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“All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity”

I don’t feel much like writing anything today.  Or, rather, I don’t feel like writing anything that isn’t morbid and gloomy and morose and dark, and I know that people don’t like to read that stuff.  Of course, this blog isn’t necessarily about entertaining or even informing other people, though it’s nice when I can do that.  This blog is of me, by me, and for me, ultimately.  Which should make me satisfied (though not necessarily happy) just to write it.

Well, satisfaction is a tricky and evanescent thing at the best of times.  It’s not a good biological strategy to have lasting satisfaction in any kind of organism.  I’ve talked about this before, and I’ve referenced Yuval Noah Harari’s example of the squirrel that is durably satisfied by a single nut:  it would be a content, happy squirrel for the short time it lived before starving (painlessly) to death.  That doesn’t sound too bad, honestly, but natural selection will never tend to allow such a creature to endure let alone thrive and reproduce.

Anyway, I’m not satisfied by writing this blog, but there is a pressure of a sort to do so, and by doing so, I relieve that pressure briefly.  I guess that’s a good thing, as far as it goes.  It’s not much good, but it is some good.

It’s about the only personal thing I’ve done in a long time.  I haven’t sung or played any music nor even listened to any music in what feels like a very long time.  I haven’t really been reading very much, either, and certainly not much about topics or from genres that formerly interested me.

I got a Stephen King book that I hadn’t read before, but I lost interest before the real plot even got going.  I’ve tried to reread Insomnia, which is one of my favorite Stephen King books, but that doesn’t hold me for long, either.  Neither Tolkien nor Donaldson pique my interest, nor Lovecraft nor Poe nor Shakespeare, and I can’t seem to summon the energy to do any science reading either.  Even my own stories are boring to me.

I am just washed out, maybe.  I am tired and I am alone.  And yes, in some spiritual solidarity kinds of senses, one is not ever alone, because there are people out there going through things such as what you are going through, and who would willingly offer you moral support or whatever.

That sort of reassurance has never made very much sense to me, let alone providing any comfort, though I appreciate the thought.  It must be a neurotypical notion of some kind, useful and even truly helpful for those whose identities‒such as they are‒are dependent upon their group or tribe or whatever, and who are able to feel connected by such means.  It’s never provided comfort to me.  If anything, it’s more depressing to know that many other people have been depressed, are depressed, and will be depressed out there in the world.

My feeling of being alone is somewhat analogous to the old Woody Allen joke, if joke it was, in which he said he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality by not dying.

So, yeah, I don’t want to stop feeling alone because some hypothetical people out there are going through similar feelings or wish me well in some general sense, well-intentioned and appreciated though such things are.  It doesn’t work for me; it doesn’t assuage my feeling of being alone.  I want to stop feeling alone by actually having a friend or friends or family with me.

Of course, that’s a tall and rather hypocritical order.  I don’t even like being around myself, so it’s hard in good conscience to want to inflict myself upon other people.  And it’s not as though I can really conceive of wishing to “be” someone else, though I can certainly wish to change some of my attributes or improve myself.  Mostly, most of the time, I just want to get away from me, from awareness, from the constant internal pressure that brings no reward but which certainly punishes if not followed.

Anyway, sorry, this has not been amusing or upbeat or in any way optimistic.  At least you know I’m not sugar coating things.  Except, really, I am.  I do not let out anything like all the dark thoughts and notions that go through my head.

I actually almost always try to be more upbeat and amusing than I feel.  I try to be positive for other people.  I don’t know that I succeed very much, but I do try; it’s one of those pressures that I cannot easily ignore.  Doing it brings no real happiness or joy or satisfaction, any more than any achievement ever really brings me such things or ever has.  I just feel the pressure, the tension.

I don’t know.  It doesn’t matter.  No one really cares, and that includes me, at some level.  Like Kansas said, everything is dust in the wind.

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Fevers, Chills, and Sweats, LLP

Hi, everybody.

