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This is my brain, on.

I’ll bet you wish it could be turned off sometimes.  I know I do.

I’m writing this post on my laptop computer today, and at the very least, it’s going to be easier on my thumbs.

I was just about to sing the praises of MS Word, because it looked as though this new page on Word was going to start with the Calibri font instead of that new, Craptos font they’ve made their default because someone somewhere fellated just the right person.  Unfortunately, that was just the program catching up with itself, and the font changed to the new default, and I had to change it back manually.

Honestly, if anyone out there invents time travel to the past and figures out that it can change our timeline (I doubt it), then please, go back in time and interfere with the parents of each and every person involved in the decision to change the base font and in the design of the new font, so that all those people are never even conceived.

You see, I’m being generous.  I just want those people never to have been.  I don’t want them to suffer.

Actually, I do want them to suffer.  I want to torture and burn each and every one of them, to break their bodies with baseball bats and steel pipes and to wash their faces with broken glass.  But I know that’s a bit excessive, so I’m willing to settle for erasing their existence completely.

Such are the better angels of my nature.  This is me being kind.  Thanos was a pussy.

Okay, well, now that I’ve gotten a little bit of the madness out of my system, and all without hurting any actual people, I hope I can go on and write a somewhat sensible blog post.

I’ve already had some frustrations this morning, not least of which was waking up by about 2 am after less than four hours of sleep*.  Other things have happened as well, to do with transportation and so on, but I won’t get into it all.  I would come across as a truly disgruntled curmudgeon and/or just an asshole.  I’m not saying those would not be accurate descriptions of me, and sometimes even comparatively kind ones, but I would rather not come across that way if I can help it.

I haven’t received my report from my autism assessment yet, of course.  Well, not “of course”.  If something is supposed to arrive within a week, that means it could take less than a week, which this would be, if it had already arrived.  Be that as it may, it has not arrived.  There are three more days in that week (and in this month, it turns out), but I would of course rather it arrive sooner than later.  That’s not something about which I have a choice, however.  I put the ball in their court and they are the ones to return it.

Is that a tennis metaphor, the whole “ball in your court” cliché?  I suppose it could refer to volleyball or other “court” sports (but not badminton, since they do not use balls, they use shuttlecocks—why do these terms lend themselves so well to sophomoric jokes?).  I guess it could even have something to do with jurisprudence, but I don’t know what one would be doing with a ball in a court of law.  Maybe it originally referred to a masked ball, or even a formal ball, for all the lawyers and judges, and we’ve all been misunderstanding the metaphor as referring to a physical object, a ball, such as are used in many sports.

I doubt it.

Try not to be too bothered by my nonsense and gibberish.  I’ve always been mad, and I think I’m probably going madder.  That feels like it should be “more mad” but I think “madder” is more proper.  I don’t know for sure.  It doesn’t really madder much, though.  Ha ha.

Anyway, I’ve already reached my target word count for this bouncing bullshit, so I’ll call it quits.  I know I’m joking about it, but my mind really is falling apart.  Or, rather, I guess it’s more that it’s decaying, it’s rotting from within, it’s rusting, it’s crumbling, it’s finally succumbing to all of its design and manufacturing flaws.

I guess I was just a lemon, after all.  Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of lemon with which you can make lemonade.  Sorry about that.

*It’s proper to use “less than” here instead of “fewer than” even though hours are, in a sense, discrete, countable units, because I am referring to an overall measure of continuous time—an integral amount of sleep if you will—and I am giving an estimate, rounded up to what is perhaps the nearest whole hour.  It’s rather akin to saying you have drawn less than three buckets of water from a well; though buckets are discrete, water is continuous, so to speak.  On the other hand, it’s not sensible to say “there were less than ten people in the room,” for instance.  People are not a continuous variable.  They come in quanta, if you will, in indivisible** chunks.

**Well…you can divide people into smaller bits—much as I would like to do to the people behind the Aptos font in Microsoft Office apps—but then they cease to be people pretty quickly.

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“…my mind is on the blink.”

It’s Monday.  I almost don’t know what more needs to be said.

I’m probably going to make this relatively short, because I’m having quite a bit of pain in the bases of my thumbs as I write this on my smartphone.  I took three aspirin* already this morning, but it certainly hasn’t kicked in.  If it’s not going to help my pain, I wish at least the anti-platelet action would make me have a massive GI bleed or something.  I know, it’s kind of gross, but it’s one of those things where no one can claim you’re malingering or lazy or whatever.  If you’re vomiting blood, only a fool could say, “It’s all in your head.”

Speaking of it being all in your head, though, it’s of course a worry that aspirin could cause a hemorrhagic stroke instead of a GI bleed.  Obviously, since my brain is my greatest strength, I would prefer not to have that happen.

