writing

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

Happy Day of the Moon, everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost certainly that won’t be the case.

*Which might be a good name for a band.

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Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps, and they that blog see time how slow it creeps

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the long-standing day of what was my weekly blog, back when I was writing fiction that almost no one but my family members would ever read on the other days of the week.

I’m writing this at the house, because I decided to take the bus in to the train this morning, because I already feel over-hot and sweaty and, most importantly, quite mentally fatigued.  I thought I’d give myself a short break and do my walking in the evening today.  That way, at least, I don’t have to carry a change of clothes with me to the office and have it drying out in front of my little desktop fan most of the day.  Not that anyone complained—they didn’t.  But it’s mildly irritating.

I’m getting tired of doing this blog, especially the Thursday one, in which I use a Shakespearean quote that I’ve altered to squeeze in some form of the word “blog”.  Then again, I’m getting tired of doing pretty much everything.

I haven’t read anything at all this week, apart from the occasional snippet of a news article.  I have listened to some podcasts—mainly Sean Carroll’s Mindscape—so far this week.  His solo “AMA” podcasts are often better than the ones in which he interviews someone, though I’ve encountered some interesting people through the latter podcasts, and have bought books by them.  Still, I did that far more often for people on the Sam Harris podcast.  I’m not sure why that is.  Maybe I just have more in common thought-wise with Harris, or I tend to find his guests more interesting.

Still, I like the AMA’s for both of them, the ones for Carroll because he is a physicist, and so people ask him many physics-related questions.  He has more than enough expertise to address them, and he’s a good explainer and thinker.  I think in some ways that Sam Harris is a more careful thinker, a more methodical and cautious one; his long-standing meditation practice seems to serve him well in this.  He strikes me as almost Vulcan in character, though not in any straightforward, simplistic, “emotionless” sense.  In any case, I admire both men and like to listen to their thoughts and listen to their interactions with other intelligent people about interesting topics.

I have Sean Carroll’s textbook on General Relativity, Spacetime and Geometry, but I haven’t read very far in it.  It’s not that it’s too difficult; it’s well written, and everything so far makes good sense and seems clear.  But I just have a hard time forcing myself to go through it, or anything else, really.  I have the book at the office, like I have Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, but I have to sit and actually read them, and there is no good time period during which to sit uninterrupted, even during my supposed lunch time.  And by the time I get back to the house—or early in the morning—I’m all but completely out of mental energy.

I also have Stephen Hawking’s book Euclidean Quantum Gravity (co-written with G.W. Gibbons) that supposedly goes into more detail on some ideas he mentioned in A Brief History of Time, and I’ve also hardly read any of that.  But, again, this week I really haven’t read anything, fiction or nonfiction.  I’m really running out of steam.  Nothing is very interesting.  Nothing is very fun.  I feel mentally exhausted, even though I’m getting more physically fit.  It’s just all very boring.

Maybe it would be better if I weren’t in pain every day, or if I had someone with whom I could really talk about things like physics and whatnot, on a regular basis.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  Well, I’m going nowhere, of course, but that’s more long term.

Maybe I should just Uber to the office, so I don’t even need to walk to the bus stop.  Why not?  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to save money.  I have no future for which to plan or prepare.

I feel a bit like Colonel Slade (I think that was his name) in Scent of a Woman, in that I might as well just spend whatever I have on minor diversions.  I have no interest in most of things in which he was interested, of course—no interest in Ferraris or escorts or fancy restaurants in Manhattan, or the Waldorf-Astoria.  I also have no interest in or expectation to find some high school student to walk me around—thankfully, I am not blind—nor to save my life in dramatic and touching movie-style fashion.

Also, of course, though I do appreciate and enjoy Jack Daniels whiskey from time to time—it’s probably my favorite hard liquor—I do not have a drinking problem, unlike the good Colonel, and I rather quickly get tired of alcohol on the occasions when I do drink it.  I could see myself getting habituated to Valium, in principle—the two times I actually took it, for medical reasons, are the only times in my life when I recall feeling “normal” and at ease in my skin—but I understand the nature of that process, and that such habituation would lead to feeling even worse in between doses.

In any case, I have no access to Valium (or any of its relatives), and have no intention to seek it out.  I wouldn’t trust “black market” Valium even if I knew where to look for it.

Of course, one might well ask, if I don’t really care if I live or die, what does it matter if I take something that isn’t actually Valium?  Well, if I were to be seeking Valium, it would be to try to experience that sense of feeling normal, perhaps for a third and final time in my life, and it would be terribly disappointing to get the wrong thing.  This is a situation in which it is better never to have loved at all than to have loved and lost, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m tired, and this blog post is already longer than I meant it to be.  This week has felt like a million years already.  So much for Pink Floyd’s line “every year is getting shorter”.  Of course, I understand that phenomenon, and I have experienced what is being described in the song.  But lately, time is moving more and more slowly, from a subjective point of view.  I’m dragging my feet, but the sun still just doesn’t keep up, and it certainly doesn’t feel as if it’s racing around to come up behind me again.

Of course, unless I’m secretly immortal, which seems ridiculously unlikely, it is certainly true that I am “one day closer to death” every day, as are we all.  But it still could be a comparatively long way off, at least if I leave it to its own devices.  If I do that, and experience life as I have been for so long, and if I live even only twenty more years (which would still have me die younger than either my mother or father, neither of whom had exercise habits or practices such as I do), it would seem a horrible semi-eternity.

I know, “semi-eternity” doesn’t actually make sense.  It’s akin to multiplying infinity times zero—it’s not a well-defined operation, mathematically.

I did invent a “number” in the past, which I called a “gleeb” for no particular reason, that when multiplied by zero would produce 1, making it, in a sense, “bigger” than infinity, or at least different.  I even worked out a little of the implicit algebra of the gleeb, during some down-time in the education department at FSP West.  It was silly, and it certainly wasn’t useful for any mathematical purposes, but when you realize that it implies that 1/0=gleeb, or 1/gleeb=0, and then start putting those identities into equations and the like, you can get some surprising and amusing results, such as that a gleeb raised to any positive power is just still a gleeb, and that the gleeb is, in a sense, the reciprocal of zero—though again, there’s no use or rigor to it.