(Hi, Doctor E!)

I’m sorry about not posting a post yesterday.  There was nothing deep or symbolic going on; I was just out sick.

You may recall that I left the office early on Tuesday, but I needed to go in on Wednesday because of payroll.  Well, by Wednesday evening, I was feeling really run down, and then by the time I got back to the house, I was starting to have some shaking chills and to spike a fever*.  This is despite the fact that I already had/have constant antipyretics on board (NSAIDs and acetaminophen, for instances).  So, though my fever never got very high‒just over a hundred I think‒that might translate into significantly higher without meds.  Though we cannot be sure; it’s not necessarily a simple, linear effect.

Anyway, between that and general aches and malaise and a dry cough and whatnot, I stayed at the house yesterday.

Sometime during the night last night, my fever seems to have broken; certainly I woke up quite sweaty and my temperature reads as it normally does on my digital thermometer.  So, now I am feeling a bit less ill, though I am by no means at my best, whatever that might be.

I don’t know, my best probably happened around the times of my kids’ births.  Certainly those were the best events to happen in my life; few things even come close.  Marrying my ex was pretty close, I guess, and what happened subsequently doesn’t change that fact.

I certainly wouldn’t go back and change it if I could.  I would not change anything in my past‒even if I were given that power‒if it had the remotest chance to prevent my children from being born.  That is non negotiable.

So, yeah, with some minor tangents, that’s a sort of summary of what happened yesterday that led to me not making a blog post.  I will also not be posting tomorrow, because it is a day off work this week.

I was considering not working on this coming Monday, because it is Yom Kippur.  I am not observant, but nevertheless, I almost always fast on the so-called Day of Atonement.  I think it’s good for a person to do that from time to time.  It’s a good sort of “reset” button, metabolically as well as mentally.

I certainly feel like I can use it.  But I don’t necessarily take the day off work when fasting.  And given that I’ve missed a day and a half over the last week, taking another day on Monday would probably trouble my conscience.

Anyway, maybe I’ll have some manner of spiritual epiphany during my fast.  It’s unlikely, though.  It’s never happened before.  I think I would need to fast longer than 24 hours to be able to expect any kind of spiritual revelation.  But who knows?  It’s not impossible to experience some mental clarity and insight after just 24 hours without food or water.

Whatever the case, it’s not usually a bad thing for me to eat less.

Well, other than all that, I am not at all sure what to discuss today, and though I am recovering, I am still under the weather.  So, I won’t try to introduce some other topic now, even in passing.  I will, instead, draw this to a close for the day and for the week.  I hope you all have had a better, or at least a healthier, week than I have had, and that you all have a good weekend, too.

Though I will be fasting, I plan to write a post on Monday, so you can look forward to that, if that’s the sort of thing to which you tend to look forward.  Take care.

*Those two things are part of the same process.  When you’re getting a fever, your body resets the target point of your internal thermostat; this is a real thing, and it lies primarily in your hypothalamus.  So, all of a sudden, your body perceives that you are much less warm than you are supposed to be, and so you feel subjectively cold and can start to shiver, even as your core body temperature begins to rise.  Indeed, the biological “purpose” of shivering is to make you warmer.

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I feel like posting this because I dread the immediate future

Getting the “aura” for one of my “classic” migraines now. It came on FAST (in minutes) and is BIG, obscuring most of the right side of my vision.  I am not looking forward to this.

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Today is not the day to find out…something or other

It’s a new week, and soon it will be a new month.  Isn’t it exciting?  I know that I, at least, can barely contain myself‒and I try to do so using lead shielding and straitjackets and trenches filled with spikes and gasoline.

Of course, the ones I use are metaphorical and/or imaginary, so they only work‒if they work at all‒to contain metaphorical or imaginary things.  And though it is subjective, excitement is not imaginary or metaphorical.  Indeed, in some senses at least, it can be objective.  After all, one can measure heart rate, blood pressure, pupil dilation, circulating epinephrine and cortisol, and even brain and brainstem activity.  So, no, it’s not imaginary or metaphorical.

