re all just curious, literate people reading the blog of someone who occasionally has something mildly interesting to say and being as supportive as its practicable to be, often more so.  It’s my problem or set of problems, and it’s my fault (in the sense that “I am the faulty one” not in the sense of “I have done wrong”).

It doesn’t help that it’s near the solstice, so the daytime is getting shorter and shorter—I tend to be seasonally affected—and also that it’s the holiday time of year, and that the US is in a political state reminiscent of the single available port-o-john after a major rock festival.

I’m overwhelmed and I’m very tired, and I don’t see any reason to expect things to tend to get any better than they are now.  Just as all political and regulatory and economic forces are in place to make the stock market tend to go up in the long run, despite many local ups and downs, my system seems set up to deteriorate over time.  I don’t just mean that in the sense involved in the second law of thermodynamics, though that obviously comes into play.  I mean that so many events of life seem prone to knock me downward, mentally, often in big steps, but my attempts to crawl back upward are plodding and scrabbling, like someone trying to reach the summit of a mountain of loose gravel.

Anyway, geez, sorry again.  I shouldn’t even post this, really, but I don’t have the energy to start over and write a different post, so I’ll stick with this, apologizing yet another time.  If I write a post tomorrow and/or Saturday, it/they will appear here.  If not, it/they won’t.

I hope you all are doing well.

TTFN

*With which I’ve had a particularly bad result in the past, and toward which I am therefore quite wary.

**This is only appropriate or at least predictable.  Believe me, no one wants to be around me much anymore.  I don’t even want to be around myself.

***I know, I know, that’s just what a person with a drug problem might say.  But while that may be true, nevertheless, among the number of people who would say that they don’t have a drug problem when asked, the vast majority really would be people who don’t have a drug problem, because most people don’t have a drug problem.  Bayes saves the day again.

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“As it is lasting, so be deep!”

Well, it’s Monday again.  It’s also the first day of Hanukkah, which technically started at sundown last night‒which means it started not only at different times for different time zones, but also in different latitudes, since in the winter the sun sets earlier farther north than closer to the equator*.  It also rises later.  This is all due to the curvature of the Earth.

Of course, in summertime, the sun sets later the farther north one goes (or south if one is in the southern hemisphere).  If you’ve ever been in northern Europe in the summertime, you’ll know what I mean.  It can feel very strange for it not to be dark out yet at nearly eleven at night (for instance) if one is from the US, where things aren’t quite so disparate.

Anyway, I’m not really celebrating Hanukkah this year, any more than I celebrated Thanksgiving or any more than I will celebrate Christmas or New Years or any other such holidays.  I have a little stylized menorah graphic that I used to put up on “the board”, with an increasing number of candles with the days and everything, but I don’t think I’m going to do that this year.  It’s actually more depressing to do little superficial things to mark a holiday when one has no one with whom to celebrate.

Speaking of all this, by the way, I’m very sorry if some people are put off when I talk about my depressed and stressed and self-destructive thoughts.  I know they bother some people, though that in itself is a bit curious.  After all, they’re not your depressive and anxious and self-destructive thoughts.  Or maybe they are in a sense.  I don’t know.

I do know, though, that it seems that my dark, morose, and pro-mortalist posts seem to garner higher readership than my ones where I discuss some kind of mathematical or scientific or philosophical or political point. They are certainly more popular than my fiction.

The number of people who reliably read this blog, or at least click on it daily, is greater than the number of people who have ever bought a single one of my books or even my short stories**.  I don’t know why more people click on or “like” the dark posts, but I don’t mind it.  At least I can feel that there are people who hear it, even if there may be little “listening” involved.

Of course I’m heading in to work today.  Things have been slow at the office, and some of the people who work there are going through various events‒some positive, some negative‒that mean that some of them are unable to work as regularly as usual or to work at all in the short term, and it makes things slower and a bit dreary.  Of course, unless I’m sick, I go to the office.  I have nothing better to do (nor, really, anything worse, since that might be tempting also).

I do keep being tempted to go back on antidepressants, but they never seem to quite work out as I would hope, in the sense of actually correcting my depression for any significant length of time.  I’ve tried at least one member of nearly every class of antidepressant, and more than one of some.  They just tend to make me more disconnected and dissociated, honestly.  Maybe ECT would help more, but that’s hard to get nowadays, and the potential memory issues associated are worrisome.