Anyway, that’s that.  I want to go back to bed and try to go to sleep, but I’m not going to do that.  I work today, tomorrow, and Saturday, and it’s my coworker’s daughter’s first birthday tomorrow, so I wouldn’t want to interfere with his family’s enjoyment of that.  So, there it is.  I will need to survive until next week at least.  I don’t know if I’ll make it until next Thursday, but I expect I’ll at least write a post a day for the next two days, because that’s just me doing what I do every day.  I hope you have a good remainder of your week, whoever you are that is reading this.

TTFN

tardis-doctor-who

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“Don’t think I need anything at all.”

“No, don’t think I need anything at all.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and this morning I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer, which at the moment of writing this sentence is, in fact, resting atop some form of my actual lap.  Actually, it’s more on my right thigh and lower left leg, the latter of which is crossed over the former in what’s sometimes called a “figure four” posture, rather than being a true, traditional “lap”, like you might find in Lapland (presumably at discount prices).  Unfortunately, though useful, that figure four posture puts strain on my left knee—at least if it’s in any kind of sore state, which it is at the moment—so I’m probably going to have to switch that out.

I’m really tired, even for me.

I’m tired of trying.  I feel that I’ve been trying hard all my life, and in many objective senses, I honestly have.

I was never a slacker in school.  I graduated with all “As”, I was class valedictorian, I was a National Merit Scholar, all that bullshit.  I got a full ride scholarship to Cornell, without having anyone with any kind of real background knowledge or connections about how to apply to a high-level university or anything.  We certainly had no “connections”.

Anyway, you all know all that stuff:  blue collar town, scholarship to college, heart defect discovered and heart surgery done during my first summer of college, significant mood and (temporary) cognitive side-effects from open-heart surgery, leading to switched major.

Graduated with honors*, had a temporary (but severe) estrangement from my parents** due to issues involving my now-ex-wife.  Was administratively discharged from the Navy for health reasons related to the heart defect and also to my mood disorder.  Was not able, at that age, to finish my novel-in-progress, and so decided to go to medical school.  Got the distribution requirements easily enough, went to medical school on a partial scholarship, had some pretty bad trouble with mood disorder during third year or so.  Did residency, had kids, moved to Florida to start practice.

Had a back injury, with consequent chronic pain, worsening mood disorder, divorce, “temporary disability”.  Tried to do at least part-time medical work to help other people with chronic pain, but was not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to certain things that are beyond the straightforward (i.e., trying to help people with chronic pain but not realizing that some people—some patients and people with whom I worked, as well as the State itself—had ulterior motives of one kind or another) and thus not even recognizing that there was a chance that I could be arrested or charged with anything, since I wasn’t trying to do anything wrong…I was just doing what I saw as the essence of my job (trying to relieve suffering), and had no desire even for personal enrichment.  Seriously.  I gave away most of what I made to other people.  I’ve done that a lot, and consistently, throughout much of my life.

I’m stupid that way.

Then, of course, I went to jail and prison, and I haven’t seen my kids in over ten years.  I haven’t spoken (in any sense) with my son in that time***.  I’m still in chronic pain, my mood disorder is as bad as ever or worse, and I’ve recently discovered that I’m possibly/probably on the autism spectrum, which would explain a lot of my not understanding or expecting the issues that led me to be arrested, among other things.

It probably also explains part of why I had so much trouble with (for instance) dictating charts after I went into private practice.  I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that last bit here, but that was a nightmare for me.  I had the most horrible time trying to dictate chart notes, and always ended up getting backed up—a lot—no matter where I was in practice.  It seems all the other doctors and everybody just loved dictating charts; they thought it was so much easier than writing.  For me it was like trying to build a sand castle using knitting needles.  But I didn’t understand why I had so much trouble with it, I thought I was just being lazy or weak or something, and I just had to force myself to learn to do better, so I kept on trying, and I kept on getting backed up (severely) over and over again.

It’s a stupid idea, anyway.  Writing and speaking are two different kinds of processes, and organization and recording of medical notes is better done in writing.  Also, that way there’s also not delay in getting the notes into the chart.  I couldn’t speak and say the things I’m writing here with anything approaching the speed and clarity with which I am typing them.

Nowadays, I think most medical charting is done using portable computers, which—if the system is good—is probably an excellent option.

Anyway, all that leads up to now, when I’m living alone in a single room (with attached shower/bathroom), in a house that is not my home, working at a job that I’ve worked at basically just to keep myself alive and fed while writing fiction…but now I’m no longer writing fiction, I’m no longer doing music, I’m no longer doing anything apart from this blog.

Tomorrow would have been my 32nd wedding anniversary.  Though I’ve been divorced longer than I was married, it’s still an important, or at least consequential, day to me, though I’m guessing it isn’t as important to my ex-wife.  I don’t know, I think I’m a member of a species that mates for life to a single mate (though clearly that was not the case for her).  I certainly have no desire to get romantically involved with anyone else ever again—it’s not worth the risk.  I also can’t imagine anyone wanting to get involved with me.  The few minor attempts I made after my divorce were laughably bad.

There’s nothing good coming down the pike.

And no one is going to help me, I’m pretty sure of that.  I’ve sent out coded and not-so-coded distress signals, here and elsewhere, over and over again, in various ways, some of which are perhaps opaque, but others of which I think are rather obvious.  Maybe it’s just a case of some form of “the bystander effect”, I don’t know.

I’ve tried to do therapy again**** (online this time), with limited and very temporary effects, and I’ve called 988 and spoken to the very lovely person who was there—they deserve all the plaudits and support they can be given.  (I’ve tried to call it more than once, the first occasion of which involved a misadventure due to T-Mobile’s bad service at the time).

It’s all ultimately not getting me anywhere.  I’m not accomplishing anything or contributing anymore to the net worth of civilization.  I’m certainly not contributing to my own well-being, because I don’t think that even exists.  I’m just adding my little, inconsequential bit of entropy to the eventual (probable) heat death of the universe.

I need to die.  I’m just having a hard time working up the nerve to do it.  I wish I had a drug or alcohol problem, because the use of those is associated with higher rates of suicide, and even “accidental” overdose death, but I don’t seem prone to such things.  I have large bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen and naproxen that I could take, but such means are unreliable, and the process tends to be quite drawn out.  I don’t own any guns anymore.  I did buy two helium tanks and a non-rebreather mask and tubing, but setting that up and applying it turned out to be difficult, and I didn’t have a good place to do it.  I hate the idea of leaving a mess for innocent people, though that may be unavoidable.  That’s also the main reason for not just cutting various arteries open after ensuring that I’m adequately anticoagulated—I’m not afraid of blood (and I’m demonstrably not afraid of cutting myself), but I know other people are, and I don’t really want to traumatize others more than I already have in my life, if I can help it.

