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Brief thoughts on candy, carbon, communication, and a shared “video”

Well, it’s Wednesday, the day after Valentine’s Day.  I know it’s not technically the Ides of February or anything—at least I think I know that—but there ought to be an official day for the day after Valentine’s Day, some equivalent of Boxing Day after Christmas.  Maybe we could call it Barfing Day; that might be both fun and appropriate.

I was thinking that yesterday would have been an excellent day for me to have a heart attack.  It seems an appropriate potentially fatal healthcare crisis to have on a day when everyone is sharing “heart-shaped”* treats, many if not all of which are not great for the coronary arteries.  However, though I did in fact find myself once sprinting to beat a light and then later sprinting to catch a bus—one can’t get much more cliché than that when it comes to myocardial infarctions—I felt not a hint of chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, or what have you.  Disappointing.  And the only nausea I felt was that sort of subjective nausea that isn’t a true physical feeling, but which is a projection of disgust over the very silly and stupid things people say and do.

This queasiness was not in response to Valentine’s Day activities!  Don’t get me wrong.  I thought Barfing Day was a good follow-up day because eating too many sweets in one day can lead to GI upset.  For the most part, I think it’s nice that people express love, romantic and/or otherwise, to those important to them.  It may be frustrating that it’s such a ritualized, scheduled expression of love, but unfortunately, if it were not for such rituals, it’s probable that many people would never make or think of any such expression at all.

Sometimes, it seems, humans need rituals to make them realize their own feelings, and perhaps even to confront their own feelings.  This can apply to bad feelings as well as to good, as when, on the approach to a holiday such as Valentine’s Day, someone realizes that the person with whom they are currently linked is someone with whom they don’t really feel that strong a bond.  Hopefully such a realization occurs before too much has been invested in a relationship.

I suppose the need to act in recognition of such a fact can sometimes lead to a stereotypical Valentine’s Day breakup, which is harsh, but perhaps better than the alternative of a long, unpleasant relationship with increasing acrimony and emotional (if not physical) abuse.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I don’t know; I’m making this up as I go.

In distant parallel to the above, I sometimes think that maybe we should lace all Valentine’s Day candies with hormone blockers or something along those lines to diminish the sex drive of those who eat them.  Surely, anything that can be done to decrease the breeding of new humans is probably going to be a benefit for the rest of the planet, and evolution just isn’t likely to get to that solution on its own.

On second thought, that may actually be a foolish notion.  Honestly, I’d worry more about people if they didn’t have any children, because the nurturing of children is one of the most potent triggers and encouragers of love—not to mention forethought—in humans.  As I think Fagin said in the musical Oliver, I think I’d better think it out again.

Anyway, that’s all for you guys to worry about.  I’m giving up on it, and with any luck, none of what humans do will have any impact on me, other than perhaps to alter slightly the rate of decay of my corpse.  Though it would be useful, I think—and as I’ve written before—to enact a policy, or even a tradition, of storing the bodies of the deceased in deep ocean subduction zones, to get them out of the carbon cycle.

Cremation seems like a terrible idea; it just gives everyone one last lunge to increase their individual carbon footprint!

It probably doesn’t make much difference, though, honestly.  Such minor sequestering and the like on local, individual level is unlikely to accumulate into anything of significance to the global atmosphere.  I think it will only be the development of new science, technologies, and processes that will engineer out the excess carbon from the atmosphere, perhaps using some adjusted and enhanced equivalent of photosynthesis on an industrial scale (among other thing).  After all, photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide and water—potent greenhouse gases—from the atmosphere and ultimately converts them into carbohydrates and fats and such.  These can then be sequestered, if necessary, or converted to bioplastics, and biofuels, to use for things we currently do with fossil fuels.

The local energy for those processes can be derived from the products of the photosynthesis (ultimately from the sun) and so on, so that even when not truly “carbon-negative” it will be at worst “carbon-neutral”.

Of course, it’s stupid to be carbon neutral as a matter of personal, aesthetic judgment.  Carbon is the backbone of life as we know it, and probably will be for most if not all other life in the universe, if there is any.

I know, in these matters, “carbon” is just a shorthand for greenhouse gas reduction and whatnot, but I wonder how many people really think about that when they use the term, especially when one considers that water vapor, which is more potent than CO2  as a greenhouse gas, has no carbon in it at all, and methane, which is also more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, has only one carbon atom for every four hydrogen atoms.  And a molecule of methane burns to make one molecule of CO2 and two molecules of water.

If more people were more scientifically literate and careful in their thought, a great many of our problems would probably be diminished, so my biggest local lament here is that many of the more vocal activists on all sides may refer to things like carbon and economics and communication and the like without even really thinking about the words they are saying.  Such words in such cases aren’t tools of communication, but are, as Eliezer Yudkowsky notes, just soldiers going into battle.  What a horrible bastardization of the greatest invention of the human species.