On the other hand, it’s not as though my brain is my friend or anything.  It’s where my greatest difficulties lie, as well as my strengths, and those difficulties dominate most of my days and‒to say the least‒my nights.  I’m depressed and “anxious” and angry and pessimistic, and I cannot sleep properly, and I am in constant pain, and I also have all these attributes that led me to have my assessment done last Friday to try to determine if I have the second kind of ASD or not.  So I can’t exactly feel too worried about my brain.  I don’t even wear a helmet when I ride my bicycle.  If I get brain damaged, it seems like the least my brain deserves.

I’m tired.  I’m so tired.

I know there are people out there who are able to try to put the best possible spin on events, and who can honestly say that they love themselves, and that’s great.  I envy and admire that.  And I have tried very hard to develop those habits, through self-hypnosis and autosuggestion and meditation and even pharmacology, but I have not been able to alter my programming so far.  Maybe I need a factory reset or something.

Anyway, I’m supposed to receive my report about my autism assessment within a week, so I should have it by this Friday at the latest.  I can’t say I’m not nervous about it.

Well, I can say it, I guess.  “I’m not nervous about it.”  See?  But saying it doesn’t make it so, no matter how loudly you say it, or how often you repeat it, or what oaths you proclaim, or what authority you cite.  It doesn’t even matter if you really believe it, even if you believe it so fervently that you’re willing to die for the belief.

If that were any measure of truth, then suicide bombers would be more likely to be right than Nobel Prize winning scientists, and such people are not more likely to be right.  They are almost certainly wrong about everything important that led them to blow themselves up.  In fact, certainty of anything beyond literal mathematical and deductive, logical conclusions is the hallmark of a mind less likely to be right than would be a mind that is full of doubt and willing to criticize itself.

So, I am nervous, but there’s nothing I can do for now but wait.  In the meantime, I really should start writing on my laptop computer again.  This phone writing is losing what charm it had, since it’s making my thumbs hurt worse over time.

With that said, I’m going to end the first draft of this now.  I don’t have more to say that I’m sure I haven’t said elsewhere, before, probably eight-thousand times.  I tend to repeat myself a lot.

I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Sometimes I feel that the plural of aspirin should be “aspirins”, but I think it’s generally just “aspirin”, like “deer” and “fish”** being both singular and plural.

**Sometimes one sees the word “fishes”, but that is generally used, I believe, when one is discussing more than one kind of fish.

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It’s not the size of the blog post, it’s what you do with it

Well, it’s Saturday, and here I am writing a post of sorts, which means I am working today and‒of course‒I am still alive, at least by some definitions of the word.  I don’t think I could write if I were not alive.

I’m not going to make this very long today, since I’m quite fatigued.  I had my assessment yesterday.  It wasn’t any kind of ordeal or anything, but I was quite nervous.  I don’t have any idea what my results will be.  Well, okay, at some level they’re just going to be either positive or negative, but I can’t give any kind of objective assessment of the probabilities.  I’m too much in the middle of it, so I’m disrupted by my emotions.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see what the outcome is.  I don’t know what I’ll do (if anything) if it’s positive and I really don’t know what I will do if it’s negative.

As for other things, I don’t know.  I haven’t been walking really in the last couple of days, except of course basic getting around a room or something.  I’ve been having a lot of pain in my joints and as always my back.  I also haven’t played guitar in a while.  I guess it’s good that I didn’t buy a new acoustic, huh?  Anyway, with the evaluation, I spent more money than I usually do, so I don’t need the added expense.

I don’t really have much else to say right now, I think.  Maybe I’ll add some more in the edit, but as far as I’m concerned, the first draft is over.  Have a good weekend if you can.

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Add title, stir until no lumps remain

Well, it’s Friday, after a foreshortened week (for me) but I still feel exhausted.  I’m scheduled to work tomorrow, but I’m not sure whether or not we will open the office; there don’t seem to be that many people who are going to be there, and apparently last week only one person showed up.  We shall see.  For business purposes, I hope we do well; for rest purposes, I hope we stay closed; and for my purposes…well, I have no useful purpose, so I just want to go to sleep and stay that way.

Today I have my autism assessment at around lunch time, and I’m at least a bit nervous.  I don’t enjoy meeting new people at the best of times*, but I think this is important.  I filled out all the paperwork and whatnot, which took quite a while for one of the portions, and there was another form my sister filled out, though I don’t know the contents thereof.

I honestly don’t know what to expect.  I also don’t know for sure what effect the results will have on me, positive or negative (meaning the “test result” not its effect on me, though that is certainly important).