I had a rather strong bourbon and diet-Pepsi last night; alcohol is supposed to help one harm oneself, but it’s just made me feel more tired today than usual because of worse-than-usual sleep.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I don’t know if or what I’ll write after this.  I hope the rest of you are feeling better than I am.

*After initially missing the deadline for my honors thesis, thinking it was due a month later than it was, and having to write the whole thing—52 pages!—in one weekend.  I might have gotten more than a basic cum laude if I’d been better able to manage deadlines and all that, but it was never my own idea to try for honors, anyway.  Not that I regret it, but it was not my ambition.

**And more indirectly, in consequence, with the rest of my family, since they were caught between.  I feel very bad about that, and about the time I missed with them and my parents, all over someone who left me in the end.

***His choice, not mine.  We have exchanged one email in that time, and he sends along his thanks via his sister for birthday presents and the like.  He’s a good person, and I love him and am proud of him and do not blame him.  He’s not much better at dealing with things like this and with other people and with radical changes of circumstance than I am, and I think he was badly hurt by everything that happened.

****I’ve gone to at least four or five therapists, and I’ve even been (very briefly) hospitalized once for depression while I was out on bail.  I’ve tried at least seven different anti-depressants with mixed results, at best.  And here I am.

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This is the way the word ends:  Not with a “!” but a “…”

Well, it’s Monday again, the (effective) beginning of yet another week…a week that has no end that I can discern.

I don’t mean to say that I think the week will last forever.  That wouldn’t make any sense (though at times it can feel subjectively endless).  A week, by agreed-upon definition, lasts seven days, and seven is a good prime number (and all primes are finite, though there can be no largest possible prime number).  I mean, rather, that it has no end in the teleological sense.  It has no purpose.  It has no meaning.

I’m not accomplishing anything at all.  I mean, okay, I’m going to work and doing a job.  I’m also writing this blog post, which will be looked at by a few dozen people, perhaps.  That’s bigger than the number of people who have read any of my stories and/or books, and probably larger than the number who have heard any of my songs, but it’s still not much of an accomplishment.

Not that I’m ungrateful!  I deeply appreciate and thank each and every one of you who reads my blog posts, however depressed and depressing the posts tend to be.  But I don’t think I’m doing any good for anyone by writing them.

I am always trying to learn new things, as much as I can.  As I walked the five miles to the train this morning, I listened to some of James Gleick’s The Information, a sort of prehistory and history and exploration of information theory and computer/communication science.  I find that learning the history of discovery and innovation really gives me a deeper handle on the workings of a subject.  On the other hand, though, I also have an audio textbook proper on Information Theory, which is quite interesting in and of itself, but I decided for now to do the Gleick book.

That’s not all to which I’m listening or that I’m reading, of course.  I am interspersing it with two audio books by Sean Carroll (Something Deeply Hidden, which I’ve read before, and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, part 1, which is new).  I’ve recently started two and finished one Kindle-version book by Hugo Mercier, Not Born Yesterday, and The Enigma of Reason, the latter of which was  co-written with Dan Sperber.  Also, I’m reading The Experience Machine:  How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark*.  And I’m reading Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire by David William Plummer, who runs the YouTube channel Dave’s Garage.

I started trying to read the Kindle version of Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible, by A. Zee, but since the Kindle version of that is basically a pdf of the print version, it’s hard to read on Kindle, since its text size and formatting can’t be separately adjusted.  Even on a tablet, it’s difficult to read.  I think, if I really want to read it, I might need to get the print version, but if I’m going to go that far, I might as well just get his actual textbook since that’s reputed to be quite good, and I might as well take a deep dive.

Unfortunately, though I enjoy learning all this stuff, it’s also all just pointless, since I have no one with whom to discuss it deeply, and I’m not making any contributions to knowledge or process or to anyone’s quality or quantity of life, including my own**.  I’m not even as useful as someone trying to shout and do semaphore in a sandstorm, because I don’t seem to have any message to convey.

Talk about a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing‒I’m not even telling tales anymore.  I’m certainly not contributing to human knowledge, whether in physics or mathematics or biology or music or literature or even medicine (though I have contributed a tiny amount of the latter in the past).  I’m certainly not contributing to overall happiness or well-being in any sense.

I don’t feel that I’m contributing any lasting good to anyone, not even to my family, though at least I did that in the past, and I also did some good for a fair number of people when I was in medical practice.  Maybe at some point the reflections in this blog might be of interest as a case study of a mind that’s not so much disintegrating as imploding, like a dying star, completely run out of fusible material***.  Otherwise, though, I am alone and pointless.

Anyway, now I’ve ridden the train and have arrived at the office, so I’ll draw this first draft to a close.  I will simply add that, apparently on Saturday, someone (most likely the boss) moved around a bunch of stuff in my area of the office, presumably to free up a plastic tub that now sits empty under a table stacked with papers.  It hasn’t increased the accessibility or usability of the various things.  It’s purely a cosmetic reassortment, which I suppose can be aesthetically beneficial to people who find the seeming mess problematic.

However, I have a hard time sympathizing, when every day I am confronted by the disorder of people ignoring schedules, being inconsiderate of others’ time, cutting corners on procedures and sales and so on, people yelling and shouting and sometimes making fun of other people, people demanding to have loud music playing‒all that crap, all of which is to me not much better than having swarms of flies and mosquitoes constantly buzzing around one’s head.

Probably I’m being unfair.  But it is irritating.

Oh, well.  The world is unsatisfactory, and it probably always will be.  And I need help, but I don’t think I’ll ever get it.  And any given week in my life now has no apparent end, and it often feels that way metaphorically in the other sense.

*Anyone who has been on both Sam Harris’s and Sean Carroll’s podcasts in the space of about three weeks is probably someone with interesting things about which to write, and that is indeed the case.

**In this latter area, the care and maintenance of my well-being, indeed of my own survival, I fear that I need a tremendous amount of help, rather urgently, but I don’t have any right or ability to seek anyone else’s efforts.  My need is my own problem.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be up to the task on my own.  In such circumstances, the outcome is reasonably predictable.

