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In Diana, we are simply passing through history.

It’s Tuesday morning, now, as I’m writing this, which makes sense, since yesterday was Monday.

In case anyone was wondering about the title to yesterday’s blog post:  After deciding not to try to work any reference to any song titles or lyrics relating to Monday into the title‒though I did link to that Carpenters’ song‒I thought I would reference the moon, nevertheless, perhaps as some metaphor for madness.  That seemed appropriate for my blog, since I’m rather steadily mentally deteriorating.  So I figured, who better to give a quote about the moon and madness than Shakespeare?

My first thought, though, led me just to the classic Heinlein novel, which I had thought had been a direct quote, albeit not from any play I had read.  But it wasn’t, apparently.  So I dug around a bit and found a quote from Henry IV part 1‒which I have read, but quite a long time ago‒and took the appropriate lunar reference.

However, I didn’t want simply my usual, slightly altered Shakespearean quote, though that might make up for last Thursday.  The fact that the original line references Diana* made me think of turning it into a Japanese “quote” and replacing Diana with Tsukuyomi, the traditional Japanese moon god or goddess (more often the latter in manga and anime depictions) sibling of Amaterasu, the Japanese god (or goddess) of the Sun/Dawn (obviously a very important deity in the land of the rising sun).

I can’t claim the Japanese expertise necessary to have translated by myself the quote into yesterday’s title, at least not without a lot of work and probably making a mess of things, so I used Google Translate.  I do know enough Japanese to have been able to tell, basically, that it was a decent translation.  I originally planned to leave it in the Japanese characters‒I had gone as far as to remove Google’s transliteration of “Tsukuyomi” or “Tsukiyomi” into katakana** and put in the actual kanji/hiragana characters‒but then I decided that would too pretentious, even for me***, and so I left it in the transliteration into romaji.

For the picture, I used a version of Tsukuyomi found in the brilliant and beautiful manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by the unparalleled manga team CLAMP, creators of such works as Cardcaptor Sakura among many other (in my opinion) even better and more beautiful works.  I altered the picture, though, to make it darker and more eerie and sinister-seeming, since that seemed appropriate for a moon goddess as a representative of madness, as the Shakespearean reference seems to imply, and which certainly seems most pertinent when it comes to me.

Anyway, I’m sure that’s all quite boring, but I thought the title might seem strange and obscure enough to merit an explanation, and while I was at it I ran off at the keyboard.  That, at least, is not too unusual.

I’m writing this on my phone again, by the way.  Yesterday I decided not to carry my laptop back to the house, because I knew I planned to walk from the train to the house (which I did) while talking on the phone to my sister (which I also did), and I figured I’d keep my load light-ish, just to make the process as pleasant as could be.  It wasn’t raining, which was good, but it was rather hot and, of course, humid.  Fortunately, having someone to whom to talk makes the trip pass rather quickly, subjectively speaking.  In objective time, it took slightly longer than usual for 5 miles for me, which makes perfect sense.  I was talking while walking, after all.

I’m afraid I have to report that I am still pretty stressed out at work, and when I am not at work, and just in general, other than when I was talking to my sister.  I had a third quasi-chamber locked and loaded already yesterday, if you’ll remember my reference and metaphor/analogy from the other day.  At one point, I decided just to take it, which I did, and that little bitty minor risk did calm me down a bit.

I’m still just quite, quite depressed, and I guess I’m also what would be called terribly anxious.  Though it doesn’t feel like “fear” of any kind exactly to me as much as it does a kind of mental itchiness and swelling tension, as though most things in the world give me a central nervous system neurologic allergic reaction that makes me want to peel myself out of my own metaphorical skin.  I’m not afraid of anything per se; it’s more as though I’m being squeezed and stretched at all times in numerous directions in some mental vector space, and it’s both crushing me and tearing me apart, slowly and sadistically.  I find nearly every interaction‒especially ones involving interruptions to something I’m already doing‒to be incredibly irritating and stressful.

I feel a bit like an injured and sick feral cat that’s being approached and molested by various different gawking people (no good Samaritans) and other animals when my instinct is to want to be left alone and unmolested, so I can succumb to the elements and just die.

It’s all really very uncomfortable‒though there are pleasant interludes, at least, as noted above about talking to my sister‒and I really don’t think I can last much longer.  I need to escape, but there’s nowhere in this world, in this life, to which I can safely flee.  Not as far as I know, anyway.  There’s no rescue shelter out there that’s going to take in and try to help and heal and find a home for as diseased and damaged a stray as I am; certainly I see no sign of one, and I can’t just keep waiting and hoping.

Well…I can, or I could, in principle, but there is no percentage in doing so as far as I can see.  I’ve been waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping for quite a long time, meanwhile subsisting on the delusion that some nominal, abstract “fact that people somewhere in some abstract kind of sense kind of care about whether I live or die” can actually make any literal, physical difference.  But, like “thoughts and prayers”, it seems not to matter in actual fact (though it is appreciated, and I don’t mean to denigrate such thoughts).  Or, if it matters, it doesn’t matter enough to keep me going indefinitely.  I’m a miserable person to be around, and I’m a miserable person to be.  I just need to screw my courage to the sticking place and finally take more decisive action than exposing myself to a slight risk of a GI bleed.

Real daggers still work against daggers of the mind, but a bare bodkin is an intimidating thing to turn upon oneself, as Hamlet knew.  But I need to do something.  I can’t just keep waiting and deluding myself that something in me will get better.

Oh, well.  Time to head to the bus stop.  Maybe the walking will help my morning back and leg pain.

Have a good day.

*Not Wonder Woman, but, unless I’m mistaken, the counterpart to the Greek god (or goddess) Artemis, sibling of Apollo.

**Which seemed a dreadful bit of disrespect toward such an important deity, treating it as if it were a foreign-introduced word.

***If you can imagine.

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Tsukiyomi no mori no ban’nin, hikage no shinshi, tsuki no tesaki ni narimashou.

It’s Monday morning again.  I can only think of two songs off the top of my head that provide fun references to the day, and I think I’ve used them both more than once, so I’m not going to do that here.  I suppose I could refer to the Carpenters’ song about Rainy Days and Mondays, but that’s a slightly gloomy and glum song, though pretty (and, to be fair, with some upbeat aspects), and I can do gloomy and glum just fine by myself, thanks*.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful, which is not a bad attribute for a day off.  I did my laundry, which was good, and I also got some rest‒I took several naps throughout the day, which, again, is good.  In all fairness, that’s pretty much what I do throughout most nights:  taking lots of short naps and waking up in between.  I even did that on Saturday night after taking two Benadryl before going to sleep.  In fact, I started having a hard time even dozing back off at about 4 am on Sunday.  But that’s just too early to be getting up and starting laundry, even for me.  So I toughed it out until about 6:30.