Meanwhile, I’m trying to do a little promotion of my work via the various social media on which I have more recently become “active”, though that’s a relative term, of course.  I’m also rereading some of my books, just to try to see if there’s any hope at all of getting back to writing fiction.  If people actually showed any interest in it or shared it or read any of it, it would be a lot easier to be enthusiastic.  I just recently finished The Chasm and the Collision, which I still think is quite a good “fantasy” adventure**.  And now I’m rereading Son of Man, which I’m liking a lot again.  It’s an oddly intimate story, given the stakes involved in it.

I really wish I could get word out about my books to more people.  I really think there are plenty of readers who might enjoy them.  I think they’re pretty good stories, and they are pretty well written.

I also think my music is decent.  I know the production quality isn’t up to professional standards, but then again, I recorded the stuff using USB mics and practice amps and whatnot in the back storage room off the office, and I mixed it using free software that I had to figure out as I went along.  Considering that, I think my music is pretty good.

Anyway, if anyone reading this has any kind of following and is interested, it’d be great if you could share the links I share to this, and to my books and my music and so on.  I know I don’t have any right to ask for such things, but if the mood strikes you, it would be greatly appreciated.

It’s very weird to me that this blog is probably the most popular thing that I do.  I of course make no income from it.  I suppose I could set up a Patreon account and try to make money that way, but it’s hard for me to imagine someone paying to read this blog.  Also, I don’t have any idea what extra benefits I would give to Patreon supporters.

It probably all is just a series of exercises in even short-term futility, let alone accomplishing anything durable.  The world will little note nor long remember my words or my existence.  Even my kids would not notice much if I were to disappear at this very instant.  It certainly would have no significant impact on their futures.

“All is vanity” as is proclaimed in Ecclesiastes***.  Or as the Buddha said of a particularly painful kidney stone, “this too shall pass”.

I know, that’s a stupid joke.  But I’m a stupid person, so I guess it’s par for the course.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day today.  If I go to work tomorrow, I will probably write a post.  If not, I almost certainly shall not.  But no matter what, I hope you all have a good weekend.

*Well, at average times, anyway.  I’m not even sure what “the best of times” means for me.  I suspect that, at such a time, I would be at my best, and meeting new people would be unthreatening or at least easily tolerable.

**I’ve said it many times before, CatC is technically science fiction, since nothing that happens in it is “supernatural” in character.

***See, I’ve read the Bible, parts of it even in Hebrew, unlike most of the IgnoraMaga people who are nominally Christian nationalists, a flagrantly non-historical movement that relies upon the idiocy of millions of under informed people.

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O, you must blog your rue with a difference!

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday of course.  If you don’t know why I would say “of course” after my “Hello and good morning”, then you need to read more of my blog!

I recommend going back as far as you can; I certainly ought to have posts going back to, I don’t know, at least 2015.  For a while I just wrote weekly posts‒I was writing books and short stories and sometimes writing and recording music some of that time‒but then in more recent years I released one every workday.  Or perhaps you could say one escaped every workday.

That means…well, let’s do the figuring:  5.5 days a week (average) for 52 weeks is 286 days of a given year (roughly), and since I write an average of perhaps roughly 1000 words a blog post, then in a given year you have available about 280,000 words of mine to allow into your head.

You’ve already begun.

This means that there are multiple millions of my words out there, available for your imbibement, if you include my books and my blogs.  I really have written quite a lot.

It is from reading my blogs that you will probably rather quickly develop an understanding of why I said “of course” above.  But, of course (ha ha), reading my words, taking in my thoughts, can be terribly detrimental to your mental health, like exposure to mercury in tuna or to lead in car exhaust or to radon in your basement.  Or perhaps it might even be as bad as reading De Vermis Mysteriis, or even Al Azif (the original title of the Necronomicon).

Mind you, it’s unlikely to be as dramatic as what the stories depict happening when people read the above books, but then again, perhaps that’s worse.  After all, the initial infection with HIV is not usually terribly dramatic (sometimes there’s a mononucleosis-like syndrome, sometimes there’s nothing much at all), and Hepatitis B and/or C can be even more subtle.  But the long-term effects of those infections, if untreated, are terrible, and there is no known treatment for infestation with my thoughts.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

Like a retrovirus, my words are not as aggressively infectious as the common colds and coronaviruses and even the influenzas of social and other media.  But such loud viral spreads and “infections” tend to be very self-limited and acute.  They can (and do) sometimes destroy particularly susceptible people (I’m sure you can think of some) but for the most part, they come and go like the hula hoop or pole sitting*.

If it takes hold, my stuff is not too likely just to fade away into a mildly amusing memory of youthful or not-so-youthful foolishness.  My stuff will gnaw away at you like black mold and dry rot, like rust that slowly claims even mighty battleships, like erosion that wears down mountains, like a retrovirus that triggers lymphoma.  It’s terrifying.  And, of course, you have already been exposed, so it may already be too late for you.