***It is theoretically possible, if I understand correctly, for a sufficiently massive star at the end of its “life” to collapse straight into a black hole, with the horizon forming rapidly enough that there is no time for a supernova explosion to happen.  Any astrophysicists who read this (ha ha) please correct me if I’m wrong.

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This title has nothing to do with this post, other than the inevitable fact that it is the title of this post

It’s Monday again, and I’m using my laptop to write this post, after having used my phone all last week*.  It’s much faster and more natural for me to write on the laptop, of course, and it doesn’t tend to cause soreness in the base of my thumbs (since I hardly use them when I’m typing).  But of course, it has its disadvantages, too, the biggest being the computer’s weight.  Although it is a slender, small, 11 inch laptop, it’s still heavier than my smartphone—and I carry my smartphone with me even when I have my laptop.

Nevertheless, it’s not that heavy, and I would like to be in decent enough shape that simply carrying my laptop in my backpack along with other stuff makes no real difference.  If I ever mean to go on any long hikes, with a backpack full of clothes and supplies, I would hope the laptop would seem negligible.

Also, when I’m writing on the laptop, using Word, at least the autocorrect function of my phone doesn’t keep changing “its” to “it’s”.  I try to catch them all—like Pokémon, I guess, but much more irritating—but I’m not certain that I succeed.  It would be frustrating to find that I’d allowed a grammatical slip caused by the “smartphone” to go out when I was just using it out of laziness.  I guess it would be just deserts**, but still, I’d rather be hoist by my own petard for something I did myself, not something that was a poor consequence of an automatic, would-be spelling assistant.

Speaking of malfunctioning technology, I had a stressful morning yesterday.  I put my laundry in the washing machine, with soap and fabric softener as usual, and then…the machine didn’t turn on.  There was not so much as a flicker or blink of its lights.

I have to admit that I freaked out much more than was probably warranted, though I doubt that any outside observer would have been able to tell.  Evidently, my emotions don’t show much on my face, and apparently also not in my voice or my choice of words.  Inside my mind, I felt like I was going to rip into pieces from tension and stress.

Sunday is the only day of the week on which I do laundry, since it’s the only day of the week I’m certain to be at the house, and I’ve done it that way for years, now.  I also start my washing early, because I get up early, and the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can stop having to go out into the rest of the house where I might encounter my—perfectly pleasant—housemates and have to interact with them.

Anyway, I texted my former housemate and the owner each (knowing I would have to wait a while for their replies), while trying to brainstorm ideas for what might be the issue.  Of course, I checked (and reset) all the circuit breakers, and checked the locking mechanism on the machine, and all sorts of other obvious things.  I’m not sure any of that improved anything.  In the meantime I ordered a few new shirts and a new pair of pants and some underwear (I accidentally ordered the wrong size, though), and so on, just in case.

Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of not being able to do my laundry, I honestly wished that I would have a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, and that it would all become moot.

I didn’t, of course, have either of those things, as far as I can tell.  In the long run, between me and my former housemate and the landlord, texting back and forth in parallel conversations, I got the washer to work by stretching a very long combo of extension cords to an outside socket and doing what I think was a hard reset of the washing machine—after having left it unplugged for quite some time, starting it on rinse, then stopping, turning it up to “normal” wash while it was running.

Anyway, I got my laundry done, thank goodness.  I honestly think that, in my current state of semi-life, I would rather die than have to find a way to go and use a laundromat.  I’m not speaking hyperbolically, except perhaps in the mathematical sense in which I’m at the long tail of a hyperbolic function (such as y=1/x), asymptotically approaching zero.

Wouldn’t it be horrible to find oneself steadily and slowly getting closer and closer to zero, but at a slower and slower rate, so that actually to reach zero would literally take an infinite amount of time?  The horror of getting weaker and more depressed and more decrepit, and yet never being able to die, would be…well, quite obviously, a fate worse than death.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that such will be the fate of the universe itself on the longest of time scales, if the cosmological constant really is a constant and whatnot.  But that’s in a truly, very long time.  Hyperbole aside, I don’t imagine I’ll live long enough for that to be relevant, except as a matter of scientific curiosity.

Speaking of decrepitude, I’ve been trying to do some wider spaced pull-ups recently, rather than my usual, shoulder-width ones, because I thought it might help my back.  I think it actually may have been helping my back a bit, but unfortunately, an old injury to my left shoulder began acting up by the second iteration of those pull-ups, and has gotten worse, and that pain and soreness radiates down the whole arm in a sort of electrical feeling (not the good kind), reminiscent of “causalgia” which is a term that might not be in current use anymore.

In any case, this morning I went back to more usual width, but my shoulder is still acting up.  This isn’t too surprising; once triggered, that kind of thing can take a while to calm down.

In conclusion, my life is definitely not worth the effort.  It’s just a bad habit for me, at this point.  I don’t contribute anything of substance to anyone, probably not even to myself.  I’m stressed out to the point of near-suicidality by even minor things—like having to get up and go into the office.  But, as is often the case, bad habits are hard to break.  I mean to try, though.  I’ve been hoping for some way to wean myself off, and I still have hope for that, but I may need simply to go cold turkey***.

*Imagine what someone perhaps a century or so ago would have thought upon reading that sentence:  What?  You used your laptop to write something…a post?  And…sometimes you used a phone to write?  WHAT?

**There must be plenty of bakeries or ice cream shops or similar places that call themselves “Just Desserts”.  The sorts of people who make and sell sweets are definitely the sort to enjoy a nice pun.  I mean that as a compliment.

***Homer Simpson:  Mmmmm…turrrrkeyyy.

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How does one escape when one’s own mind is one’s persecutor?

Well, it’s Friday again, but since I’m working tomorrow, this won’t be the last blog post of this week‒unless some catastrophe happens and I’m unable to write and/or work tomorrow.  If something does happen, I hope it’s something that at least leaves me unconscious, possibly comatose, for however long it lasts.  It would be annoying to be stuck in a situation where I was, for instance, in great pain and unable to work, but still didn’t get any rest from myself.

I occasionally think about seeking out one of those experimental depression treatments, like ketamine or psilocybin or summat.  But I would be very nervous, especially about the psychedelic one.  I tend at times to have weird reactions, or at least unusual ones, to neuro-active substances, and as you may or may not have realized, my mind is not my friend.  I feel quite nervous that I would start a treatment like psilocybin and be stuck in a longish “bad trip”, which I know can literally last for hours and subjectively last interminably.