SSRIs do tend to help my anxiety/social discomfort somewhat, but they affect my judgment, with negative outcomes.  For instance, I did not see the fact that I could end up a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years when I was only trying to help others who also had chronic pain, like I have.  And therapy has never given me many durable results‒this is, I’m led to understand, not uncommon in people with ASD‒though it was often nice to have someone with whom I could speak freely and who would at least give me sympathy.  Still, it was pricey.

I certainly don’t want to disrespect my various therapists‒I do very much respect them, and they did their best for me, I’ve no doubt about that‒but I might have done as well having weekly visits to a sex worker.  I don’t think I would have wanted to partake in their regular “services” though; I think the prospect of having sex with someone you don’t know, let alone to whom you have any deep attachment, is very strange and seems uncomfortable.

It might sound like it could be good, but I think it would be unworkable if I tried it.  I don’t even like being patted on the shoulder by people with whom I am not close, and sometimes, depending on my mood, even by people with whom I am close.  But still, one hears stories of men who go to sex workers largely to have someone with whom they can freely just talk.

That would probably cost more, though, and possibly lead to legal problems, not to mention the facts of exploitation and so on, in which I have no desire to participate.

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  But it doesn’t matter.  I’m just tired of all this.  I don’t want to do it anymore.  I just want to sleep.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day.  And Happy Hanukkah, if you celebrate it.

*The mirror image of all this occurs in the southern hemisphere.

**Though people who actually read my stories do seem to enjoy them.  I’m just really not good at promoting myself.  This is probably tied to my whole self-hatred, self-destructive attribute cluster.

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Another day, same old stories

Well, it’s Tuesday the 2nd (of December) and that two/Tue coincidence has to be worth something doesn’t it?  I suppose it would be better if this were February (the 2nd month), but perhaps it’s enough to note that the difference between the official number of this month (12) and its nominative number (10) is 2.  Anyway, having two twos might make more “sense” than having three of them.

Is that important?  Almost certainly not.  In 56 years of time and space, I’ve never encountered anything that was truly and objectively “important”.  But it is the sort of thing that engages my (admittedly rather odd) aesthetic sense, and this is my blog*, so I will indulge myself.

Anyway, it’s the second day of the work week, and I’m going to work.  The reason I go to work is, at root, nominally to keep myself alive and “thriving”, so I can…what?  Keep working?  I don’t have any other, deeper or longer-term reasons.  It’s fairly absurd when you think about it.  It’s a self-referential, almost tautological, ouroboros-like situation.

By the way, I don’t see any reason to think that this state of affairs is the product of some conspiracy‒centuries or even millennia long as it would have to be‒by the powerful to keep the masses toiling away for their benefit.  For one thing, as we can all plainly see (I hope) the powerful are at least as idiotic and moronic and clueless as anyone else, and they probably tend to be less self-critical, so they are more prone to do really stupid things without anyone protecting them from their own stupidity.

They no more really, actually control anything‒including themselves‒than a queen bee (or ant or termite) runs its hive/hill/colony.  The queen just happens to be the breeding female.  And even that is not a role based on any merit, other than being capable of developing active ovaries.  The queens are “chosen” randomly, as far as we can tell.

It’s all just shit that happens in a region of spacetime in which entropy is moving from low to high, as it tends to do, but in which there’s enough movement involved in the process to allow for locally highly complex phenomena based on carbon’s extraordinarily fecund chemistry, which occasionally forms self-replicating molecules that undergo natural selection.

But people tell stories about things.  It’s one of our strongest attributes, and it serves in us roughly the same “purpose” as the various pheromone trails and hive dances in the aforementioned ants and bees and termites.  Our stories allow us to act in concert with many other people, on a scale that puts even the social insects to shame.

We often believe that our stories are true, at least to some degree.  And some of them, in a limited sense, really are “true”.  But most of them are just stories, made up “just so” explanations of things we either haven’t figured out or that have a nature too complicated or too daunting for us to want to face them as they are.

As someone who has a penchant for creating stories, I can tell you, it’s quite easy to make up plausible-seeming, internally consistent tales about worlds and characters and events, real or otherwise, that have little to do with reality other than that it is a fact of reality that I made up those stories.