Perhaps I should post a disclaimer at the beginning of every entry:  warning‒reading this writer’s words may be dangerous to your mental health.  Although, that might effectively be a sort of perverse advertising, like suggesting to people that they snowboard down this particular slope at their own risk, and we cannot be responsible for the outcome if you choose to do it.  The more humble and prudent people might heed the warning.  But the more daring, those who thrive on excitement, might be more inclined to dive right into my blog.

I guess such people would receive what they deserve.  For there is no excitement here, as such (though my stories can be relatively exciting).  Here there is only dark thought, sometimes disguised as humor or whimsy or curiosity or something else, for I cannot write what I don’t have inside, and as far as I can tell, all that exists within me now is darkness.

I guess that’s not anything really new.  I’ve always been dark and largely detrimental by nature.  I do, after all, have a subject heading for this blog that reads “My heroes have always been villains”***.  I’m a mutant grown from a mutant source.  I guess that’s how all new infections come into being.  They are not created ex nihilo, because nothing is****.

Well, it’s too late for you now.  Hopefully you won’t have too virulent a reaction, but I cannot be responsible, except in the broadest of senses, for whatever the outcome may be.

TTFN

*Just to be clear, all the discussion of infectious diseases (viruses specifically) is metaphorical.  It may not be necessary to point this out to most of you‒it probably isn’t‒but there are always those people who are metaphor-impaired, and we should strive to be patient with and supportive of such disadvantaged people.  Who would choose to be so impaired?  No one who knew what they were missing.  But, alas, such people do not know what they are missing.  It can break your heart, if you let it**.

**You probably shouldn’t let it.  If your heart is functioning properly, you should try to preserve and encourage its health.

***That’s a play on the old Willy Nelson song My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.

****The only possible exception being everything.

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“I’ve seen that road before”

Well, I’ve already walked about 5 miles this morning‒that’s the distance from the house to the train station.  I gave myself a break yesterday, since I had exercised pretty seriously for 4 days before that, but it seemed a shame not to take advantage of at least the slight improvement in my condition over the past several days.  I considered biking, which would have taken about a third as much time as walking, but I just get nervous when I’m biking.

No matter how much I do it‒and there have been times when I did it a lot‒biking always feels profoundly unnatural and uncomfortable to me, and I’m always worried about getting a flat tire or having some kind of accident, like the time I flipped over on a bike and fractured my right scapula.  I also worry about locking the bike up at the train station, because even if I secure it thoroughly, with the two thick cables and the U-lock that I have, it can still be vandalized.

At least with walking, there is no serious maintenance other than maintaining my body, and to that end I have spandex braces on both ankles and my left knee, and these seem to be helpful.  My boots are good quality, so they’re not going to give out all of a sudden (like even a good bike tire can do) and I’m trying hard to keep from exacerbating my underlying arthroses‒thus the spandex.

My feet and ankles and knees are less troubled now than they were on Monday, and if I can keep this up, they should adapt more and more, asymptotically approaching some optimal configuration.

It didn’t hurt‒so to speak‒that I woke up at about 2 am today, and after a while decided I might as well just get up, get ready, and walk the 5 miles to the train.  It wasn’t as though I was going to be late, just later than I usually am.

Yesterday at work was pretty stressful, and I felt very tense, especially for the first part of the day, when a few people asked how I was.  I mean, my boss called it a vacation, but it was not that.  It was an emergency mental health break, and it was far from adequate, though it did provide some help.

I like to say that I don’t need a vacation, I need a dirt vacation, which is like a dirt nap but longer, if that’s even possible.

I finished filling out the pre-appointment questionnaires for my autism assessment this Friday, and now all I can do is wait.  I’ve not really done a video appointment before; I’m not sure that I will like it.  Or, rather, I’m not sure how natural it will feel to me.  I mean, I guess it really isn’t “natural” in a certain sense of the word.  But from another point of view, it is natural, because everything is natural.  Anything that actually exists is part of nature.  Nothing unnatural exists, not can it exist.

I intend, at least half-heartedly, to walk back from the train station this evening.  This would mean that, even if I get a lift to the station from work, I would (will) have walked about 11 miles today.  That’s something of a long distance, though it’s not as far as I walked Monday, and then I only took three 19-minute breaks, whereas today I have the train ride(s) and, of course, work in between the two main legs of the journey.

I want to get to the point where I’m fit (and thin) enough that my joints and so on are no longer bothered by the walking, but have adapted well enough that I can walk indefinitely.  Of course, it would be nice also to be able to do a little jogging now and then.  And if I have trouble, I can always hop on one of those horses that wishes turn into and which beggars ride.