On the other hand, I’m not actually excited about the start of the week.  I’m a bit anxious/tense, because every interaction with other people and their world is stressful and feels unsafe.  But though that technically counts as “excitement” from a neurohumoral point of view, it’s not excitement like that expressed in the old song, I’m So Excited.

June 29th, which is today, is a prominent date for me.  It would have been my 35th wedding anniversary‒I mean, really, it still is my anniversary, but no one is celebrating it.  It’s weird to think that it’s been 35 years since I was married.  Soon it will have been two thirds of my life since then.  I’ve also been divorced longer than I was married, which is really weird to me, partly because the years since have felt distinctly less real than the years during or before.  You’d think I would be over it by now, but it seems to be otherwise.

Speaking of “the years during or before”, my sister recently sent me some old stuff that my Mom had apparently kept, and some of it is interesting and amusing, at least to me.  In addition to some paperwork and such, I received some bits of nostalgia, including a large print of my high school senior picture (from 1987), which I will share here:

I think you can all agree that, apparently, I was the type model for Draco Malfoy.  I’m not sure what to think about that.  He’s definitely not the type of “villainous” character I’ve ever admired (probably because he and his family are more realistic, banal bad people‒just bigoted, entitled assholes, not misguided geniuses or philosophically interesting nihilists or such like).  I certainly would never have written an edition of My Heroes Have Always Been Villains about Draco or even his father.

Speaking of villains and also of heroes, there was a 7 x 9 ish drawing pad there as well that must’ve been from no later than sixth grade.  In it were some very early, very crude comic book pages of Helios (among others), the superhero I made up that I’ve mentioned here before, and about which I started writing a novel, though I have not gotten far at all.  My attention seems more erratic than it used to be.

Also there are various drawings and designs of things like space ships and secret bases, and my attempts to work out how to make a tractor beam and powered armor and even my “Eu-ray”.  That, at least, was not a completely stupid notion, even if the name is stupid.  I remember learning about how CRTs worked and thinking, hey, if you had a bunch of those cathodes inside a chamber and channeled it with magnetic and electric fields, you could make a ray gun*.

In real life, it really would make a particle beam, though maintaining a vacuum within the device while projecting electrons out of it always seemed like it would be a bit of trouble.  I think I remember imagining that the electrostatic (or whatever) pressure within would ensure that nothing in the air would be able to sneak back.  Maybe there was also some kind of electronic valve thing, I think I thought about that.

That bit probably wouldn’t have worked, and even if it did, there’s no way it would have been a very useful weapon‒electrons cannot travel very far through the air, and certainly not very accurately‒though it might have been useful in particle physics.  There are much better accelerators now, though, for physics.  And it’s so far been hard to improve on things that hurl kinetic projectiles at high speeds if you’re looking for ranged weapons.

If only phasers (a la Star Trek) actually existed, but alas, they do not and almost certainly cannot.  But think about it:  if you shot yourself with a phaser on full power, there would be no chance of a failure leading to a crippling injury, leaving you in a worse state than before and making you a burden on those around you; you would be disintegrated, which also would nicely leave no mess for other people to clean up.

I wonder how one would play Russian Roulette with a phaser.

Anyway, that’s about all the personal news I have for this morning.  I hope you all feel better than I do today.  That’s not a low bar to clear.  Though, come to think of it, while a low bar is easier in hurdles, it’s actually quite difficult if you’re doing the limbo.  In this case, though, it’s like a steeplechase jump that’s a few inches off the ground, or even embedded in the surface like a tiny speed bump.

The point I’m making is that I don’t feel very well, mentally at least, and I am only at the office because the AC is partly down at the house, and it’s boiling out around here.  I have no desire to sweat myself into the risk of another kidney stone, so it’s better, in that sense, to be at the office.  Or to be nowhere.