Of course, I frankly wouldn’t know where to seek out such a thing, anyway, and even if I did know, I don’t think I could force myself to go and seek it out, just on my own.  I can’t even work up the will to change the inner tube on the front tire of my bike.  I’ve been perusing electric scooters for weeks, but I’m no closer to buying one.  My ability to do anything other than my basic, daily routine is almost completely gone.

I can’t really foresee going on any trip, or doing anything fun on a weekend, such as seeing a movie, going to a bookstore, going to a restaurant, going to a zoo, or whatever.  Nothing is really any fun, anymore, anyway, so I have no motivation, no drive.  I wish I could just collapse, somehow.

I often think of the comic book version of Adam Warlock* who, when in distress, or after injury, or when needing healing or something, creates this cocoon around himself and just goes dormant for a long time.  I guess maybe some kind of sensory deprivation chamber might work like that, but again, I don’t even know where one would find such a thing near me, and I don’t think I would have the gumption to seek one out, anyway.

I don’t make things easy for myself, do I?  But then, who would make things easy for the person they most despise in the world?  It wouldn’t make sense.

I’m writing a bit slowly this morning, but that’s okay.  I always wait for a while at the bus stop, anyway, even when I leave “late”.  I would be terribly distressed if I left it to the point of barely getting to the bus on time.  That would make me feel horribly tense and uncomfortable and, frankly, angry at myself.

I always used to get to school more than an hour early, usually before most of the teachers.  That way I could just be in the place in silence for a while before anyone else showed up and began the cacophony.  Then the place at least felt, in some ways, like mine.

I do the same with work, now.  I can’t stand to arrive anything but quite early.  And I don’t like it much if other people get there too early as well, interfering with my time alone in the quiet.  But then again, I also hate when people show up late.  I really don’t make things easy, do I?  At least, the only person who suffers from all this is yours truly.  I mean, okay, occasionally I probably get grumpy, but since I don’t socialize much anyway, there are few consequences for anyone else.

For me, though, I start to feel tension build as the time approaches for the workday to begin, as people begin to arrive at the office, and they start to have conversations and interactions‒often talking to each other from clear across the room, rather than moving closer each to the others.  It’s horrible.  It’s like the shrieking of the damned, but they don’t even realize they are the damned, so it’s only other people they’re tormenting.

I’m being unfair, of course.  I am the weird one, obviously.  I am the odd one out.  No one else deserves recrimination for the fact that I’m always made uncomfortable by so many things other people do routinely without any malicious intent.

Of course, “deserves” is a silly, artificial, imaginary concept, like justice and goodness and law and money and civilization itself.  That doesn’t mean it’s all valueless, but it has no foundational, fundamental, inherent reality.

I wouldn’t say it’s a “language game”; that’s not really an accurate or useful description.  I like Yuval Noah Harari’s choice to call them all “fictions”, by which he doesn’t mean they are unreal‒a fictional story is, if you will, a real fictional story, after all, and though money is a fiction, its effects are immense‒but they are made up.  They don’t exist outside the minds of groups of humans and humanoids.

Anyway, as usual, I don’t know what point or points, if any, I might be trying to make.  I’m just writing because that’s what I do every working day.  I had thought for it to be a kind of therapy, hopefully helping treat or improve my dysthymia and depression, but I don’t think it’s doing that at all, and I’m sure many of you would concur.

Writing fiction seemed reliably to help my mood, which is consistent with Stephen King’s long-standing claim that his writing was, for him, the best therapy around.  It’s certainly ego-syntonic‒especially if, like Stephen King, you have other people who read and enjoy your work.

But I can’t seem to do that, anymore.  And I can’t seem to do music anymore, either.  I certainly haven’t fixed the E-string on the Strat.  My toe is steadily healing, at least.  It looks worse than it feels, but it is still sore.

Anyway, that’s all stuff and nonsense.  I’m at the bus stop, now, and not improving this post with further writing, so I’ll stop soon for today.  I’ll be here again tomorrow, and then Monday, then Tuesday, and so on and on, until something finally breaks me, or until‒much less likely‒some kind of epiphany or miracle happens and I get better, or perhaps I receive help from somewhere, somehow.  I don’t expect that to happen, however.  I could use it, I would probably welcome it, but it’s not going to happen based on my actions and initiative.  So I don’t have much hope for it.

Anyway, have a good weekend.

*I still haven’t seen the movie, yet, and I probably won’t go to the theater to see it, but will wait until it’s on Disney+, if I even watch it then.

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Concision, irony, illness, and a first use of Uber

I’m going to try to be a bit more concise today than I was yesterday, though concision in writing has never been my strongest point.  Still, with effort, I can do it.  After all, I pared down Unanimity by a bit over 50,000 words from its original form.  That’s right, it’s actually slightly shorter than it would have been initially, even though it still ended up being so long I could only publish it as two volumes.  I had no idea it was going to be so long when I started it—I merely had the story, which I wanted to tell, and it ended up taking that long.  I don’t know if anyone but I has even read the entire thing, but I’ve read it many times, both as part of the editing process and even once or twice since it was published.

Well, that wasn’t a very concise first paragraph, considering I was discussing the very intention to be concise.  But I like irony, so I guess that’s okay.  I’ve often thought that the song, Ironic, by Alanis Morissette, is a meta-level joke, in which the ironic part of the song is that essentially none of the examples she gives in the lyrics are actually ironic.  If she did that on purpose…wow, what an amazing artist!  Also, she was pretty brilliant when she played God in Dogma.

Okay, what else is going on?  Well, I’m still a bit under the weather, but I’m already on the upswing, physically.  I was very tired by the end of the day yesterday—much more so than usual—which made it clear to me that I really am sick, though I was already entirely clear on that fact.

Ha ha, thinking about being sick just made me sneeze twice.  Or, well*, I happened to sneeze twice right after writing that sentence.  It’s unlikely that writing about being sick was actually what triggered the sneeze, but it isn’t impossible.