You’ve got to be hard on yourself sometimes.

Oh, I’m writing this post on my phone this morning, because I just felt too lazy to bring the laptop with me on Saturday.  There was no particular reason to avoid it.  I just didn’t want to bother.  I’m not sure what I’ll do today; I don’t want to force myself to decide in advance.

I’m somewhat disappointed to report that I don’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects, at least so far, of the little experiments that I began the other day.  It’s not impossible that some could accrue yet, but I think I shouldn’t get my hopes up.  It would be such a weight off if I could just start having a GI bleed or something.  Maybe I’m too half-assed about it.

Rat poison used to be primarily comprised of “super-coumadins” in diatomaceous earth**.  That might have been a useful option.  Nowadays, though, most rat poisons (I have checked) seem to be the new neurologically targeted stuff that’s highly specific toward rat nervous systems, and much less dangerous for humans and dogs and cats if they accidentally ingest it.  I know, that’s a good thing (unless you’re a rat or love rats).  But it’s disappointing if you want to have readily available options for encouraging your own self to bleed without a prescription.

Thank goodness aspirin was discovered millennia before the FDA or DEA and has never been used to “get high” by anyone***.  If it were discovered in the modern world, it would never be available without a prescription‒not in the US, anyway.  You even have to go to the effing pharmacy counter to get pseudoephedrine for your cold and allergy symptoms, because some people turned a certain amount of it into amphetamines of one kind or another.

Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  Let’s keep a useful and comparatively harmless medicine**** restricted in availability for people who want to use it for legitimate reasons, in order to prevent rare people from turning it into a product other rare people use because they like it.  Remember, illicit drugs aren’t forced on their users.  People buy them because they want them, just like people do with fast food and candy and beer and tobacco and fast cars and the like, none of which are without drawbacks.

Ah, to hell with it.  It would be nice to improve human civilization using reasoned action with actual measurement of end-points and serious attempts to obtain good data, with a goal of improving things overall, in general, for everyone.  But that’s not how humans are built, is it?

I really want to check out of this madhouse hotel.  It’s noisy and garish and smelly and loud, and it’s almost impossible for me to get a good night’s sleep in it.  And I can’t seem to find anything to do here that’s any fun.

Oh, well.  Maybe things will get better this week.  Try not to laugh; that’s me attempting my closest approach to cautious optimism.  I’m not very good at it.

Princess_Tomoyo

*The “pretty” part might be a personal deficiency in my work, I’ll admit, but sometimes you’ve got to let gloomy and glum just be full-on ugly, and not try to sweeten the hit.  I can do that.

**Coumadin is a brand name of warfarin, an anticoagulant that interferes with vitamin K dependent aspects of the coagulation cascade (is that factors 1, 2, 7, and 9, or am I misremembering?) and of course, diatomaceous earth is basically composed of bajillions of microscopic silica-based skeletons of ancient marine organisms (diatoms), which have tiny little spiky projections everywhere.  I believe that the idea was that the diatoms would make lots of little perforations in rat GI tracts, but I don’t know that it ever did much.  Super-coumadins are more than able to induce various kinds of massive hemorrhaging on their own.

***That factor seems to be the main issue with a great many of the drugs that are illegal, if not all of them.  If people can, at will, do something that will make themselves feel good, even if only temporarily, then what carrots and sticks can keep them being fully productive cogs in the spontaneously self-assembled machine?  Caffeine, on the other hand, is by far the most widely used and abused drug in the world but is quite legal‒and Starbucks is the world’s largest drug pusher, followed closely by Dunkin Donuts and then McDonald’s, or those were the rankings the last time I checked.

****The over-the-counter decongestants available are not as effective, are not as long-acting even in slow-release forms, and are associated with significant and sometimes acutely dangerous elevations of blood pressure, even at their usual dosages.  Blood pressure elevation is, generally, only a theoretic concern with pseudoephedrine; I never saw it actually cause secondary hypertension in anyone.

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What are the odds that I’ll get out of this tunnel?

Well, it’s now Saturday‒the first Saturday of official summer in the northern hemisphere, (and of winter, in the southern).  I hope you readers out there have something fun planned with your families today and/or tomorrow.  You might as well.  If you can find an excuse to celebrate together, you should do it.

I am writing this post‒the first draft, at least‒on my smartphone, because I didn’t bring my laptop computer to the house with me.  Instead, I brought my hardcover copy of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  It was an odd decision, I think.  Recent history has not shown me prone to reading real books at the house when I’m off work.

I think maybe it’s wishful thinking.  I guess I figure that, if I want to read any of it at the office during my down time, I can fire up the desktop version of the Kindle App* and read it there.  Since it’s basically a pdf, the limitations of the desktop app won’t matter much, and it should be big enough to see and read on the desktop screen (though I haven’t tried yet).

If that doesn’t work‒assuming I even try it‒I can always just bring the book back.

Anyway, that’s not really what I want to write about today, but I’m not sure how much I should write about what I feel like discussing, because I worry about the possible reaction.  I also, oddly, worry about a lack of reaction.  Maybe part of me is hoping to raise an alarm.  Maybe this is yet another of my hundreds of cries for help, this one a bit more strident, since the others haven’t worked.  My mind is in a peculiar state, even for me.

Anyway, that thing I briefly mentioned near the end of the post yesterday…well, I decided to do some minor trial runs of it, with slightly live ammo, so to speak.  At moments when something particularly stressed me out, I just quietly did that little thing.

I won’t get into details.  It’s nothing very dramatic, really.  If it were a game of Russian Roulette (which it isn’t, at least not literally), it would be one using a single loaded chamber in a revolver with, I don’t know, maybe a hundred chambers in the cylinder.  Probably more, maybe slightly less, it’s hard to say.  But the risk involved right now isn’t very high.  Still, it accumulates, as risk does, when iterations are independent.