*Why did my thoughts go straight to “ray gun”?  Well, I could make the excuse that I had read the term “electron gun” when learning about cathode ray tubes, and that had triggered the thought, but that wasn’t the real reason.  It just seems to be my nature to think of ways to make weapons or otherwise destructive things.  I’m not a very good person by nature, it seems.  I guess that’s part of why I have so many rules.

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Sleep! Sleep like your life depended on it!

Well, it’s Friday, and it’s a slightly fun date to write out:  6-26-2026 or (slightly more fun) 6-26-26 or, in the European way, 26-6-2026 or 26-6-26 (which sounds a bit like a quarterback calling plays in American football, which is slightly ironic for the European format).

I’m writing this post on the lapcom, by the way, because I decided I didn’t want to let an entire week go by without using it, and it just feels better, more “natural” for me to write with it.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this mini lapcom or one nearly identical to it.  Unanimity (books 1 and 2) was more than half a million words just by itself, and I don’t know how many words I’ve written in all my blog posts that I’ve done on one or another mini lapcom.  I suppose I could figure it out, but it seems like tedious work.  If anyone wants to check it for themselves, you can try, but don’t ask for access to my smartphone or lapcom.

I have a small bit of what is, for me, momentous news:  I slept almost five and a half hours last night!  That was more or less uninterrupted sleep, as far as I know.  If I woke up during the night, I don’t remember it, and I certainly needed to rush to the euphemism as if I had not gotten up during the night.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the most sleep—certainly the longest uninterrupted sleep—that I’ve had in a long, long time without significant use of things that make me sleepy*, like Benadryl®.  However, though I have tried to use the aforementioned antihistamine on non-weekend days in the past, I’ve learned that it actually does me more harm than good the next day if I need to work.

The hangover/persistent effects of that stuff make me slow and stupid (even more so than usual!) and I don’t feel mentally very rested after it.  This makes sense, neurologically, given that sleep is not merely a lack of consciousness but a very involved, active, and utterly crucial** process we still understand only somewhat, and almost all sedatives disrupt it.

I have some hypotheses about why last night’s exceptional sleep happened.  Of course, it could well be just a random outlier—they happen if you wait long enough in pretty much all intrinsically variable systems that produce bell-curve distributions of outcomes—but there are a few contenders for possible, more causal, reasons.

I am always trying various things to see if they improve my health, my sleep, my pain, my mood, etc.  I don’t tend to be as scientific as I would prefer to be about such things, alas.  I tend to be in a constant state of low-level desperation (rather like the “low-flying panic attack” in Radiohead’s Burn the Witch), because I feel so uncomfortable in so many ways so much of the time, and so it’s all but impossible not to try as many things as one can try at any given time.

When you have a bad itch in the middle of your back that you cannot reach directly, and there is no one around to help, you can probably be pretty clever (and desperate) in how you’ll scratch that itch.  Well, itches are a kind of pain—they’re mediated similarly but not identically in the nervous system—they’re just a low-level kind.  That’s part of why scratching works to provide temporary relief:  the local receptors get drowned out by the surrounding inputs.

Now, if itching in your back can be so impossible to ignore that it drives you to scramble madly for a pencil or the corner of a wall or a tree trunk or whatever, no matter what you’re doing—and yet it can be countered by just locally running your fingernails over the surrounding area—well, just think how much more difficult it is to ignore a serious, deep and persistent pain, as well as general, persistent (largely social) anxiety, and depression.  Even when it’s been going on for years, for decades, the very hardware of your nervous system does not let you simply ignore it.

So, yeah, I’m cautiously glad about my night’s sleep.  I don’t want to get too excited.  It may not ever happen again.  What follows the vast majority of outliers in statistical distributions is a subsequent regression toward the mean.  This applies not just to good outliers but also to bad ones, though, so it’s not all bleak.