I am also receiving a pair of “trek poles” today, which are being delivered to the office.  I’m hoping these will help me avoid overtaxing my lower body and will make walking more of a total body workout.  We’ll see.  I may hate using them.  I may love using them.

The latter would obviously be nice, because then I would be more inclined to stick with my “program” and keep exercising regularly.  I’d like to get used to it all at least before the weather down here gets truly hot and humid.  I can readily handle that if I’m already in shape, but if not, it just makes things more difficult.

I sound relatively optimistic, at least for me, this morning, don’t I?  Perhaps I have already begun to develop some of that “runner’s” high‒or walker’s high in this case.  I used to get that in spades when I ran longish distances.  By the end of my runs, I felt like a superhero.

We’ll see if I ever get that feeling again, or any other truly positive feelings like joy, friendship, love, enthusiasm, positive anticipation…what have you.  Or will I just need to take that dirt vacation after all?  I suppose I can only wait and see.

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“Pull me out of the air crash…”

Well, it’s been a short while since I posted here.  I intended‒vaguely‒to write a post on Friday and then Monday (which was yesterday), but I had a surprise situation happen that I haven’t really discussed with anyone yet, though I might have mentioned it on Threads.

It seems at least some of my underlying distress was evident to some people at work‒I certainly know that I’ve been feeling like I’m coming apart at the seams, and at times in between the seams.  So, on Thursday morning, my boss somewhat quietly came to me and “suggested” that I take a bit of time off.  He suggested 5 days, but if I had come back tomorrow, there would be too much backed up work, so I got it down to 4 days (plus Thursday afternoon).

He said he could tell that I was really getting stressed out and irritable, and that I needed a break; I hadn’t taken any non-sick time off since my mother died.  In and of itself, this was truly kind of him, and that’s completely in character.  On the other hand, he doesn’t understand me all that well.  It’s hard to blame him; I’m a weirdo, after all.

Anyway, he suggested all sorts of absurd things, like getting a hotel room on the beach, drinking cocktails, getting laid, and so on.  Imagine that:  me getting laid on short notice!  I wouldn’t have the comfort level with strangers even to pay to have sex with someone, let alone to pick up or be picked up.  When he made those suggestions, I started to giggle hysterically‒it was a sound that worried and sort of even frightened me‒and I had to suppress it pretty quickly, because if I didn’t, I knew I was going to start to cry.  In any case, I left the office at noon and went back to the house.

As for the beach…

Well, I did do some biking, trying to get used to riding so I could do more, and after riding around the local area a total of about 9 miles on Friday, I decided on Saturday to ride out to the beach and (of course) back, about six miles each way.  It was quite a ride for only my second day back on the bike, but I managed it.  Then I walked down to the beach and saw that at least every human in the western hemisphere was there, so there was no way I was going to remain for long.

I didn’t bring beach gear anyway, having no intention of swimming.  The waves on the Atlantic coast make swimming at the beach there irritating.  The beaches on the Gulf of Mexico are much more pleasant.  Also, I’m about as fond of sand as is Anakin Skywalker.

So, I stopped at a 7-11 for some Gatorade, drank it, and rode back.  Then, on Sunday I biked to the train station and back, which is only about 10 total miles, but it was harder than the day before, probably because I hadn’t fully recovered.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I took a very long, 12-mile walk.  I wore spandex braces on my ankles and my left knee, and these seem to have helped a lot.  I do have a minor blister and a half on my left foot, but otherwise there were no real ill effects.

I probably look as though I partied in some fashion, because I am pretty sunburned.  That’s okay; for some reason, sunburn doesn’t really hurt me much.

So, anyway, I at least got some exercise.  I bought junk/comfort food for a few meals (deliberately) but even my old comfort foods are becoming unappetizing.  That would be okay with me.  In fact, yesterday I ate only a total of around 1000 calories, despite my long walk, because I just wasn’t hungry.  I didn’t even finish all that I “cooked” myself for dinner yesterday.

Being off from work has been at least somewhat fruitful for me, in this at least:  that I have worked on improving my physical condition and have tested my endurance a bit.  Otherwise really, what mostly happened was a harsh, undiluted confrontation with just how empty my life is.

Work is in some ways the most positive part of my current existence; I have to be productive to be worthy of staying alive, and I can interact with my coworkers in ways that are couched in work-related situations.  It is far from fully positive; the noise alone is terribly frustrating.  But then again, I’m pretty much a net negative wherever I am, so it’s hard for me to be judgmental.

When I am at the house, I am fully immersed in how alone I am*.  And things like being at the beach just cement that even more for me.  I do not feel like the same species as everyone else out there.  I don’t know what I am or should be‒I’ve had great past success in all the ways I thought were success, but that all just blew up in my face in the end.