If the chance of something happening on the first try is 1%, or .01 (or 1-.99, which is the chance of it not happening) then if you spin the cylinder twice, the total chance of the thing happening is 1-(the cumulative chance of it not happening), or 1-(.99 x .99), or 1-.9801, or .0199.  That’s close to 2%, but it’s not quite there, and the new, added increments get smaller and smaller.  Otherwise, after a hundred goes you’d be certain to have something happen, and with independently randomized iterations, that isn’t the way it works.  After a hundred random tries at something in which each attempt gives a 1% chance of the event, your actual likelihood of the event happening once is about 63%, if my figuring is correct.  Someone please check my math**.

Now, if one is playing traditional Russian Roulette without spinning the barrel between each trigger pull, then by the end of six pulls, the odds are essentially certain‒barring misfires‒that someone will “win”.  Whereas if you spin the cylinder (randomly and fairly) each time, the odds are, let me see…about 66.5% after 6 tries.

The point I’m making is that it’s not a high chance, but it gives me some sense of control and possible “escape” each time, and I think that helped calm me a bit yesterday.  I even think I might have slept a bit better last night.  That might be just because I was feeling physically a little improved since the previous day, though.

I did wake up quite a number of times throughout the night, each time filled with frankly absurd anxiety about something, but I have no idea what.  That’s just what usually happens, though.  I also woke up once coughing my brains out from a reflux/regurgitation event, but I think I know the dietary indiscretion behind that, and I don’t mean to repeat it.  That’s a horrible feeling.

Anyway, I think I feel slightly more level…though it’s still very early in the day, and just thinking about it while (now) waiting for the train seems to belie that possibility, as I feel tension and anxiety building rather quickly.

It’s so frustrating.  I just can’t ever seem to feel in any way at ease or relaxed or at home.  I really do feel sometimes like I don’t belong on this planet, or even in this universe, like there’s been some meta-cosmic mix-up.  You would think that one would get more used to the world after one had been in it for a longer period of time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Possibly at least some of my former ability to handle it was due to the presence of my family and friends, who could provide good examples and smooth out rough edges and act as allies who helped when I was at a loss.  When needing to rely solely my own resources, I think I just get worn down.  It also doesn’t help that, despite my having worked quite hard all my life to succeed and thrive in this place, and having achieved quite a lot, it just wasn’t enough, and everything all went to shit, largely due to me just not seeming to get other people and what they meant or needed or intended or what.

Maybe I was just unlucky.  My back injury and chronic consequent pain really set the boulder rolling downhill.  Without that, maybe I would have been fine.

That boulder has been rolling for a long time, now.  I’m on more level-ish ground than I was, but only because it’s nearing the bottom of the valley; most of its prior, impressive height has long since been lost.  If this were a metaphor for energy states of quantum fields, I’d say it’s approaching the vacuum state, or at least a pseudo-vacuum; I can’t see the shape of the whole curve.  Maybe at this point I’m effectively already in the vacuum state, and any seeming movement is just quantum jitters.

Sorry, I’m skipping from metaphor to metaphor like a grade-schooler playing metaphor hopscotch.  How’s that for a meta-metaphor***?  

Anyway, I’m not getting anywhere with this right now, except heading toward the office.  But maybe, just maybe, I’ve put in motion things that will give me a higher chance of quantum-tunneling to a lower, true ground state, where I can rest, or at least stop being constantly in pain and anxious and depressed and lonely and futile.  Or maybe‒there’s always that foolish hope‒someone will help me.  Though it’s hard to blame anyone for not doing so.  I’m a rotten person who isn’t really worth the effort.  I know I don’t like me.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I hope, again, that you all have a nice first weekend of summer.  Or winter.  Either way, if you have friends and/or family with whom to spend your time, please make the most of your opportunity.

*Which, by the way, sucks compared to the smartphone/tablet version, and is very frustrating.  If any of you out there are on the development team at Amazon for this, or have access to those who are, please let them know that they need to improve their product relative to the other versions.

**Don’t bother accounting for the possibilities of more than one occasion of the outcome happening.  We’re talking about Russian Roulette‒if one “event” happens, there will be no more spins.

***Since I used the word “like” I guess it’s technically a simile about metaphors.  That’s not as much fun, though.

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I was out sick yesterday – again. Or is it “still”?

Okay, I’m writing this post—the first draft, anyway—on my laptop, and actually on my lap, because for right now, I’m sitting on the piano bench* in my room at the house.  I’ve decided not to try to walk to the train this morning, since I’m still feeling under the weather from yesterday.

As you may know, I did not write a post yesterday, and as you may have guessed, this was because I was out sick.  I considered getting onto my WordPress account just long enough to write a pseudo-post titled, “NO POST TODAY”, with a single line in the main body:  “I am out sick.”  However, I didn’t feel up to doing even that, and frankly, I don’t think it really matters to anyone out there, anyway.

Anyway, I was out with a very bad headache and fogginess and some nausea, but it didn’t feel like a typical migraine that I might have.  I suspect it might be a reaction to the fact that, upon arriving at the house, thoroughly exhausted, on Wednesday night, I took a rapid-release pill of melatonin.  I was trying to help myself sleep, if it was possible.

I’ve tried melatonin more than once in the past, and I’ve gotten results that generally made me feel worse rather than better, but I was at the end of my rope, or at least near the end, and I just wanted to be able to sleep.  I knew that if I took Benadryl on a work night, I’d feel groggy and slow for most of the next day, so I didn’t want to do that.

The melatonin may have ended up helping me start sleeping sooner and staying asleep longer—it’s difficult for me to tell—but it did not help me feel in any way better rested.  I awoke—well before my alarm, still—after still not having gone to sleep before eleven or so, despite my horrible exhaustion, feeling absolutely rotten, and having chills, though if I had a fever it was low-grade.  I also felt a bit sick to my stomach, though I did not throw up.

I had reconsidered melatonin after encountering a few stray articles in various sources indicating that melatonin might be useful for sleep disturbances among autistic people—these articles might have been focused more on autistic children, as most of the research is—and since I might have “Asperger’s” to use the relegated term, I thought maybe it would be worth another try.

Of course, Matthew Walker, in his book Why We Sleep, the best popular scientific book I’ve encountered on the subject, said that while melatonin may be good for jet lag and the like, it doesn’t seem to be useful for chronic sleep disorders**.  Still, he was speaking generally, and about the human population, not about changelings and replicants and mutant, weirdo strangers like me, whatever I am, so I thought maybe it would be worth something.

I don’t think I’m likely to try it again, at least not anytime soon.

The most sensible thing for me, probably, would be just to give up.  I’m just not going to be able to get a good night’s sleep ever again, not without the aid of significant pharmaceuticals, and then it won’t really be a good night’s sleep, since pharmaceuticals of all kinds interfere with natural sleep functions.