In closing, I just want to let you know that I recorded myself reading aloud the last blog post I made on my alternate blog Iterations of Zero, and I’ve turned it into a video to put on YouTube.  I’ve embed it here, below.  It’s only three minutes long, and some of that is a lead-in moment of silence.

You can read it or listen, whatever you like, but I hope if you “watch” it you’ll give it a “thumbs up” on YouTube.

It’s a brief discussion of a thought experiment or story of a person trapped in a peculiar prison and trying to send messages for help without alerting the jailer, but it’s not as simple as it seems, and it’s not actually fiction.

Enjoy.

*And they are truly sort of heart-shaped, especially if you look at the interior shape of a heart.

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Some 義理チョコ from me to you, with 感謝

It’s Tuesday, February 14th, which means that it’s Valentine’s Day, a day that is “celebrated” in the United States and Japan at the very least.  I think it’s observed in many other places, but I’m not at all certain of anything specific.

I guess it’s appropriate, given that it’s a holiday nominally about romantic love, that it falls on a twos-day this year.  Ha.  Ha.  Excuse me, I think I have to throw up.

Anyway, to those of you who are having, or planning to have, a lovely day with your significant other—or others, I suppose that’s possible—I hope you have a nice, even a terrific, day.  Honestly, I do.  I’ve gotten to the point in my depression where I certainly don’t feel envious or spiteful or anything.  I’m just mostly empty.  So do whatever you like with each other, with your civilization, with the world, whatever.  Ruin it, save it, let it slowly grind away, gasping and limping, to its inevitable end.  I don’t really care.  I have no skin in much of any game, anymore, not even my own.

It’s curious, the form in which Valentine’s Day was imported into Japan, at least according to every light novel, manga, and anime I’ve seen that deals with it.  It’s a day on which girls give chocolate to friends and/or to those with whom they are infatuated /romantically interested (usually boys, but not always nor exclusively).  That’s giri-choco (義理チョコ) versus honmei-choco (本命チョコ)* if I recall the terms correctly.  Subsequently, the standard practice is for one who received chocolate (usually a boy) to return some kind of gift on March 14th, which is called “White Day”, and appears to be a holiday that solely exists in Japan.

I doubt anyone much planned for any of these things to happen, of course, despite frequent complaints, there and here, that such holidays were invented by greeting card companies or the like.  As with most human institutions—indeed, as with civilization itself—they are spontaneously self-assembling systems.  They are not even in any kind of stable and/or dynamic equilibrium.  Certainly there are people and organizations that benefit from Valentine’s Day, and they will encourage it to continue and to grow to the degree they can—candy manufacturers, florists, greeting card companies, those sorts of people and things—but that happens very much spontaneously.  As with most actual “conspiracies” it’s not planned, it just occurs.

There is no shame or crime in any of this.  Who among you, given an opportunity to benefit yourself (and by extension, your family and others you love) through the honest production of goods and services that reinforce and spread the memes of a holiday which is at least nominally a positive and cheerful one, would not do so?  Making a living while supporting love seems like a win-win situation.

No one forces you to buy candies, or cards, or decorations.  No one forces you to be in a relationship**, no one forces you to buy holiday-associated clothes or treats or jewelry or whatever.  You may feel strong urges to do such things, but you can’t blame those who recognize those urges and make products that respond to them.  You can’t blame McDonalds for the fact that you feel hungry but don’t want to go to the trouble of eating somewhere else, anymore than McDonalds can blame you if you do choose to eat somewhere else.

I don’t know how I got off on that tangent.  I think I was arguing with myself, past and present, as much as anything else.  It’s all academic and moot to me, now, really.  I have no romantic interest, haven’t had any for quite a long time, and I don’t expect—or really, want—one any time before I die.  I’m a cat whose feet have been burned too painfully to risk walking across that stovetop again.  It was all always confusing and counterintuitive to me from the start, to be honest.

Speaking of walking, my feet still have a little bit of soreness from Saturday, but I got through my four miles total of walking yesterday without much trouble, and my blisters are resolving but not gone.  I think if I undertake such long walking—or longer—in the near future, I should probably do an hour on, an hour off, and so on, at least until I get used to it.  I know I can walk for an hour at a time without any real trouble.

I should also make sure to apply sunscreen.  My nose and forehead are peeling, and that’s not appealing at all.

Sorry.  Stupid pun.  I don’t like it, either, but I have a tendency to punish and hurt myself, and unfortunately, you readers got caught in the process this time.  I apologize; I try not to cause harm to innocent people when I self-harm.  I generally try not even to let people know about it.  But, of course, in the ultimate, it’s a tricky conundrum to go the final distance, so to speak, without at least inconveniencing or worrying some other people, and that’s frustrating.