Honestly, I was more than half hoping for a heart attack or some other health crisis or life-threatening occurrence while I was biking and walking over this surprise long weekend.  Perhaps it would have been good to be hit by a car.  One thing I did note was that there are a lot of tall buildings with balconies down along the beach.  That’s something at least a bit interesting.  The bridge over the intercoastal, unfortunately, is rather low there, so it’s not much use.

In all honesty, speaking as a physician about myself, I think what I needed was not a “vacation”.  What on Earth would such as I do on a solitary vacation other than be solitary?  Instead, I would probably recommend that I be hospitalized, if that were available, or at least get some intensive kind of treatment.  But of course, I don’t have insurance, and whatever my boss might think about my finances, I don’t have the wherewithal to pay for much of any medical or psychiatric care.  I also don’t have the mental wherewithal to seek out any such help.

I am finally getting an autism assessment this Friday, and I’m slightly anxious about it.  I fear that it’s going to be utterly negative, and that I’m not autistic, I’m just a defect.

I do find that, even when I try to lurk around autism based sites and feeds and so on, I feel that I still do not fit in with any of them.  Maybe if I get assessed and it’s positive, I will feel differently.  I don’t know.

In any case, I am back to work today, and if I survive until tomorrow, I will punish you all with another stupid blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*I did have a very nice phone call with my sister on Sunday night.  That’s always enjoyable.

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I could a blog unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course‒Valentine’s Eve, if you will.  I don’t mean to imply that every Thursday is Valentine’s Eve (which would imply that every Friday is Valentine’s Day).  No, no.  For the sake of any future archaeologists who might be trying to piece together tattered bits of our civilization, among which is this blog post*, I’ll point out that Valentine’s Day falls on February 14th (every year, without even any breaks!), and today is February 13th.  I’ll also point out that I am probably the only one who would think of it as Valentine’s Eve.

As you may be able to tell, I have nothing about which to write, today.  Don’t worry (as if you would), that won’t stop me from writing.  But I am distracted by mental exhaustion and rather severe pain that’s been bothering me and exacerbating my depression all week.  I know that my depression is not dependant on or caused by my chronic pain‒I know this because it predates it by a good twenty years‒but Batman knows it doesn’t help.

I mean, think about it:  you have dysthymia (aka chronic depression, with dips into full-on major depression), probable undiagnosed ASD with all its associated difficulties, you had a congenital heart defect (also called an ASD!) requiring open-heart surgery at 18, and now you have chronic back pain from a disk rupture/tear and “failed back surgery syndrome” for about 20 years (so every day for 20 years has been dominated by pain), and your career is wrecked, you’ve been to prison, you have no social life, no friends (outside of work), no romantic attachments for more than a dozen years (after having been divorced after your marriage of 15 years and then having only one, short and ultimately rather catastrophic, relationship after that) and you strive for self-improvement‒which you stubbornly keep trying to do, because you’re stupid that way‒but each time run into the barriers and obstacles and quicksand of your mood disorder, chronic pain, and probable “neurodivergence”, sending you what feels like three steps backward for every one you took forward.  Why would you not want to give up?

What, other than foolhardy stubbornness (and literally mindless biological forces), could drive someone to keep going and keep trying when there is no point, no goal, no reward, no aspirations, and no significant amount of even transient joy (though there is some)?

Whatever it is, it’s associated with such a high degree of tension that I cannot even sleep at night without waking frequently and early as if I were a soldier in the jungles of wartime Vietnam or something.  It’s really stupid.  I’m very irritated by and with myself.

But I have not yet been able to find effective solutions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t any‒the potential solution space might just be very large, and the subspace of workable solutions much smaller‒but it also doesn’t give any reason to be convinced that there are effective solutions.  There may be no answers, there may be no “right” way to go.

Oh, well.  What was I writing about…or, rather, what was it about which I was writing?  I don’t know.  Valentine’s Day, future archeologists (perhaps virtual beings?) trying to find clues to the attributes of our civilization, the pointlessness of continuing to live without connection or companionship or activities, no full escape from pain (ever), no good nights’ sleeps, all these weird things were matters about which I wrote above.

Enough.  I’m annoyed by myself; I can’t even imagine how annoyed you readers must be.  Really, I can’t.  My apologies.  I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish.  Nothing, really, and possibly nothingness***.  But I have nothing else to write right now.  I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*This, of course, raises the question of how future archaeologists would even be able to see my blog without having already understood much of our civilization.  After all, unlike paper artifacts such as books and magazines, every written thing on the internet and web requires functioning computer systems, including processors, storage, internet protocols, languages from html to Java, C+, Python, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, I don’t know what, as well as all the necessary hardware.  This is something people who say stupid things like “online is forever” don’t seem to grasp:  if we lose electrical power or some other process interferes with electronics, all the data on the internet is useless.  Hard copy books can decay of course, but that is much slower; they are much more self-contained stores of information, much less contingent.  That’s something about which to think, as the world approaches the brink**.