I consider all religions and all their related tales to be part of this phenomenon.  This is not an insult to them per se, and the tendency for people to take it as an insult or an attack belies the faith such people claim to have in their religions.  But people who really think a particular thing is true don’t have to defend it with anger, let alone violence.

Imagine if the classical physics people had crucified Planck for solving the “ultraviolet catastrophe” by positing that only certain chunks (quanta) of energy can be produced, or if they had burned Einstein at the stake for not only showing that light comes in such quanta but that matter is also finely divided***.

Science does also work with stories.  Every hypothesis is a story, and some of them can seem extremely compelling.  Some of them we really want to think are true.  And that’s why, ideally, science takes every such story and pokes the hell out of it, trying to show if and where it’s wrong, where it’s internally inconsistent, where it doesn’t match what actually seems to happen in the world.  It’s not perfect, but it does improve in an incremental, ratchet-like fashion, at least as long as we hold to the rigorous, ruthless, but honest criticism of those stories.

With that, I’ll draw the main body of this post to a close.  I have no idea why I’ve written what I’ve written, or at least I don’t know very well.  I doubt there’s any internal consistency or coherence to it, but I guess that supports my point.

Please try to have a good day.

[Aside: a thought occurred to me yesterday that, as we approach the era of humane, lab-grown meat derived from animal stem cells, what, if any, would be the moral implications of using human stem cells, taken from a volunteer‒I’m willing‒to grow meat in the lab and have people eat it?  There’s no risk of parasites or infections, assuming reasonable genetic screening, such as might explain an evolved revulsion for cannibalism.  There’s no one being harmed.  What do you think?  I’m not concerned with whether you feel it’s somehow “icky”; that’s just misfiring evolution-based taboos.  Do you think there is any moral reason not to grow and eat such meat?  If so, what are they?]

*There are many others like it**, but this one is mine.

**Are they really like it, though?  You tell me.

***These are two of the things Einstein demonstrated during his annus mirabilis (i.e., “miraculous ass”***) in 1905, the same year he published his paper introducing special relativity.

***That’s not really what it means.

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“From childhood’s hour I have not been as others were…”

Well, it’s not just the start of a new “work week”, it’s also the start of a new month‒the last month of 2025.  That’s December, by the way, in case you didn’t remember or were confused by the month’s name, which indicates that it’s the tenth month, not the twelfth.

Don’t be confused by the fact that this month starts on a Monday, by the way; it’s when the first of a month falls on Sunday that the month will have a Friday the 13th.  This month will have a Friday the 12th.  I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s mildly disappointing.

It’s hard to be clear why I find that as disappointing as I do.  I mean, I like prime numbers and particularly the number 13, but every month has a 13th day.  I guess it’s because of the supposedly unlucky implications of Fridays the 13th that I want to embrace the day.  Is that sympathy (for something not alive) or is it perversity?

I suspect it’s a bit of both.  I tend to feel sympathy and affection for peculiar things, and literally to feel bad for some inanimate and even abstract entities when I think they have been unfairly maligned.

But I do also tend to have a sort of affection for things that others fear.  I don’t know if that’s a defense mechanism or what.  But, after all, I did make a brief (failed) series of blog posts called “My heroes have always been villains.“

Whatever.  It doesn’t really matter.  I’m just a weirdo*.  What else is new?

Not much, of course.  I mean, I’m on my way to work, because I am working today, though I don’t feel very well.  But then, I never really feel well.  I’ve been in pain literally for more than 20 years straight, so I never do feel “well” anymore.  Every time I get up from my chair in the office, such as when I need to use the bathroom, I feel a bit like the Tin Man, trying to kick painfully rusted limbs into motion.  That’s just one example.

Do I have a heart, unlike the Tin Man?  I don’t know about the metaphorical one, but the physical one is real, because I had surgery on it for a birth defect when I was 18**.  It’s probably true, though, that my metaphorical heart is also defective, perhaps more so than my literal heart.

Who am I kidding with “perhaps”?  Of course it’s more defective.  For one thing, there is no surgery to repair a metaphorical organ.  You’d think that something conceptual might be easier to alter or repair than something physical, but that would only be the case if we understood how the whole thing works well enough to be able to figure out how to make adjustments and‒more crucially‒which adjustments to make and when.  It’s at least as difficult, in its way, as trying to control the weather.