We don’t know quite what all those are, but sleep appears to be incredibly important for creatures with nervous systems, since every single one of which we are aware spends a significant amount of its time in that semi-inert, quite vulnerable state.  You would think, if it were possible to go without it, evolution would have produced some creature that used that option.  But even marine mammals like whales and dolphins sleep, though I understand that they do so with only half their brains at a time.

There is even a mouse (or vole of some variety) in the far north that is capable of literally going into a kind of suspended animation for months at a time, lowering its heart rate and body temperature nearly to zero (C) and decreasing the freezing tendency of its bodily fluids, and basically shutting down like a sci-fi astronaut.  But it has to rouse itself from this cryo-stasis periodically to sleep!  It needs to wake up from suspended animation so it can sleep or else its brain will suffer!

So, again, sleep is very important, and I’m certainly not getting anything like enough of it, and never in uninterrupted spans of more than maybe an hour at a stretch.  I think I must be missing out on some of the dreaming process, too, since I don’t remember dreams at night, even though I wake up quite frequently, and you would think I would sometimes do so during REM cycles.

Also, almost as soon as I attempt meditation, once I focus on my breath and am still for a moment, I begin experiencing strange courses of thought and images and stories that are quite reminiscent of dreams, as if my brain had been champing at the bit to get running with them at the first opportunity.

As I say, I don’t expect to find the answer or solve the problem.  I would just like to reset or else unplug the game at this point.  It’s long since ceased to be fun, and it’s getting more and more tedious.

I came up with an interesting possible means of shutting down the game the other night—Wednesday night, actually—and I made a test run of the delivery system that was encouraging***.  I may do another test today, and in the meantime I’m going to consider possible payloads, though I have at least one main idea that I mean to try primarily.

It comes down to a thing I recall from reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  I don’t remember which of the books it was in, but it was  almost certainly one of the first two, and probably The Illearth War.  Thomas Covenant is telling one of his dreadfully dark true stories of the “real” world, about a man from India who was diagnosed with leprosy, and who killed himself during his flight to go to the Leprosarium in Louisiana, after having lost his whole family because of his diagnosis.

Covenant makes the interesting observation that it seems much easier—at least at first—to commit suicide by means that are typical for another culture but are not typical of your own, because they don’t feel as real to you, and so the barrier to their initiation is lower.  I think there is something to that insight, though it must also be balanced against the observed effect that publicly well-known suicides, especially of celebrities, etc., tend to make certain methods feel more normal, more “acceptable”, and like more “reasonable” approaches for people tending in that direction.

Like most things in the world, the system is complex.

But, anyway, my idea is neither really from another culture, nor typical of modern American culture.  It has some antecedents in some old-fashioned things, and its effects would be potentially delayed, which is part of the whole “lowering the activation energy wall” notion.  But it’s really sort of a “uniquely my own” kind of thing, which seems appropriate.

I don’t seem to be able to connect with any other people around me; they don’t understand me and I certainly don’t understand them.  It seems reasonable, or at least predictable, that I would do something atypical or even unique.  It would at least be nice to end things on some original type of note, ironically.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress—probably, anyway.  We’ll see what happens, I guess.  To paraphrase Yoda, the future is always in motion.  Though that may not actually be true, depending on how much (if at all) reality departs from pure determinism, but from the local, “human” point of view, that’s the way it feels, since we’re always simulating the future in our heads as our means of trying to shape it and to guide our own actions.  It feels as though many different things are possible, even if in actuality they are not.

Neo took the red pill, and for the character it no doubt would have felt as if he made a choice that could have gone the other way, but no matter how many times you rewind and replay that moment, it always turns out the same.  Reality may be just like that, only more so.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m working tomorrow, so you can reasonably expect a blog post from me tomorrow morning, barring the unforeseen (see above regarding predicting the future and so on).  I hope the rest of you out there have a good day.

*Such is its official name, though no piano has ever sat upon it.

**If memory serves.  It’s been a bit since I read the book, though I used both the print and the audio version, so I got a double whammy.  Anyway, it’s possible I’m misremembering.

***No, this wasn’t what caused any of my symptoms on Thursday morning.  The delivery system is inert, of this I am convinced beyond what I consider a reasonable doubt.  My “Bayesian prior” is certainly over 90%, anyway.

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“And everything under the sun is in tune, but…”

It’s Wednesday, June 21, 2023 (AD or CE, as you prefer), and I’m writing this on my laptop, but it’s not on my lap.  It’s resting on my desktop at the office, because I stayed here overnight last night.  I had a bad day—personally, not professionally—at the office, yesterday.  I felt just rotten, partly due to how poor a sleep I had, even for me, the night before.

I considered leaving early, but we were rather busy, and I didn’t feel I could justify cutting out on everyone.  Also, I had the nagging concern that, if I left early, I might never come back, because I really felt at my wits end, and though I had no specific plan in mind, I thought I might take some kind of drastic action to make it impossible for me ever to do anything again.  I just wanted to go to sleep and to sleep and to sleep and perhaps never to wake up.

Anyway, it really started to thunderstorm rather badly near the end of the work day, so I decided I would just stay at the office.  I’ve had a hard time getting up to my usual status on the payroll this week so far, and it has to be finished by today, so eliminating the commute time will better allow me to finish that.

But everything is getting too onerous for me.  I’m so tired, and I have no internal drive or purpose of significance, just habit and stubbornness, which can’t really ever make up for the real thing in the long run.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I need help, but I doubt I’ll get any, and I don’t think I’m capable of seeking it.

I can’t make myself believe that I deserve or am worthy of any help.

Speaking of long runs (I was, you can go back and check) today is the Solstice—the summer one in the northern hemisphere, and the winter one in the southern hemisphere.  Thus, it is the “longest” or the “shortest” day of the year, depending on one’s location.  I use scare quotes because it’s not the actual length of the day that varies on this date, or from day to day in any kind of steady way, but the duration of daylight, the time in which the sun is overhead, or at least visible in the sky (barring clouds).

But, of course, the length of a day really does change a bit from time to time, though not in anything like as regular, nor as dramatic, a fashion as daylight does regarding solstices and equinoxes and all that.  The earth is a rotating mass, and is subject to the laws of angular momentum.  Thus, when enough mass changes position on the surface of the planet, it can have an effect on the overall rate of rotation of the planet.