So, anyway, I was very tired and still was/am sick, so I was a bit more impatient than usual when I got to the bus stop near the train station last night.  The bus’s arrival time (17 minutes after I arrived, by schedule) came and went and the MyRide thingy didn’t show its usual real-time update on when the bus would actually be there, or if the bus would actually be there.  So, after waiting another fifteen minutes, with no updates and no sign of any oncoming bus, and with lightning flashes occurring about once every ten or fewer seconds (with the thunder gradually getting a bit louder), and an early few drops of rain coming, I gave up and gave in.

I walked back to the train station and I popped open the Uber app—not necessarily in that order—and I requested a ride.  It turned out the driver had literally just dropped someone off at the train station**, and so I didn’t even have to wait the estimated two minutes.  Though I’d wasted more than half an hour at the bus stop, I still got back to the house slightly earlier than I would have had the bus arrived within five minutes of my arrival at the first stop.

It was quite a good first experience using Uber.  It’s reminiscent of my first time in Vegas, when I won $80 on my first play of a joker poker machine***, because both events were so positive and fortuitous.  I gave the driver a good rating and a good tip, and based on the profile the app gave me afterward, he’s had many similar reviews.  I don’t know if Uber has engineered the app to arrange such rapid pickups for first-time users—it seems like something that would be quite hard to manipulate—but if this is typical of how the system works, it’s something I may use again.

There certainly have been times, at the end of a long day, when I’ve looked at the app (and its competitor, Lyft) and seen how much it would cost to get one of them all the way back to the house, rather than taking the train.  There have been times when I’ve thought, “You know, it would almost be worth $45 or $50 plus tip to use it.”  Maybe someday, if I decide I need to leave early because I’m not feeling well, then I might just do that.  Still, that’s a lot of money for a commute.  It’s even a comparative lot to go from the train to the house, though that’s a lot more palatable, especially when the buses are running late.

Speaking of buses, I need to wrap this up and get heading out for the bus.  It’s payroll day, which tends to be stressful, but I did a lot of catching up on the weekly process yesterday, and once my momentum was going, I actually got a bit ahead, so it should be no worse than usual.  I hope you all have a good day, since the sort of people who read my blog are the sort of people who deserve to have a good day.

*Imagine the author of 1984 and Animal Farm introducing himself by saying, “Hi.  I’m George.  Or, well, that’s my penname.”

**I thought this sort of thing seemed possible, which is why I walked back to the train station in the first place.  It also has, by design, good pick-up/drop-off locations.

***And here is yet more of my neuro-atypia:  Not only did that not lead me to getting hooked on joker poker, but I have never played it since****.  Contrariwise, one time my ex-wife and I lost our entire allotted casino budget for a weekend—$1000—in half an hour playing blackjack, but I still enjoy playing blackjack.  I almost never do it, of course, partly because I find all the casinos down here in south Florida rather seedy, especially compared to the good Las Vegas places and Foxwoods (the place we lost the grand).

****Let’s face it, despite the fact that you can occasionally win money, the gambling video machines are never going to be as fun as playing, for instance, Tempest™ or Robotron® or Pac Man© or any of the other classic arcade games back in the day.

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I was out sick, yesterday. My apologies.

Hi there, all.  It’s Tuesday morning, not Monday; I didn’t write a blog post yesterday.  That was not because the office took yesterday off—they worked until 4pm, as it turns out—but because I was at the house fighting a respiratory virus.  It’s not a severe one—I had a bit of a low grade fever at first, but it rapidly went away*, and I just felt physically crummy, with a dry, scratchy throat and runny/stuffy nose and the like.

I’m now going in to the office, though the boss suggested that I take a couple of days off.  However, if I do take a couple of days off, then when I go back, which would be tomorrow at the latest, there would be so much on which to catch up that it would be overwhelming.  Life is overwhelming enough for me nowadays.  I don’t need to make things worse.

So, obviously, I’m still feeling physically a bit under the weather**, but I’m going to wear a mask today, and I have a batch of spares with me, in case the first one gets unusably compromised.  I actually don’t mind wearing respiratory masks.  Quite apart from having needed to wear them sometimes when I was a practicing doctor, I also like to cover and hide my face.  I don’t like my face very much.  I can entirely sympathize with Doctor Doom for not wanting to show his.  I don’t like how I look, and I don’t like who I am.

Weirdly enough, as I think I’ve noted before, my self-hatred doesn’t make me hate things that I’ve made or created.  I rather often reread my own books—recently I reread both Mark Red and Son of Man—and I listen to songs I’ve done, either covers or originals.  I probably comprise almost the complete numbers of those who have “viewed” my videos on YouTube.  I even like to look at my various drawings and the like, which I scanned long ago and saved to Google Drive, thankfully, so they weren’t completely lost along with everything I owned back when I was arrested and sent away for trying to treat people with chronic pain, but naively not recognizing the other things that were happening at the time.

I guess this is a kind of living proof that I never have done my “artwork” (if you will) to please other people—though I’m delighted when other people like my stuff, and I would be more delighted still if more people did—but have done it because it was what I liked.  I think, if there’s a story that I would like to read, but no one seems to have written it, I should write it myself.

Of course, if someone has to make a living by their arts or crafts, then they have to cater at least somewhat to other people’s tastes over their own, but I think most creative things happen because the creator just wants to create something, at some level.  Then again, I can’t exactly extrapolate the way I feel and think about things to other people—I’m thoroughly weird.  I’m not really even the same species as people around me.  At least, that’s the way it feels to me a lot of the time.

So, the company of most humans is always a bit uncomfortable, though that certainly varies depending on the human, and I also don’t find my own company particularly pleasant.  I mean, it’s often the best option I have available, for what that’s worth—just to be by myself—and I certainly prefer the quiet of solitude to the chaos of whole flanges of naked house apes ooking and shrieking and throwing their feces at each other***.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to be so curmudgeonly.  I’m just tired, and I’m sick, and I’m sick and tired of most everything.  It would be nice if I had the energy and enthusiasm to want to play music—especially to write music—and to write new fiction and all that.  Or to draw, for that matter.  But there’s only so much I can do for what is, essentially, an audience of one, especially when that one is not someone I like.

Yesterday, I saw the thumbnail of a YouTube video that was offered up to me by the algorithm, Why Do Depressed People Have Low Self-esteem?  The specific wording might not be exact, but that was basically the title.  I didn’t watch it, because part of me just thought, “Is that a joke?”  I mean, that’s part of what depression is, surely.  But I’m sure there’s more to the story than that, and I believe I marked it as a “watch later” video, but it is strange.