What am I going on about?  I don’t know.  More pointedly, one could ask why I am going on‒with this blog, with work, with my life, with anything.  I’m wasting your time and mine, I think.  Mostly I’m wasting yours I suppose, since my time is a waste from the start.

Well, no, actually, that’s not entirely true.  Everything that led up to the birth of my children was absolutely important.  I would not change anything up to that point.  Any negative experiences that happened to me until then were worth it.  After that, though, there are many things I would change if I could‒indeed, there are probably many things that I cannot even bring to mind that I would want to change.

I don’t know what they might be, and I don’t really try to dwell on such things‒that’s probably part of why I dislike, or at least don’t enjoy, the weird manga/anime/light novels in which someone gets (for instance) hit by a car and seems to die, but is sent back in time to an earlier stage in their life and gets to live it again, but with their old memories, so they can change their outcome.

Yes, there is a whole slew of such stories, just as there are oodles of related “isekai” stories, where someone dies and ends up reborn in some “magical” world.  I guess that’s a bit related to things like The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, but he didn’t have to die to go to the Land, he was summoned.  And also, when Stephen R. Donaldson wrote those books, back in the 70s and 80s, the idea was relatively original, or at least not wildly overplayed.

Speaking of overplayed, I’ll call this blog post to a close now‒and by that criterion, I ought to call everything to a close.  I am badly overplayed.  I jumped the shark 13 years ago or more.  I don’t know why they keep renewing this show.  But I appear to be under contract to keep playing this stupid role as long as the show is renewed.  I wish I had an agent to whom I could talk about getting out of this with minimal fuss and mess.

Alas, that will probably just be up to me, and I’m not good at doing things with minimal mess, though the “fuss” part is at least something of a question.

Anyway, enough.  This is stupid.  I’ll just wish you all a very good day, and a good week, and a good month/rest of the year, and then a most excellent year next year.  And, what the heck, while I’m spitting into the ocean, I wish you a truly wonderful remainder of your lives.

Wishes have no power, maybe, but mine are at least sincere.

*And also a creep, no doubt.  What the hell am I doin’ here, indeed.  I really don’t belong here.  Not that I’m convinced that anyone does.

**The birth defect didn’t happen when I was 18, of course‒it was found when I was 18, and operated on within that same year.  But it had been there since at least the time I was born, more or less by definition.

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Black Friday Sun, won’t you come?

Well, it’s officially “Black Friday” here in the US at least‒an ironic name that referred to the fact that the day after Thanksgiving was, at least traditionally, the busiest shopping day of the year, so going holiday shopping (mainly for Christmas) was always considered an ordeal.  And therefore…well, therefore everyone went and did it.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you look at it that way.  But that’s the way humans are, isn’t it?  Think of the hoarding of toilet paper that led to self-fulfilling prophecies of shortages during early COVID-19 days.

So, anyway, I’m going to the office today, because we’re open.  We’re also planning to be open tomorrow.

I wish I were sick.  I mean, I’m sick in the head (ask just about anybody, if they’re being honest) and I have chronic pain and all the fun associated with that, but I am not acutely ill, let alone ill enough that I could mentally excuse myself from going to work.

I wonder what would happen if I just decided not to go.  I wonder what would happen if I just didn’t go to work, didn’t write my blog, shut my phone off or put it on airplane mode, and just vegetated until I wilted and became compost.  Not very much, I suspect.

I mean, people at work would try to figure out where I was, because it’s work, and if I’m not there, someone will have to pick up the slack.  And I think my sister would try to figure out what had happened to me.  But that’s most of it.

A few people would worry, but that would only be for a while, and then even all passing thought of me would taper down, asymptotically approaching zero, but in the fashion of a quantum event‒more episodic and sporadic in measurable character than a seemingly smooth decay, but nevertheless getting closer and closer to zero all the time.

I’m tired.  Also, frankly, I’m uninterested.  The two things may be related.