The stereotypical “demonstration” of this process is a skater spinning on the ice, who speeds up when bringing his or her arms close to the body and slows down when extending them.  This is because, crudely, the angular momentum is mvr, the mass times the “tangential” velocity (of the mass), i.e. the speed at which it goes around the center of rotation, times the distance from the center of rotation.  Thus, since angular momentum is conserved, if the radius shortens, the velocity around the center of rotation increases proportionately, and vice versa.

The instantiation of this is somewhat complex, as is usually the case, but this really is the gist of it.  The conservation of angular momentum is related to the rotational symmetry of the universe, as per Noether’s Theorem—i.e., the laws of physics aren’t dependent upon which direction you happen to be facing.  This is similar to how conservation of linear momentum is related to symmetry of translation—i.e., the laws of physics don’t depend upon where you happen to be along any linear direction.  And conservation of energy (locally) has to do with the symmetry of time.  This last one can be tricky when taking the universe as a whole, because conservation of energy doesn’t necessarily apply to the whole cosmos, nor is time fully symmetrical on the largest of scales, or so it seems, but locally it is true.

Physicists, please correct me if I made any gross errors there.

Anyway, back to the rotation of the Earth and the length of days.  Movement of significant amounts of mass on the surface of the planet (or within the planet) can change the rate of rotation of the planet.  I’m led to understand by the program QI* that a massive hydroelectric project in China cause the “elevation” of a large enough mass of water to slow the rotation of the Earth by a measurable—if inconsequential and utterly unnoticeable—amount.

I sometimes wonder if the periodic gathering of millions of people near the mouth of the Ganges has any potentially measurable effect on the momentary rate of the Earth’s rotation.  I’m not aware of anyone having made such a measurement.  Even if it’s true that it changes the rotation rate, it may be too small to detect.

I also wonder whether, as glaciers on mountains and across Greenland and similar melt, with the water thus previously elevated seeking a level closer to the center of the Earth, the planet’s rotation might well speed up.  I wouldn’t expect glacier melt in Antarctica to speed up the rotation in quite the same way, because those glaciers are all far closer to the axis of rotation in the first place, and so might have limited effect in shortening the “lever arm” of rotation.  Indeed, if they raise sea levels significantly enough, I could imagine the “center of mass” of the Earth’s rotation moving slightly outward, especially as the seas bulge more at the equator, thus slowing the motion of the planet down.

The odds of this perfectly balancing seem small, but I imagine it would require very complex calculations and—more importantly—quite fine measurement to ascertain the net balance.  And, of course, the balance is likely to shift over time.

In comparison, it’s relatively** easy to calculate the balance between special and general relativity required to keep GPS satellites in synchrony with the ground.  In this case, the speed of the motion of the GPS satellites slows down their local passage of time relative to the surface of the Earth, by a calculable and quite constant amount, but their greater distance from the center of the “gravity well” makes their time go faster relative to the surface of the Earth, again in a quite calculable and rather constant rate.

It’s the latter effect that predominates, and this is routinely accounted for in the GPS process.  If it were not, GPS would have huge and increasing errors as the timing in the satellites and of ground-based clocks diverged steadily, and the errors would very rapidly become far too great to be useful.  So, your use of smartphones to find where you are and how to get where you’re going depend on both of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

I guess you all already knew all that.  Sorry to be boring.

Anyway, that’s my bit*** of trivia for the day.  It will probably be the most interesting thing to happen to me in this particular Earthy rotation, but I hope all of you are having more interesting days than I am.  I’m just very tired, and discouraged, and worn out…and it’s only a little after five in the morning.

I’ve been in pain for twenty years, and I haven’t seen my kids (in person) nor interacted with my son at all (barring one email) in over ten years, and my last remembered restful night’s sleep happened in the mid-1990s.

If I could just find way to get restful nights’ sleeps, that would be a start.  Everything else would be easier, or so I suspect, if I could find a way to make that happen.  Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t help, and I would simply be faced with the tragic irony of having that wish come true only to find that it didn’t make the other things better, and might even make them worse.

Never underestimate the potential for things to get worse.  Reality has no bottom.

There’s that symmetry of translation that implies, by Noether’s Theorem, that momentum will be conserved.  Which brings me full circle, thus recapitulating the conservation of momentum/symmetry of rotation.  It’s neat, isn’t it?  Time, however, is a trickier bit of possible symmetry, as Pink Floyd recognized only too well.  But at least after Time has passed, when on The Dark Side of the Moon, one can look forward to the beauty of The Great Gig in the Sky.

If you haven’t listened to that album in a while, why not listen to it today?  Or if you’ve never listened to it, treat yourself.  It’s well worth it.  What the hell, it’s the longest day (or night) of the year.  Indulge yourself.  And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear—you shout and no one seems to hear—and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Summer-Solstice-Stonehenge-860x540

*Which has, upon occasion, been incorrect, but it does, in the long run, try to correct prior errors, often in hilarious ways, usually at the expense of Alan Davies, as in the running conflict over the number of moons the Earth actually has.

**Ba-dump-bump.

***Well, actually, probably a few thousand bits, albeit redundantly encoded.

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Blog Post for June 20, 2023 (AD) – Tuesday

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m beginning this post at the train station rather than on the train, because this time I timed things so that I arrived a few minutes after the 6:10 train passed.  That way, I didn’t feel the urge to chase after it, like what I described the other day.

This was somewhat deliberate, but it also had a lot to do with just how tired I already am.  I don’t talk about my insomnia all that often, probably for the same reason most of you don’t talk about breathing very often.  It’s just always there.  But last night was worse than many; starting at a bit before two, I “woke up” every five to ten minutes, looking up at the clock, as if I were worried that I might have overslept.  I don’t know what I’m worried about in such situations, honestly‒it’s not as though there would be any objective, dire consequences if I were late.  But, of course, the real problem is that I would be distressed and upset if I were to miss my schedule.  And because of that, I can’t seem to sleep.

So, this morning, I already feel fatigued and mentally worn down, and the day is just getting started.  Of course, yesterday by noon or so I was already mentally crashing at the office, and that was Monday after a full, two-day weekend!  The crash was acutely due to my usual frustration with the nominal rules of the way we do things in the office being ignored when convenient in the short term, but it’s really all a cumulative and complex process.  By the end of each day I’m worn down more than I was at the beginning, and by the next morning I haven’t really gotten quite back up to the level I was at the start of the previous day, perhaps partly due to my insomnia.