Anyway, maybe I’ll sleep well this weekend.  I’ll certainly sleep longer, because notwithstanding my above admissions about the drawbacks of antihistamines, it’s nice to be unconscious and physically resting for longer than usual, if the consequences are not significant.  So, long live diphenhydramine (so to speak).

I will not be working this weekend, so I don’t expect to produce another blog post before Monday.  I hope you all have a good weekend.

*It does make me sleepy—very much so.  I found that out the first time I had to take it in response to an attack of hives I got (apparently) from using Irish Spring™ soap.

**How crucial?  As far as we can tell, every animal with a nervous system needs to sleep a significant portion of its time.  This includes aquatic and marine mammals and reptiles, a fact that engenders some amazing adaptive creativity, such as creatures sleeping in one half of their brains at a time.  Evolution may be the true blind, idiot god, but it has a lot of time (much of it in parallel to itself) to explore innovation-space, and it does produce some amazing things.  But it does not seem able to select for simply not sleeping in any creature.  But sleep makes an animal vulnerable, tremendously so.  So, it must be really crucial—life and death crucial—for there to be no yet-discovered alternative.

 

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AI as detrimental enchancement

This is that audio I mentioned this morning (and yesterday morning).  I didn’t do a LOT of editing, just truncated the silences, reduced noise, and added a bit of reverb since after all the noise reduction it felt a bit dead.  I honestly don’t remember exactly what I said, though I remember the gist, and I don’t know whether I was coherent.  This is a bit of an experiment, just uploading without listening.  Enjoy.  Or don’t, if it’s not enjoyable, I won’t try to dictate your reaction.

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I am near the end of my rope with this

Well, here we are again.  It’s Saturday, and as I warned you, I am writing/have written/will have written a blog post.

Is this a good thing?  Is it a bad thing?  I suppose that’s all in the mind of the reader (or the avoider as the case may be).  I don’t think there’s any final, objective assessment of the goodness or badness of me writing (or having written) this blog post.  Everything happens as it must, I suppose.

There’s nothing deep about that.  I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason, as if there is some telos to reality; as far as I can see, there’s no reason (ha!) to suspect that there’s any deep meaning to things other than simply that they are.  The universe does what it does, physics does what it does, and once it’s done, it doesn’t change and could not in any sensible way have been otherwise.  Thus, everything happens as it must, in the sense that it had no choice.

I’ve gone over this ground many times before, I’m sure.  There must be figurative ruts in this thought path deep enough to be able to fit the Loch Ness monster, if you flooded the ruts with water, and if there were a real monster (other than humans) associated with Loch Ness.

Sorry.  I had a very bad sleep last night, even for me, and here I think we can bring an objective measure of badness to bear.  Sleep that doesn’t last and doesn’t bring any refreshment is sleep that’s not doing what is expected of it, and that’s bad.

I don’t think I got a single uninterrupted hour of sleep last night.  That doesn’t mean I slept only less than an hour overall; I slept in fits and starts, as it were, but the total was probably a few hours.  I have been fully awake for about three or so hours already as I write this‒since a little after one in the morning.  So, it’s been quite a poor night, because I certainly didn’t go to sleep very early.

[Aside:  doesn’t the word “manifesto” sound like something a stage magician might say when apparently conjuring something out of midair?  Alternatively, perhaps it could be the name of a breakfast cereal:  Try new Manifest-Os!  Part of this complete breakfast!  Sorry, that thought came to me as I was briefly recalling a video I watched last night.]

Such is my life now, or my “life” as I ought to write, with scare quotes (or should that be “scare” quotes?).  Of course, life is life; it is what it is, like Popeye and the God of Exodus.  My life is no more meaningless than that of the dead “palmetto bug” I flushed down the toilet this morning.