None of the things I do for entertainment‒for distraction really‒are working very well anymore.  I am particularly bored of being in pain, of course.  That gets old very quickly, especially when it’s chronic, and mine has been there for decades now.  It’s not a warning of some life-threatening process happening, it’s just a set of alarms that are broken so they’re stuck in the “on” position.

Of course, my main problem(s) is/are me.  I’m a piece of merchandise that’s defective in many ways and in more than one system.  Believe me, if you got me as a present, you would hope whoever bought me had kept the receipt.

Anyway, I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving yesterday if you celebrated the holiday.  I ate a bit of junk food at the house, but it wasn’t very good, and it seemed to give me some gastrointestinal trouble, so that wasn’t a lot of fun.  There was nothing good on TV, unfortunately; I started to watch the Lions game (American football), but got bored very quickly.

I watched some videos on YouTube, but I’m running out of things there that are interesting.  The best thing I saw was a couple reacting to Rogue One, but that’s still very much a simulated, twice removed illusion of watching a movie with friends, so it’s a bit lame.

Obviously‒I hope it’s obvious‒I’m giving you my viewpoint on these things, not claiming to have some definitive, objective take on them.  If people enjoy something and it does no harm, then it’s a positive and “good” thing, so I mean no disparagement.

I am not a good measure for how good things might be, because I tend to see things in a less than optimistic and upbeat fashion.

That’s enough for now.  I guess I’ll be writing a post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, though it’s difficult to see why.  Maybe some catastrophe will befall me and become a blessing to you all (and to me) by finishing everything for me.  In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend.

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But life, being weary of these worldly blogs, never lacks power to dismiss itself.

Hello and good morning.

Well, yesterday was something of a cluster fudge*.  I mentioned that, if not for payroll, I would not have gone to work, but payroll existed, so I needed to go.

I intended to leave as soon as payroll was done.  However, my coworker, with whom I share some of the daily tasks, ended up calling in sick from a stomach bug, so I was going to be stuck.

Then my boss, who is actually very kind, asked the people from our other office to come over to cover for me so I could leave at about 2 at least.  But after that there were numerous messages and questions and issues and the like that I had to witness, though I did not participate in all of them.  Perhaps needless to say, I didn’t get much rest.  I wouldn’t be going to work today, honestly, but I just know there will be a mess to clean up, and it will only accumulate further if I wait**.

I know, it’s my own problem; if I were less uptight about such things I could just leave it for a bit and rest today, which would probably be better for me.  But I would not be able to rest much today from thinking about it, and when I finally went in, I would quietly blow a gasket.  It wouldn’t be obvious on the outside, but I might very well get so stressed as to deliberately harm myself‒that does happen with me more often than I like to admit‒and that’s worth avoiding.

That’s why I started smoking cigars regularly:  it’s a way to self-harm without the risk of being Baker Acted (or whatever the term is nowadays).  That’s definitely worth avoiding.  I once called the help line thingy when I was feeling in a particularly bad way, and I ended up being picked up by the Palm Beach Sheriff’s office, handcuffed (by deputies who were obviously pretty pathetically frightened to deal with someone who was self-destructive) and taken to a little shit-hole mental health place in south Palm Beach County.  It would have been better if I had done something to force them to shoot me.

I was only in the mental health place for 24 hours, but I got nerve damage in my left wrist/hand from poorly applied handcuffs***, and that lasted about a year before I lost the paresthesias.  Anyway, I’ve told that story before‒parts of it, anyway‒and I don’t want to bore you too much.

I do keep getting, every few days, a pop-up message when I get on Threads that says someone thinks I need help or am having a hard time, and it gives links to things like the suicide help line, and to, I don’t know, places with ideas or resources or something that other people have found useful.

Unfortunately, because of the experience I just described, among other things, I generally avoid calling the help line.  It’s not just that I seem ever more with every day to have difficulty interacting with anyone I don’t know well; I really don’t ever want to be arrested, or just “arrested”, again in my life.  I’ve been through way too much of that shit, especially for someone who never even tried marijuana until his mid-forties**** let alone any other drugs or crime.

I do truly appreciate the thought behind these pop-ups.  But I’m not a young man, and I’ve had mental health problems pretty much my whole life (partly because, it turns out, I was an undiagnosed autistic person, with complications thereof, but I didn’t know that until very recently).  I also supposedly have a uselessly high IQ, and in addition I get obsessively curious about things in which I am interested (or about which I am desperate).  There are very few treatments, let alone ideas, that I have not explored and digested, and sometimes tried, to help my chronic depression.