It’s not a precise, smooth curve, of course; there are day to day fluctuations, and even I am not always in my worst state of mind.  But overall, the trend is downward, and I think it’s fair to say that I am now palpably lower than I have been in a very long time, if not ever.

It’s a good thing that I can at least talk to my sister on the phone for an hour or so once a week.  But I’m so annoyingly stressed by social interactions that, even with my sister‒whom I’ve literally known all my life, and with whom I get along as well as pretty much anyone‒I have to schedule and plan the phone conversations ahead of time, and generally on weekend days when I’ve at least had a mental break.

It’s ridiculous and pathetic, I know.  I can’t give it any kind of noble or even sympathetic spin.  I’m disgusted by myself…but then, that’s my general attitude toward myself, anyway.  Not to say that there’s nothing about myself that I like, of course.  I like that I’m very curious, and that I can understand science and math and all that stuff rather well, and that I have a good memory, and that I can learn things well and more easily than many other people seem to be able to do.

Even when very depressed and moriphilious* I’ll find myself inescapably driven toward ordering‒or at least to consider ordering‒some book or audio book, perhaps by someone I’ve heard speaking on a science and/or philosophy podcast, or similar.  Also, as I think I mentioned yesterday that I was considering, I did order the hardcover copy of Quantum Field Theory as Simply as Possible.  I almost ordered the author’s textbook (especially when I saw that, among many other places, Cornell uses it), but I decided I would start with the bird’s eye view before going deeper, partly because I’m not sure I have the mathematics expertise really to grasp the deeper stuff in a strict fashion.

I may.  I’m pretty good at stuff like that, and I can build on my prior understanding with more ease than some can, because I don’t tend to learn things by rote.  I learn by a sort of model-building in my head, which means it can take me longer to prepare for a test, for instance, but once I understand something, I don’t tend to lose that understanding very quickly, and can apply it elsewhere and merge it with other matters.  So, if I can get the concepts of some physical theory, and the concepts of the pertinent mathematics, then the nitty-gritty, nuts and bolts of it is much easier then to master.  That’s nice.  I do like that about myself.

But I don’t really have anyone around with whom to talk about the things in which I’m interested at any very deep level.  And it’s hard to contemplate even seeking out such people.  I would be stressed out worrying that dealing with other, new, and potentially frustrating people would be too much effort, but also‒perhaps more so‒that I myself am an irritating person, and I can’t quite bring myself readily to inflict myself on other people.

Also, I would probably have to go through some online community‒perhaps some form of “discord” or whatever that app/system is, or some Facebook or Twitter group or some** such.  I’ve never been interested in trying to get into Reddit communities, and most of the other social media meetup type things are anathema to me.  I don’t even like gaming with strangers online.

Early on, back in the day, I got on a Yahoo! based depression support chat group, but mostly I just lurked, though I did make a very good online friend in one, who (among other things) introduced me to both Sailor Moon and Radiohead, so that was a tremendously lucky and great meeting.  I cannot thank that person enough, and we are still in occasional contact to this day.

But even things like that Yahoo! group have changed and no longer appeal to me.  And I have changed since then, too, of course.  I’ve been to prison, for one thing.  That’ll change you a bit.  Probably even a cushy minimum security Federal Prison changes people, and FSP West is most assuredly not such a place.

Anyway, enough nonsense for today.  Tomorrow is the Summer/Winter Solstice, for what it’s worth, so I’ll probably mention it then, unless I’m lucky enough to have something happen that makes me unable to write my blog post or anything else.  Or unless someone swoops in and rescues me from the verge of the event horizon.

That’s not gonna happen, is it?

Oh, well.  Have a good day.

*I just made that word up, I’m not sure if it really works.

**Here’s a mildly amusing typo:  I originally typed that as “sum such”.

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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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Why can’t I just let the train go?

Well, I walked to the train again this morning.  I tried to dilly-dally, expecting to get to the station just after the 6:10 train had arrived and gone; I took it a little slower getting up and showered and dressed than usual.  However, as I walked along, not trying to be fast, after coming to the last turn before the station, I foolishly looked at the clock on my phone and saw that it was 6:04, and I was in striking distance of the station.

Now, a sane and well-adjusted person would probably choose, in light of that information, to slow down more, to stroll toward the station, to watch the 6:10 come and go and revel in the fact of being among the first people there waiting for the 6:30 train.  Such a person might even start writing a blog post in the 20 minutes before the next train was due to come.

Clearly‒as you probably already know‒I am not a sane and well-adjusted person.

I increased my pace and my stride length, and got to the train station crossing just as the lights began flashing.  I sprinted across the tracks before the gate came down and then up along the platform, tapped in with my train card, and was able to get on the train just as it came to a halt.  I was already sweaty, of course, so the sprint had little effect on that, and anyway, I brought deodorant spray to take the edge off.  I simply couldn’t force myself to let the train go, since it was possible for me to catch it.  I’m not happy about it, but I don’t seem to have much control over the situation.

I’m writing this on my phone again, by the way.  I didn’t even bother bringing the laptop with me yesterday, and I probably won’t bring it today, either.  I mean to keep doing this procedure:  walking in the morning before work, and deciding later in the day if I feel like walking on the way back.  I never should have thought about trying to get a bike, and I certainly shouldn’t be thinking of electric scooters or electric-assisted bikes or any such thing.  I don’t need to buy new things.  Indeed, I would say that I need not to buy new things.  Ever.  I wish I didn’t have to buy food, but that’s going to be a difficult habit to break.  One step at a time, so to speak.

I have tomorrow off; I won’t be writing a post, so you’ll get a bit of a reprieve, if you read my posts out of some sense of obligation.  I’m going to try to get up and walk in the morning nevertheless, though, because I really want to try to get used to longer and longer distances.  I hope to walk either until it kills me or until it corrects my depression.  Regular exercise is supposed to be good for depression, though it’s never really seemed to help me much; I had bad depression even when I was running six miles at a time.  But maybe it’ll make a difference this time.  Anyway, it would be nice to be a bit thinner when I die, at least, so it can help with that, at the very least.

Yesterday was a somewhat stressful day at work, because my coworker was out with back pain.  Thankfully it wasn’t particularly busy, though it was a decent day for business.  I worry about him not being there today.  I’m barely able to scrape by on any given day as it is.  I don’t think I can make it for too many days in a row with added work.  If he can’t come in tomorrow, I’m not going to fill in.  I’m just going to say “no”, which is unusual for me, but there it is.  If I get pressured into coming in, I don’t know if I’ll come in again after that, ever.  Sunday is “Father’s Day”, and that would be as good a day to die for me as any other, and better than the vast majority of them.