It’s not all that much more meaningful either.  Yes, I write a blog and I go to work, and I’ve written books and songs and such like, and most importantly, I have two children who are awesome*.  But maybe that giant cockroach had done the equivalent in its own millicosm**.  For all I know, its importance to the world of coprophages is unparalleled, and will be remembered for many generations, perhaps forever.

Well…“forever” is quite a heavy lift, as they say.  But maybe its memory will live as long as cockroaches endure, which is likely to be longer than humans endure, unless humans proceed very carefully.  Of course, human records and so on tend to deteriorate over time, being recopied, adjusted, edited, lost and found, reinterpreted through the lens of later ideas that did not exist when original events took place, and gradually just eroded by entropy.

Perhaps palmetto bugs have more relatively durable means of keeping records‒it seems quite unlikely, but it’s not literally impossible.  Even so, they cannot be exempted from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  As Saruman said (in the movie, not the book) to Gandalf about the prospect of anyone standing against Sauron:  “There are none who can.”

Okay, well, I’m veering from the imagined lives and memories of the good and great among cockroaches to quoting the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring.  My chronic and acute lack of sleep is definitely having its effects.

I truly don’t know whether this post has been worth writing, let alone reading.  I guess that latter part will be for each of you to judge.  But, to make your judgement, you must actually read the post‒if you want your judgement to have any reasonable basis‒and then it’s too late for you to decide it wasn’t worth it, except perhaps as a lamentation.

Well, I hope the rest of your weekend has no further causes of potential rue.  Thank you for reading my blog.

Addendum: I have discovered that WordPress has changed their shit again, and I cannot access the editor I used to use. I don’t know why, and they cannot seem to figure out how to reactivate it, but it is TOO MUCH RIGHT NOW. I don’t know if I am going to keep doing this. They call themselves “Happiness Engineers”, but if so, they’re rather comparable to the engineers that made the Tay Bridge in Scotland. It all comes crashing down. I’m already at my wits’ end this morning, as you can probably tell. This blog is one of the only little bits of satisfaction I have on a regular day, and they’ve screwed that up. Fuck WordPress, fuck this blog, and fuck this whole stupid planet.

*They got the “awe” part from my “aw(e)ful” nature, and the “some” part from their mother’s “fearsome” character.  Thank goodness they didn’t inherit the full “awful” (the full aw?) from me, nor did they inherit the other two half-words and end up just fearful.

**This is a new word I just made up.  I thought “microcosm” isn’t the right term‒a roach is not on a millionth of the scale on which I live.  I don’t think even its mass is that relatively small, but I’ll look it up***.  So, I thought, “A thousandth scale seems better, and we have micro and nano and pico scales, so why not ‘millicosm’?”

***Its mass is nearly that small relative to me, but its other dimensions are nowhere close, and since the “micro” in “microscopic” generally refers to one-dimensional measures, my choice still can apply.

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My Meta-based accounts have been suspended

This is just a very brief follow-up post to note to those following that my Instagram account has been deleted due to supposed violations of “community standards”, though I’m dipped if I know how that could be.  I hardly post anything “new” to Instagram; I share other peoples’ stuff a fair amount and I comment occasionally, and I look at other accounts, but I don’t know what I might have done to violate such supposed “Standards”.  Also, my Facebook and Threads accounts are “suspended” because of the association, but I have no information on what the basis for this is.  If any of you know how to contact actual humans through meta and/or Facebook or what have you, I would be delighted to know.

If I cannot sort this out, I may need to make a new Facebook account and consider a new possible Instagram account, but though I enjoy scrolling through it, I have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing.  Still, that’s right now.  I may change my mind over time (see my post from this morning).

I’m feeling quite frustrated and stressed out.  It’s not quite as bad as being arrested and charged and threatened with long prison time to get me to accept a plea deal for shorter prison time, but it definitely calls up emotions and stress related to that truly horrible series of events that is still crippling my life.

I’m very tired of all this.  But I have no other regular, frequent connections except through those venues and this one, to some extent.

If anyone has any helpful information, I would welcome it.