Of course, it turns out that the ASD complicates things, and some treatments and helps that often work well for so-called neurotypical people end up not being as effective for those “on the spectrum” and can even be counter-productive.  Unfortunately, I’m not clear on any alternatives that might be available to me, and I have no community of like-brained people with whom I can seek support‒I’ve really gotten far more socially awkward over time even than I was in the past.

So, I’m not sure that humans are going to be particularly useful sources of mental health information for me.  I need something geared to a Nexus 13 or whatever.  Unfortunately, the Tyrell Corporation very rudely failed to become real by 2019, so they don’t have any useful things to offer a para-human like me.  They can’t even grant me a four-year lifespan.

Anyway, those are my sharable thoughts for this morning.  Imagine what the nonsharable ones must be like!

I hope you all have better days than I have been having and will probably have for the foreseeable future.  And thank you for reading my blog, today and in the past.

TTFN

*Not with pecans, though.  I really hate pecans, and yesterday wasn’t quite so bad that I should compare it to having to eat fudge with pecans.

**There was.

***Yes, I know the difference.  I’ve had a stupid amount of experience with police handcuffs‒and leg irons and shackles‒for someone as boring and well-behaved as I try to be and am.  Sometimes I think my life would have been better if I had been some manner of delinquent.  It probably would have been shorter at least, and that would be an improvement.

****I was trying to help a particularly bad bit of back pain that day, and some coworkers let me try a joint they were smoking.  I proceeded to vomit off and on for the next two hours.  It was not an auspicious trial.

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Tuesdays too many

I want to begin with a minor caveat (added here after the first draft):  I don’t feel that I’m writing very well, today.  I apologize for this, and I will try not to make it a habit.

It’s now Tuesday morning, and today I am writing this on my mini laptop computer.  Even though I felt pretty crappy all day yesterday—recall that I was sore all over, and it was particularly bad in my “usual suspect” joints and such—I decided I still didn’t want to write anything on my smartphone today again, so I brought the computer back to the house with me.

The bases of my thumbs continued (and continue) to be sore, and the process of writing on the stupidphone doesn’t get any more pleasant as I go along.  Anyway, today I feel a little less achy all over than yesterday, probably thanks to fairly high doses of three different OTC analgesics/anti-inflammatories.

I still feel vaguely as if I am fighting some flu-like syndrome, except I have no fever that I can detect and no other localizing symptoms.  I just feel blah and bleagh, as though all sorts of cytokines are flowing through my body, all those interleukins and interferons and prostaglandins and the like, making me feel as though I am beset by some infection.

As for everything else—well, the world at large continues to be comically tragic and tragically comical, more so of both than usual, and that’s stressful as well.  And there is no more apparent point to participating in any of it, or indeed in anything at all, today than there was yesterday.

But, nevertheless* I am going to the office.  What would I do otherwise?  Lie about back at the house, in my little room, and just…I don’t know, try to pass my time somehow?  It’s not as though I can readily sleep when there; I slept quite a bit less than three hours total last night, and it was not all in a row.  So, if I’m grumpy, I hope you’ll forgive me.  If you won’t, well…I don’t really give too much of a shit.

As for what to write today, well, I guess you’re reading it, whatever it is.  I have no specific topic, or subject, other than the general notion that I’m writing and sharing my thoughts, such as they are, as they stream through my consciousness in response to my obsessive-compulsive urge to write this blog every workday, even though I have no overarching subject about which to write.

I would love to be able to discuss some interesting subject in physics or mathematics or biology—or even medicine, which technically is part of biology—but though there are surely many interesting things being explored and discovered and discussed, they all seem pointless to me.  My state of mind is definitely not good if even my favorite sciences (and science-adjacent subjects) are incapable of grabbing my interest.

So, all I have to discuss, if that’s the right term, is that my chronic pain continues, and my dysthymia/depression continues, and my social anxiety continues, as does my general free-floating hostility.  All these latter things are at least partly triggered and/or exacerbated by my ASD, which is something that is never going to stop for as long as I’m alive—which has already been too long.