Anyway, I’m borrowing trouble, I guess.  I have no good reason to think my coworker won’t be there today or will ask me to fill in tomorrow.  In fact, it’s rather unlikely.

Oh, speaking of unlikely things, just this week I passed two milestones on the potential palindromic recording number path.  I passed them, but I did not actually achieve those milestones.  I missed them.  They were close together, because we were in the situation where the 4th digit was a 9, which would be palindromic only when the 5th digit is also 9, and then, of course, it soon rolls up to the 4th digit being 0, and the 5th digit is also 0 at that point.  So only the first and last 3 digits of the 8 digit number needed to line up (in reverse).  It didn’t happen, which is not surprising, of course.  Only once in 10,000 times will the last 4 digits be the reverse of the first 4.  I don’t expect to see it happen.

I also can’t tell anyone at work that I’m watching for it, or my coworker might pretend he had gotten such a number.  I don’t want to seem to get a personally chosen message to endure and have it be a lie.  That would really piss me off.

Anyway, enough of that.  My stop is coming up soon (in more ways than one).  I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re fortunate enough to have your father around, or to be a father who is loved and spends time with his family, please do enjoy your day Sunday.

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And blogged with restless violence round about the pendant world.

Hello, good morning, and all that happy horseshit.  I’m writing at least the first draft of this post on my phone, even though I have my laptop with me, because I just arrived at the train station after walking the five miles from the house, and the next train will be here in about 5 minutes.  It seemed silly to bother getting the laptop out, starting it up, making a file and whatnot, only to close it and put it in my bag, then get it out again on the train, etc.  Also, I don’t know how crowded this train is likely to be‒it’s earlier than the one I usually take (kind of impressive considering I’ve already walked 5 miles), and it’s easier to write on one’s phone in close quarters than on a laptop.

Of course, I pity the fool who has to sit next to me this morning, as sweaty as I am*.  I have been told by reliable sources that my sweat, in general, doesn’t smell too bad, since my hygiene in general is good.  Still, it’s June in Florida, so I’m not just lightly sprinkled with a tiny amount of perspiration.  I sprayed myself with one of those “scent bomb” sprays when I got to the station, just to minimize the offensiveness‒unless one finds those scents offensive, of course.

Still, no one has a right not to be offended (not usually, anyway).

That calls to mind my own tendency, that I’ve only recently recognized, that I implicitly don’t consider myself to have a right to be comfortable.  It’s a sort of fascinating thing to come to understand.  I realize that I really don’t like loud and chaotic noises (of most varieties) or crowds, or certain smells or textures or whatnot, but I’ve never thought that my disliking these things was relevant to my behavior, or at least not primarily relevant.  I suppose, all else being equal, if I saw an easy way to avoid things that were irritating, I would do so, but it was never my primary concern.

Evidently, though, effacing one’s aversions and just letting them wash over one can, over time, wear one down.  I wonder, sometimes, if this has contributed to my depression and related issues.  It’s hard to be sure, but maybe it has something to do with that thing that happened to me on Tuesday, where I just lost all impetus, as I think I put it.

I remember, as early as the beginning of high school, and maybe earlier, that occasionally I would get these episodes of profound emptiness, just a feeling of being all used up, rather similar to what happened to me the other day, but with less physical disability.  Sometimes‒often, really, and perhaps most times‒I would also feel like I wanted to die, or at least to be dead in those moments**.  Sometimes I would address these attacks by going for long walks, and sometimes it even helped.  The episodes were not infrequent, but they didn’t happen as often or last as long back then.  I spoke to very few people about them, and was probably not all that clear when I did, since I didn’t have even the faintest understanding of what they were or why they were happening***.

The walk this morning wasn’t really to try to counter such things‒which is just as well, since I would have been disappointed.  I just want to try to get into walking longer and longer distances.  I meant to walk from the train to the house last night, but the office once again didn’t finish in time for me to be able to do so and get back at a reasonable hour.  Don’t get me wrong, almost everyone else was gone.  But I can’t leave until the last person is done, whether at the end of the day or during lunch.  So, other people only stay late occasionally, whereas I stay as late as the latest person on any given day.  I open the office, too.  But the prospect of doing some different job, meeting new people, learning new duties, perhaps going someplace different and moving my stuff, is frankly horrifying.  I can’t see any point in finding a different job.  If I leave this one, I think it will be to leave the world.

I would like to be able just to walk and walk and see what happens, if my body can be conditioned to tolerate it.  Maybe I could achieve something worthwhile, call attention to something important, and perhaps achieve some manner of spiritual insight.  Otherwise, I’d be just as happy (so to speak) to walk until it kills me.  In fact, to keep myself committed to walking this morning, I reminded myself, “I’m trying to hurt myself, so it’s fine if I’m uncomfortable or in pain while doing it.”  It’s the pain which sometimes  follows that’s most annoying, but at least I seem to have avoided any serious recurrence of blisters so far.

We’ll see what happens.  Maybe, if I can arrange it, someday I’ll just wander off, and no one will ever see me or hear from me again.  That wouldn’t be so bad.

In the meantime, I’ll probably be back writing a post tomorrow, but not on Saturday.  I hope you all, at least, have a good day.

TTFN

wanderer-in-a-storm redo

*It turns out that’s no one; this train isn’t very crowded at all, despite the apparently large number of people at the station.  Curious.

**Do you get the distinction?  Dying is a process, an event, one that, by nature, for good, sound, biological reasons, usually involves pain and fear‒it’s the potential energy wall of the metaphorical chemical or physical reaction‒whereas being dead is just a state, or a lack of states, perhaps…the equilibrium of the completed chemical reaction.  It’s a state essentially identical to the one before we were ever conceived.  Permanent oblivion can be intimidating and perhaps even impossible truly to contemplate, but the painful processes leading to it are often the real impediment to the transition.

***Heck, when I started having migraines, I had no idea what they were, and I didn’t know, until I was in medical school, that my horrible, queasy, light-phobia-inducing headaches, presaged by a growing patch of twinkling light in my eyes that didn’t go away when I closed them, were migraines, and indeed were what are called “classic” migraines.  Thankfully, those don’t happen all that often now.

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A troubling partial shutdown yesterday of unknown cause

I’m writing this on my phone today, because yesterday I didn’t bring my laptop with me when I left the office.  It was a deliberate choice; I felt absolutely…well, it’s hard to describe, but clearly I was not at all healthy or well.