**Yes, I did that on purpose.

***That was a deliberate sentence fragment, used to convey a sense of drama and intensity.  I don’t know if it worked.

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Some of this is metaphorical

I’m back on the smartphone to write today’s post, and I’m on my way into the office quite early.  I’ve already been awake for hours, but there was truly no point in getting up so far ahead of time, so I just laid around*.

I did get a bit of extra rest, because yesterday I left the office early, after only about a quarter of a day.  I didn’t really get any extra sleep, but at least I decompressed a little.  This means, however, that I am well behind on preparing the payroll, so today is going to be irritating.  It must be done, though, and no one else is going to do it.

I guess it’s good to be useful.

Yesterday, my boss suggested that I ought to take about three or so days off sometime, and do something fun.  But I just shrugged, feeling worse for having to say it, and asked him, “Where would I go?  And what would I do?”  In my head, I added, “There isn’t anything.  Or anyone.”  I really do nothing for fun, and certainly there is no one with whom I do anything fun, or even just hang out.

On the other hand, I don’t want just to hang out with someone and do something.  Trying to do some random activity with some random person would be more stressful than doing nothing.  My tastes and my personality are at least somewhat esoteric.  I wish I could find another member of my species.  But I fear perhaps that I’m just a mutant or a hybrid or something, and there is no other member of my species.

Certainly I feel no real sense of kinship with any of the major figures in any of the political parties.  The most vocal people on both the left and the right are flagrant idiots, and most of their statements** are, as I think I said yesterday or the day before, “idiocy on performance enhancers”.

The specific idiocies tend to be different on the two sides of the current spectrum.  The most extreme people are as different as Hitler and Stalin‒very different in their ideological dogmas, but all too similar in all the ways that count the worst.

Never trust anyone who is sure they know what’s right, because it’s pretty clear that no one does.  And people who believe that they know what’s right‒not just for themselves, but for everyone‒are capable of committing grotesque atrocities, all the while fumigating their self-image with the fact that they have good intentions.

You know what was built with good intentions, right?

My inclinations tend toward classical liberalism, à la John Stuart Mill et al.  I have sympathy for the most sensible of progressives, and I am a fan of progress in general.  But, of course, arrogating the word “progressive” to yourself (or “anti-fascist” or “patriot” or any other such “Look at me, I’m a good guy!” terms) does not actually make you progressive by any sensible use of the term.

Likewise for conservatism‒I can  sympathize with the notion that one should not just haphazardly make changes to long-standing ideas and institutions.  All improvement is change but not all change is an improvement.  Random change is as likely to be bad as to be good‒probably more likely, like random mutations in the genome of a reasonably well-adapted organism.

But there are so very many “conservatives in name only” and “Republicans in name only” in the sense that they are not really in line with anything that the GOP has traditionally promoted, nor any sensible conservatism.

As DMX said, “Talk is cheap, motherfucker.”  Or, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, progressive is as progressive does, conservative is as conservative does.  And perhaps most egregiously, Christian is as Christian does.  Ugh.  Dealing with that hypocrisy*** would take a  whole post at least, and right now I don’t have the stomach for it.

So, to make myself a bit clearer, in case anyone was confused by my recommendations that the left should avail itself of its 2nd Amendment rights:  the reason I addressed them thusly was that they are traditionally the side that’s been more opposed to personal gun ownership and use, and so they are less likely on average to have guns.

It is the “right” who are currently in power (in the US) and they are pushing many boundaries of constitutionality (and they also tend to be fans of militarized police forces and the like).  So, if you fear that they are going the way of fascists and authoritarians in the past‒and there is at least some evidence to support this thesis‒then you must admit something the right has long since pointed out and of which it has in principle been aware:  it is harder to oppress an armed populace than it is an unarmed populace.

I’m against oppressors, authoritarians, totalitarians, etc., on any side, largely because I know‒to the extent that I know anything at all‒that they are mere flesh and blood, mortal, tiny-minded Naked House Apes.  This fact is not shameful in and of itself‒no one chooses their own nature‒but when nearly hairless, ridiculous-looking primates start thinking that they are something fundamentally superior or even divine, that they are anything but dust in the wind, then they start making messes.

If it were only themselves that they were hurting, things would be better.  Though it would still be sad, it would be morally tolerable.  But like drunk people getting behind the wheel of a car or like people who refuse quite safe vaccination against highly communicable and dangerous diseases, they become a danger to other, innocent**** people.  And, when threatened with the unrepentant use of force (deliberate or negligent, active or passive) by such supremely finite minds, people have the right‒if there is any right to anything at all‒to protect and defend themselves, and their loved ones, and the innocent, and the helpless, with force.