I’ve done pretty much all the good I’m ever going to do in the world, probably.  And I did do some good here and there.  Of course, the best thing I ever did was to father my children, so that’s one thing.  But I also contributed to scientific advancement in my own tiny little way, and I did a pretty good job of relieving suffering in my patients, and saving people’s lives**.  And I wrote my books, which very few people will ever read, but which I nevertheless think are pretty decent, and I wrote and recorded some songs, which very few people will ever hear, but which I nevertheless think are also pretty decent.

It would be nice if I felt able to write fiction again, I guess, but even the process of trying seems terribly daunting.  There is little expected reward, since probably no one but my sister will end up reading anything I write in the future (fiction-wise, anyway), if there is such writing, which seems unlikely.  And it’s almost laughable to think that I might write and record any new songs.

Also, in the end, I have always failed at everything that really matters to me.

So, I’m pretty much just coasting along, waiting for my momentum to be used up.  It’s annoyingly persistent, but I guess I can only blame some metaphorical translational symmetry for that conservation of metaphorical momentum.  I’m probably pushing the metaphor too far (a process that is itself metaphorical), but that’s what I tend to do.

I’m sorry to be such a downer.  Even worse, I’m sorry to be so boring.  It’s not personal; though it’s also not strictly business, either.  I don’t know what it is.  I’m at a loss.  But that too seems just to be my usual state.  Perhaps I’ve never been otherwise.

I hope all of you feel better than I feel today, and every day.  I hope that, even on days when I feel good—if there ever are such days again in my life, which feels pretty unlikely—that you all still feel better than I do.  Why not?  The bar is set pretty low, but at least that means there’s plenty of room for you to be boosted up.

*Is it redundant to say “but, nevertheless”?  I suspect that it is.

**Though I dislike that expression somewhat; “saving lives” is always just saving them for later, since everyone dies eventually.

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“Monday morning turning back…”

“…yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go.”

To my surprise, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone today.  I say “to my surprise” because I did not bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me on Thursday evening, but I did not recall that fact until I unzipped my backpack and started looking for the computer.  It’s a tad frustrating to have allowed that to slip my mind, but then again, it has been four days.

I don’t feel well this morning, though it’s not because of any weekend debauchery of any kind.  I did essentially nothing this weekend.  Of course, that’s always an inaccurate statement if taken literally, but it catches the gist, the impression, of what I mean to convey.  Obviously, I breathed, and my heart pumped blood, and my bone marrow presumably kept on making blood, and I ate and excreted and so on.  And I did walk to the bank and to the convenience store and so on, and I watched a few videos on YouTube and on “Prime Video”.  But that’s about it.

Despite having rested quite a lot, my entire body just aches and is sore‒especially my back and left hip and knee and ankle and my left shoulder and arm and hand.  Both my thumbs are stiff and sore, making the process of writing this post on the smartphone particularly annoying.  I feel almost as if I were fighting some systemic infection, but I have no other localizing or specifying symptoms or signs.

Of course, I’m on my way to the office right now, to start another thoroughly pointless week of work.  I say “pointless” because I’m not going anywhere, metaphorically or literally.  I see no future other than the pointless repetition of today, with its utter lack of anything fulfilling and its ample sampling of pain and tension and frustration and anxiety and loneliness and depression.

If I had some purpose, some desired goal, something toward which I was working, it would be okay, I suspect.  Or if I just had someone with whom to legitimately share my time, with whom I could have anything more than a superficial connection, it might be tolerable.

Alas, I don’t have those things, and I strongly suspect that I never will have them.  I have had good friends (and excellent family) in my life, but I seem to have lost my ability to make friends, at least to make anything other than work friends.  And I am certainly not a dating kind of person, unfortunately.

I don’t know what point I’m getting at (yet again).  Maybe the point is that there is no point.

I don’t know if any of you stopped in on Friday and read the Declaration of Independence.  Ironically, anyone who bothered to stop and read it is likely not the sort of person who would need to be reminded of the principles involved.  So who knows whether anyone really got anything out of the fact that I shared the text of the document here?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

What else is there to say today?  Not very much.  Again, I just don’t feel very well at all, this morning, even for me.  (And when was the last time I felt reasonably healthy in the morning?  It probably long predates the origin of this blog.)