I am trying not to be too dismissive, though.  The YouTube algorithm has been useful at times for pointing me toward knowledge that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.  I would never have really thought about autism spectrum disorder—beyond the fact that my character, Michael Green, in Unanimity thought he might be on the spectrum—if YouTube hadn’t suggested several related videos to me.

It is interesting how such thoughtless algorithms can produce interesting insights—thoughtless in that they aren’t actually thinking, themselves, but are merely following a general pathway, like elementary particles obeying local laws of physics, and thereby given rise, in the end, to all the immense complexity of macroscopic reality.

I wish I had someone in my actual life with whom I could talk about such things, or similar subjects, but instead, I’m here on my blog, writing about it—still mainly for an audience of one, though there are other people who read it, of course, and I thank and appreciate those people—you are one of them, if you are reading this.  Thank you!

But there is no real endpoint, no point at all, to what I do from day to day, and I have no plans or goals or expectations.  It’s merely continuance, like an automated machine left behind and running in a world in which all living things have died.  The machine cranks away, mindlessly, pointlessly, no longer benefiting anyone at all, and certainly not benefiting itself.  It just keeps going until, finally, it will catastrophically break down, and there will be no one around to repair it, let alone to maintain it, or to notice that it has failed.

I can already hear the belts squeaking and the gears grinding.  The whole thing is vibrating in a way that shouldn’t be happening if it were functioning properly.  I sometimes even think I can smell smoke coming from friction in the mechanism, but that may merely be wishful thinking.

Oh, well.  Enough for today.  If you’re still with me at this point, I doubly thank you, yet again.  And I apologize.  I wish I had given you some uplifting and empowering thoughts.  Those, however, do not seem to be my strengths.  Have a good day.

*Though, given the amount of NSAIDs and acetaminophen and whatnot that I take, fevers tend to be suppressed.  That’s why, when I got COVID and my temperature went nearly to 102 F, I knew I was pretty darn sick.

**Come to think of it, it’s rare that I’m ever “over the weather”.  The last time I flew in a plane was more than twenty years ago.  I don’t think I’ve flown since before 9-11-2001.

***This is figuratively speaking, of course.  Usually.

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What should I title this blog post? Wait, I know…

Well, yesterday was seriously painful, in the literal sense and also in a more figurative sense, though the figurative pain was at least partially due to the literal pain.  I tried various postural and furniture-based changes, altered and/or tried some exercises, all sorts of things.  It’s hard to tell whether any of them did any good.  It’s also hard to tell—assuming that some or all of them did any good—which one(s) did the good, and how to tease it out.  This is, of course, why in a proper, scientific exploration of such things, one would try to change only one variable at a time, holding all the others constant.

However, when one is in soul-grinding pain while still trying to do one’s job, one tends to be willing to split away from pure scientific rigor.  At least, I am.  And I’m as committed to the notion of scientific rigor as anyone I know.

I slept reasonably well last night—for me, anyway—only waking up at about two in the morning, and being able to get back to sleep for another 35 minutes or so starting at 3:15.  That may not sound like much, but for me, it’s comparatively restful.

I also went rather off the script with respect to food yesterday.  I decided, since I was feeling so much like crap as to be barely distinguishable, I would just eat what I felt like eating, when I felt like eating it.  So, I did.  Mind you, there wasn’t all that much available, but I did order a pizza and so on, and even got a Mountain Dew® with it, something I haven’t had in certainly over a year, but probably far longer.

I’m likely to relax my dietary restrictions today as well—I really don’t feel great, but I can’t quite tell if I’m going to have another day like the previous few or several—but then, since I have this weekend off, I’m going to go back, much more strictly, to some food regulation, so to speak.  It’s easier when one doesn’t have much to do.

And, yes, I do have tomorrow off, so I won’t be writing a blog post.  I guess, technically, Monday is Memorial Day, which I only realized quite recently, but we generally work on Memorial Day at our office.  It’s a good day for sales and all that, though we often close early.  Of course, the buses and trains will be on a “Sunday” schedule, which is a minor pain, but they are on lower schedules on Saturdays, as well, and I’ve gone in to the office the last two Saturdays without difficulty.  Still, I do find myself tempted just to call out on Monday, at least if I don’t feel much better than I’ve been feeling.

Actually, if I don’t feel much better soon—at least back to my ordinary baseline, however unpleasant that both is and makes me—I feel I should call out from everything, permanently.  I’ve been back on my historically best-working antidepressant for about four or five weeks now, if my reckoning is correct (it’s not very careful, so I could be off).  It doesn’t seem to be making a huge difference, but it’s possible that it’s making some difference.  I certainly did, for a few days, pick up my guitar(s) a bit.  But then—now—I haven’t played or wanted to play for several days.

Some of that is pain related, and a lot of it is depression related, and it’s also just a feeling of pointlessness about playing.  I had thought about working on a cover of Ashes to Ashes, as I’d mentioned here (I think), a sort of sequel to my own cover of A Space Oddity, as Ashes to Ashes was for David Bowie.  But at least for right now, I don’t see that happening.

I don’t see much happening.  The farthest ahead I can really think is laundry on Sunday—will the washer and dryer be clear for me in the morning or not—and then whether or not I’m still going to be in pain on Monday, Memorial Day.  After that, as Paul McCartney sang in You Never Give Me Your Money (and I sang in my “bad cover” thereof), I “see no future…”  Though I will pay rent on the first.  I may even pay it slightly early, because it takes a load of tension away, since then I don’t have to worry that I’m going to forget.  That’s about it.  That’s as exciting as life is for me, which is to say, it’s not very.

I don’t know what would help put the wind back in my sails, or if that’s even possible—what might renew my interest in writing fiction, or playing music, or even writing and making songs.  I don’t really have anyone that I hang out with, since I only really socialize at work—but, then again, I don’t know that I would want to hang out with much of anyone I could possibly encounter near me.  I don’t have much in common with most humans, and that fact seems to become more overpowering all the time.

It would be nice to do some good in the world again, and to have a friend or similar that actually shares interests, but it seems unlikely.  Most people I’ve encountered—or so it feels—seem to want to take advantage, or else find me too unpleasant to stay friends with (I can’t blame them), or have their own stuff going on.  And, frankly, I’m rotten at socializing anyway, even with people I like.