Of course, even this must be done judiciously, and one must always exercise the principle of charity against even one’s perceived opponents.  The presumption of innocence is crucial, and not merely at the obvious level.  Otherwise matters are prone to degenerate into mindless feuds.

It’s not that your opponents are not monsters; it’s that you are also a monster.

That’s enough for today.  I’m already exhausted.

*Weirdly enough, this is unrelated to getting laid or sleeping around.  Believe me; it’s completely unrelated.

**I was going to use the word “argument” but that would be an insult to the word.

***Based on the gospels, Jesus really did not approve of hypocrisy.

****In this matter, at least.

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I want this all to end

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer (the little one, not the regular sized one).  The laptop is slightly more awkward for typing on when there are bumps and shakes in a vehicle, but the vastly greater speed with which I’m able to type on it more than makes up for that—though it does not assuage the frustration.

I’m already exhausted (mentally) after only one day of work.  I don’t think it’s the work per se that’s so exhausting, it’s the environment, the people, the noise, the frustrations, the fact that other people arrive late or not at all, so many little frustrations.  There’s so little predictability in their behavior, and what there is is so often illogical.

I have, in general, identified more with Melkor than with Sauron in Tolkien’s universe—largely because he’s the Big Boss—but sometimes I can understand Sauron’s desire for order, and for forcing other creatures to be more orderly.  Of course, the way he goes about that is pretty stupid, but whataya gonna do?  As Gandalf said, he is a “wise fool” (a great expression).

Anyway, I like Lord Foul better than either of those two, and I like Doctor Doom most of all.  Doctor Doom is the sort of character about whom Christopher Nolan could make a movie trilogy, presenting him in a more down-to-earth fashion in a nearly realistic story, as he did with Batman, because Doom is not the product of radioactive spider bites, nor is he the last survivor of a star faring people with powers because of his alien nature, nor is he otherwise enhanced.  He is a human, but with a brilliant, inventive intellect and an obsessive drive.

Why am I writing about this stuff right now?  I have now idea.  This is all stream of consciousness, and that stream flows faster when I’m typing.  I’ve written all this so far in less than ten minutes (first draft), and I’m already almost halfway to my target word count.  I have to set a target, not so that I don’t go below it, but so that I don’t go too far over it.  I could probably gabble on here interminably.

But I want it to end.  I’m so very, very tired, and I have very little joy in my life.  I mean, I’m pleased that The Chasm and the Collision is still an enjoyable read even now.  But of course, I’m probably one of two people in the world who has actually read it.  My mother died just days after it was published—I tried to read some of it to her in her hospice bed, from her own miniature Kindle, but it was clear she wasn’t even following.  That’s too bad.  I think she really would have liked it.  I think she had been looking forward to reading it.

It’s such a me fact that my most wholesome, family-friendly story involves a threat of destruction to two universes and a villain who is unknowingly in the thrall of a much greater, larger scale “villain” or destructive force that threatens all universes, potentially.  That’s my meta-level villain; its influence is felt in many of my other stories, though I don’t always make that explicit.  I have so many ideas for my large-scale omniverse (formerly thought of as a “metaverse” before Schmuckerberg stole my term), so much backstory and intersections and connections and so on, but none of that is ever going to happen or be revealed or anything.  It’s sad, but, as a character in my darkest ever story says, “Life’s like that, I suppose.”

I wish I could sleep for a really long time, just to rest and recreate myself, but that’s not an available option.  I don’t simply long for “suspended animation” because that’s just like pausing a game; you wake up in the same state you were in when you laid down.  The only point to that would be living to see a future you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.  It’s not any kind of a cocoon, a chrysalis, an Adam Warlock kind of thing, where you change and grow and heal.

I don’t know why I’m writing about comic books and other wildly fictional characters.  Perhaps it’s because the real world is not only so stressful but is also so stupid.  This emergent system that is the whole human race interacting with itself is just an astonishing example of idiocy on performance enhancers.  I really am sick of them.

If I were Doom, I would decide to commit myself to saving them, correcting them, trying to make the world as good as I know it could be.  But of course, that leads Doom to be thought of as a villain (he has other psychopathology that contributes to that, of course).

Okay, well, I’m approaching my target, and obviously I have nothing to say, but that doesn’t stop me.  I’m really tired and depressed and discouraged.  I cannot go on like this for long.  Right now, I’m trying to hold on until at least next Friday, when I’m finally getting an autism assessment, but I don’t even know if that’s enough to cling to even for so short a time.

We shall see.