It was a very strange day, internally at least.  I started out reasonably okay, after having no worse a night’s sleep than usual, which is something like 4 or so total hours of non-continuous sleep.  I wrote a relatively fun blog post, which just sort of happened.  I certainly didn’t plan what I wrote, it just all poured out, shaping itself even as it came into existence.  That, at least, is not unusual for me.

But then, at the office–actually, really, by the time I got to the office, and certainly by the start of business–I felt the first a wave of my usual, work-related tension that comes from having the endure the noise, and the questions and erratic shifts in direction and momentum, as people come interrupt me, while I’m clearly doing some work-related task, and ask me, without any preamble or waiting period, to do something for them, or to help them with something, or whatever.  I also went over the reports from one of the companies with which we contract to make sure their records match ours (I do this every week).  And then I just felt my nervous system begin to fade out.

I don’t mean that I lost consciousness or anything.  I just ran out of propulsion.  I hardly interacted, barely replied to questions, had a hard time even following what anyone was saying, and had difficulty even moving.  I could do it, but only when necessary, and it was much slower than usual.  I felt truly like someone who was in many ways already dead.

Indeed, I contemplated just taking a big fistful of Tylenol and swallowing it, just to take some kind of action, but that would only cause trouble for people in the office, assuming they knew I even did it.  I did take slightly more pain medicine than usual, because my left hip and lower back were acting up slightly more than average, but even that didn’t seem to stimulate any real behavior or anything other than the aforementioned stuff.

By early-to-mid-afternoon, I was barely moving, and in between specific tasks I mainly just stared in a random direction.  I thought about just lying down outside in the thunderstorm that was going on then, in the “alley” behind where the office is, only partly in the thought that maybe I would get run over, mostly in the thought that it would be good just to lay out and let the elements take me and wash me away.  But neither that, nor lying on the train tracks (which briefly went through my mind), were things I could think of too seriously, largely because I wouldn’t want to cause the trouble for so many other people such an action would cause, and because they would require movement to accomplish.

Also, in a way, I knew that I probably would not be able to resist the biologically mandated drive for avoidance that approaching cars or trains would trigger.  Maybe that’s part of the reason I think of such things–to trigger that fear and perhaps wake myself up.

Yesterday, though, it was mainly apathy and lack of energy that prevented me from doing anything.  I think if someone else had picked me up and plopped me on the tracks or in the road at one point, I would just have lain where I was placed.

I’ve had episodes somewhat like this before, where part of or a lot of my brain just seems to lose all impetus, all sense of motion.  It’s often associated with depression, but not always.  I didn’t even feel tired, or at least not sleepy.  Sleep is not a readily available thing for me a lot of the time.  It’s more as if the springs that drive my clockwork ran out of tension and everything consequently just slowed to a halt.

In particular, I noticed I had a hard time talking, certainly in anything above a mumble.  I was reminded of a strange thing that happened when I was very young, certainly well before I was kindergarten age.  I had become frustrated with some attempt to say something–either no one seemed to be listening, or I was told to be quiet for some reason or other (as little kids sometimes are, out of necessity) or I just couldn’t find the words I wanted, and I remember thinking to myself, in effect, “Fine, I just won’t talk anymore.”

But soon I realized, when I had gotten past my initial little grumpy response, and wanted to say something, that my voice didn’t want to respond.  I had effectively shut down my ability to speak.  And I could kind of feel that, if I didn’t force it, I might not be able to speak ever again, sort of like Holly Hunter’s character in The Piano (not that I thought about that…that movie lay a few decades in the future).

Anyway, it was quite frightening, and I really had to struggle to get myself to say something.  Finally I did, and I’ve never gotten quite that close to being nonverbal again.  But I felt somewhat close to it yesterday, and the thought made me wonder if this could be something akin to an “autistic shutdown” (though I’m not even sure if I’m “on the spectrum”…maybe I’m just a freaking weirdo, which seems most likely).  I tried to look the symptoms up, with my limited will, but the ones I saw at a cursory glance didn’t quite resonate.  There were videos I might have watched but I had no capacity to follow a video.

Apparently my state was noticeable and rather concerning to my coworker/work-friend.  He began showing me about a forthcoming movie, and then I told him it looked cool but I wasn’t going to be watching it, or any other movie.  But he couldn’t really hear me, because I was speaking so low.

He asked me if I was okay, asked if I needed him to call an ambulance (no…what would they possibly do?) or if I wanted to go “home” (no…as I said to him, needing to repeat it since he couldn’t hear me, “home” is shit, my “home” sucks, and I like it no better than the office or the train or the street, except for the fact that I can vegetate there all alone).  Anyway, I tried to tell him I didn’t know what was happening, but that my brain just wasn’t working, and I didn’t know why.  It must’ve felt for him a bit like trying to have a conversation with Stephen Hawking when he had to use his voice synthesizer thing.

He did his best to give me encouraging and supportive words‒he knows I have trouble with depression‒and asked me to let him know if there was anything he could do.  I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t know what to do, or what anyone could do, but I sort of nodded in recognition of his kindness.

After a low point at about 3 pm, my capacity started to creep back upward, and I was able to talk and interact more, and by the end of the day I even made a few stupid jokes.  I kept up with my work as I pretty much always do.  But I never got quite back up to my usual, “normal” level of energy, such as it is, and I still don’t feel quite fully functional, even for me.  I guess we’ll see what happens.

It’s too much to hope that this is some kind of imminent moribund crisis that will take me inescapably out of the world, but it’s not good.  Today is payroll, and I must go to work to deal with that, but I wish I could just not move.  I’m not sleepy at all, unfortunately, and I don’t really even feel “tired”, not in the usual, normal sense.  I just feel almost immobile, or at least with very limited “motor” function (not in the neurological sense of motor versus sensory neurons, for instance, but very much in the thermodynamic, Carnot engine type sense).

Maybe that’s it.  Maybe I’m approaching maximum personal entropy.  Maybe I’m nearing some personal, metaphorical thermal equilibrium and there’s just no more “free” energy that can be turned into useful work.

I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see how today goes.

I have to leave now to head to the bus stop, because it’s getting “late” for me.  I will try to keep you all posted, but I don’t know what is happening, so I’m far from sure what will happen.  In any case, I hope you have a good day collectively, and good days individually.  Which is an interesting, parallel and coterminous yet not identical time construction and notion all on its own, come to think of it.