Even on-line socializing, which I briefly did a bit of in the past, has become tense and unpleasant for me most of the time.  Leaving comments—whether on a video or a blog, or whatever, let alone replying to a tweet or a Facebook post—fills me almost immediately with a good deal of tension and anxiety.  I fear that someone will engage with my comment and I’ll have to get involved in some kind of discussion or argument, or else willfully ignore it, which will feel rude.

I know, it’s  a trap of my own making, or at least of my own nature.  I certainly can’t blame the other people.  But that doesn’t make it cease to be a trap.

Ah, well, it really doesn’t matter.  When I’m in a lot of pain, I’m not interested in socializing, anyway.

And now, I need to start heading for the bus stop, so I’m going to wrap this up for today.  I won’t write a post tomorrow, and if I don’t write one Monday, it will mean either that I decided (or needed) to take that day off, or something else has prevented me from writing.  I guess, if I don’t write any more posts at all after that, you’ll be able to infer at least that something relatively drastic happened.

But if I return no later than Tuesday…well, you’ll know that I’ve returned, at least for the moment.  I’m not sure which outcome I prefer.

Anyway, have a good holiday weekend, those of you who live in the US and are celebrating.

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A hump is just a dip when viewed from the other direction

It’s Wednesday, now.

At some level, I feel as though that’s all that’s worth writing about today.  But of course, if people only wrote what was worth writing about, most of the material online—including the online versions of venerable print media like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the various other big newspapers and magazines in all their incarnations, and many books—would never exist.  While that often seems like it might be a good thing overall, when I think of the matter soberly, I think that’s probably not true.

While it is true that, especially in the era of anti-social media, much of what is written in the world is at best noise, at worst anti-information, I suspect that reducing the overall amount of it wouldn’t improve the net amount of good or useful stuff.  It would just shrink everything in proportion.

I suspect that most of everything that’s ever been written or said (or drawn or sung or what have you) is probably forgettable and pointless.  But the way the forgettable is sifted from the memorable is…by memory.  I don’t just mean storage, obviously.  Somewhere out there, I’m sure one can find some stored version of a significant fraction of all that’s been written, for instance, in the twentieth century and later, and even on back into, say, the sixteenth century, though we’ve lost more of the latter, I’m sure.  Nevertheless, back then, when writing was not as easy as it is nowadays, there was probably a greater pre-writing filter.  But even so, it’s only a tiny fraction of the stuff then written that survives, in recollection and in use, to the modern day.

For instance, I’ve read at least one play by Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and although it was good, it wasn’t great.  But, then again, not all of Shakespeare’s stuff was truly great.  Some of it survives just because it was Shakespeare.  But the truly great Shakespeare stuff—well, wow!  There’s a reason people are still reading it after four hundred years, and even still making movies of it.  It may be that even greater writers’ works have been lost entirely, but that doesn’t seem as likely as the possibility that the work of more mediocre writers has been lost.

Anyway, I don’t know just at what I’m getting.  Certainly, I don’t expect that my own thoughts or writings will survive me.  They probably won’t even survive as long as I will, which is a rather sad thought, and one that I hope is wrong.  Still, I don’t really expect that I’ll be some newer instantiation of the old Herman Melville, Moby Dick situation, in which a work is barely noticed during the author’s life, but is later considered one of the greatest works of its era’s literature (especially if you leave out all the trivia about whaling…of which, by the way, there is very little in my writing).

Even if it turns out that my fiction and/or my non-fiction writings not only survive me but endure into the centuries of the future, it’s not as though it will do me any good.  I’ll be dead either way, and the world will almost certainly be better off—and certainly no worse off—for that fact, even if it happens today or tomorrow.

Of course, today I’m going in to the office, because it’s payroll day, and so I need to be there no matter what.  Though yesterday, during the part of the day when I was feeling most depressed and stressed and despondent and miserable—you know, most of the day—I considered just not showing up, not coming in, not doing anything ever again.  I’m not really much more enthusiastic this morning, but I don’t like to leave people in the lurch, not when I’ve allowed them to depend on me even to a minor degree.

Of course, letting people down in the long run is something at which I seem to be exceptionally skilled—or perhaps “talented” is a better word.  I certainly seem to have a knack for disappointing the people I love the most.  I suppose that I may also have a knack for disappointing people about whom I don’t give a flying shit, but, well, in that case it doesn’t exactly weigh on me much.  Let strangers and would-be users be disappointed in me.  I don’t really care.  I’m disappointed in myself, too, but I don’t like myself anyway, so I don’t really care what that asshole thinks about how much I’ve let him down.

But I do feel horrible about having let down my parents and my ex-wife, and especially my children.  Many of my strongest feelings and memories are those of loss and horror when those people have found that I was not worth keeping around in their lives…not too close, anyway.  I can’t actually blame them; it’s hard to live with someone who has chronic pain and dysthymia, let alone (apparently) some form of neurodevelopmental disorder.  But, of course, I disappointed and alienated people before the chronic pain, and sometimes when the dysthymia was not fully active and/or hadn’t dipped down into its many occasions of full-blown depression.  As for the other, well, if it’s there, it’s always been there and always will be there.  I don’t know how much it’s contributed to me being an allergen to people (metaphorically), and it’s a bit of a moot point, since there’s not much I can do about it.

Anyway, I’m very tired.  I don’t even know what I’ve written this morning, or why, but I have to go in to the office because it’s payroll day.  We’ve had a prosperous and productive few weeks, but for me that just tends to mean that things have been busier and I’ve had more work to do, and—worse—there has been more noise and chaos and more interruption in routine work.  This doesn’t help much when I’m already frankly veering even more than usual toward violent self-destruction.

But I can’t do anything much about that except try to continue and try not to inconvenience and be a bother and a detriment to the people around me if I can help it.  That’s about as high as my aspirations go anymore, and I don’t think I succeed at many of even those not-so-lofty goals very often.

Oh, well.  I hope this will all be over soon.  I need this all to be over soon.  I want everything (from my point of view) to be over soon.  I can’t tolerate it all much anymore.  At least it feels that way, though who knows what my breaking point actually is?  I’ve felt many times before that I was approaching it, but it hasn’t happened yet.

It has to be there, though.  I’m finite, I’m mortal, so there is a point at which I will no longer be able to endure, and I will finally and catastrophically and permanently break.  I’m kind of looking forward to it.