All right, well, I’ll leave it here for today, pretty much.  I feel quite discouraged and despondent and just physically rather beat up.  I’ve taken two extra-strength acetaminophen and three aspirin today so far already, but I don’t yet detect any sign of them making anything better.  Perhaps I haven’t given them a fair day in court, so to speak.  We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a good day and a good week, and a good month on top of that.  And so on, and so on, and so on…

In the meantime, here’s my cover of the song from which this blog post’s title comes.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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“Ain’t no big surprise”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you got it in one:  I am working today, so I’m writing a blog post.  Not only am I working today, but my coworker, who shares some of my duties, is moving to a new apartment this weekend, so he won’t be in.  We are also supposed to be having people from the “other” office come and work with us, so there will be more to do, but less help, and I’m still just wiped out.

Oh, yeah, and the room air conditioner that I ordered did not arrive on time.  Now, depending on which automatic message one believes, it will arrive sometime today, or it will arrive by June 5th…and if it doesn’t arrive by then, I can then ask for a refund.

As if a refund would be useful!  If I had wanted the money more than I wanted the air conditioner, I wouldn’t have ordered the air conditioner.  I ordered it based on the delivery time range that they posted, which was barely soon enough, and if there had been a similar unit that could be delivered sooner, I would have ordered that.

It’s so frustrating.  This has been a really long couple of weeks, and as with most of what I do, so much of it has gone wrong‒not least of which, of course, was the fact of the kidney stone, which was probably helped along by my attempts to exercise despite the heat and humidity.

I’ve also had a bit of a persistent headache on the left side of my head for the last few days, which doesn’t help improve my mood.  It seems to be sinus related; there’s no clear sign of infection, but my nose is stuffy on that side despite decongestants.  It may also be related to the fact that I tend to clench my teeth fiercely a lot of the time, though I don’t mean to do so.

Because of the short time frame, it’s quite unlikely to be a brain tumor or a growing aneurysm, more’s the pity.

I’ve been following several depression support and suicide awareness accounts on Instagram, in addition to the usual jokey accounts (today is apparently the last day of “Mental Health Awareness Month”).  It’s a bit funny how often they post things that say something like, “Someone is glad that you’re still around.”  I’m never entirely sure that’s true.  I suspect that, if I were not making audible noises (so to speak) most such people would have all but forgotten that I ever existed.

I mean, I’m sure that there are people who are glad that I’m not dead, some in more of an implicit sense, others in a very specific sense.  And that’s very nice, of course, and I would not for a second want to criticize such people.

But what good does that do me*?  They cannot give me a portion of the gladness they have to boost my spirits, and unfortunately, the person who most needs to be glad that I am around is not glad (that’s me by the way).  I am not glad to be alive.  Why would I be?  All I do is spoil the party for others, so to speak, like in the Beatles song.  “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”

Anyway, sorry, I know this is boring as shit and as pathetic as pathetic can be.  I apologize.  I really wish I had something insightful and/or edifying and/or entertaining and/or at least interesting to say.  But look not for positivity from me.  To paraphrase the ghost of Jacob Marley**, it comes from other regions and is conveyed by other writers to other kinds of readers.

That’s not to imply that, like Scrooge, you who read this are somehow culpable for the fact that I am such a downer and write only gloomy and depressing shit.  That would not merely be unjust, it would be inexcusably rude.  I truly appreciate you, my readers, though I often wonder at your patience and interest.  But to me, like most things I do, my blog feels as though it is a net negative for the world.  Everything about me, except for my children, feels like a net negative for the world.  Just by existing, I make everything around me at least a little bit worse.

Okay, that’s more than enough of that for today.  I’m sorry.  I hope I didn’t make anyone have a bad start to their day or anything.  Please accept my sincere thanks for reading and my strong wishes for you to be healthy and joyful.  And have a good weekend if you can.

*I am deeply sorry if that seems churlish and dismissive or even contemptuous.  It’s not meant to be any of those things.  I respect and appreciate the positive feelings and intentions of those who express such sentiments, and I think those people are truly wonderful.  I merely wish to say that while it’s “nice” to have people out there who are glad you’re alive, that doesn’t actually translate into you, yourself being glad to be alive, that’s all.

**In A Christmas Carol.