I don’t know quite how I’m going to get past that.  But I’m going to have to try.  Because my tank has long since been hovering near empty, and the little warning LED has been lit for miles.  There’s no gas station in sight that I can reach, as far as I can tell, and I’m in the middle of the desert, so walking to get a can of gas to bring back is risky.

But it still may not be a bad idea.  Walking to get gas may succeed, it may be useful, with a great deal of luck.  And if it doesn’t, if it isn’t, well…a desert is at least a relatively unbothersome place to die.

I don’t know what I mean by all this.  Have a good day, please.

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*See the title of this blog post.  Giri choco means, more or less, “obligatory” chocolate, though I don’t think that usually implies insincerity.  It certainly doesn’t with me for this post.  Honmei choco is “true feelings” chocolate, basically saying to someone that you have romantic feelings for them.  It is important to make clear which one you’re giving.

**Not most places, anyway.  If that’s happening, it is indeed a crime and a violation.  But forced marriages or any other variations of such things are generally not what people mind about Valentine’s Day.

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Pursuing it with eager, weary feet

It’s Monday morning again.

Hooray…

It’s the second Monday in February, though it feels like it ought to be the third, at least to me.  That’s because the first was on a Wednesday, so it feels like the work week is slightly askew compared to the length of the month.  And, of course, because this is February in a non-leap-year, that means that March will also start on a Wednesday, as I know I’ve mentioned on this blog before.

I’m writing this on my laptop, because this weekend I was forethoughtful enough to bring it with me when I left the office.  I had a potent reminder all day Friday from my severely sore and aching thumbs, and we didn’t push past usual closing time, since everyone gets their checks on Friday, and no one wants to delay things.

I had an adventure of sorts this weekend.  I had realized on Friday, after walking home from the train instead of taking the bus, that I had walked just shy of nine miles that day, and I felt pretty good, physically at least.  So I decided on Saturday to take a longish walk and at the same time try out some new hiking shoes/boots I had recently bought and had only worn twice to work.  They had seemed fine, but they were designed for hiking, so I figured I might as well do a bit of a hike.

I first walked two miles to a nearby 7-11, where I picked up some snacks for later and a bag of cat food for the cat I leave food for outside, and put the items in my backpack.  Then I decided to go out west along the road I’d come from in the east, just to see how long a walk it was to the turnpike crossing, and then—if that was a reasonable distance—on to the next major north-south walkable road and up to the crossroad that would eventually come back to where I live.

Well, the turnpike wasn’t all that far away, or so it seemed, though it had been a steady if shallow uphill walk of nearly two more miles.  Then I passed the Hard Rock Stadium, which I had never seen in person before.  Then I finally got to a north-south road, recommended by Google Maps.  It wasn’t the one I thought it was, but it was okay.

I was feeling pretty hot by then; it had been 80 degrees out when I started, and the skies were at least half clear.  I’d already had a small bottle of Lime Perrier—not nearly as good as the orange or the pineapple, and miles away from the peach!—and decided to stop in the next convenience store for water.  They had no fizzy water, so I got two one-liter bottles of Aquafina®, which was probably a bad idea.  They were heavy, and my backpack was already none too light, nor is it really a hiking backpack.  It’s more of a student-oriented backpack.

Anyway, heading back I tried to use Google Maps to pick the most direct walking route, but it led me around behind a casino and toward what it thought was an accessible road, but which had been blocked some time in the past, said blockage including big signs telling everyone that all copper had been removed from the facility.  Was it ever a public walkway?

So I had to reconfigure and reorient, trusting my own judgement a bit, though I’d been wrong about the distance to the road past the turnpike.  I backtracked to the proper road before too very long, but I did rest in the shade in the casino parking lot—which was huge and grassy—not caring if anyone thought I was weird, since people tend to think I’m weird, anyway.  I’d been drinking the water steadily, but I was starting to feel more and more fatigued.  I only realized it later, but I was also getting a bit of a sunburn.

Anyway, I had to stop and rest for about ten minutes at a time on a few more occasions, including one where I sat against a wall with my shirt off, no doubt looking like an overweight homeless person.  I thought I must be dehydrated, so I kept drinking water, and pouring some on my back and head.  I also walked up and over the turnpike this time, on an artificial hill much steeper than any natural one in south Florida.

Finally, I decided I’d come far enough that it was okay if I took a bus for the last leg of the trip; I had rested at bus stops a few times.  I waited for the Dade County bus, having put my shirt back on, and then rode only about a mile until the stop just before where I live.  I got back to the house and, not too long after, felt queasy (actually, I’d had hints of it before), so I grabbed a Tupperware container nearby—because I had laid down and didn’t want to get up—and then promptly threw up copious amounts of water, pretty much all the water I had drunk.  I had to switch Tupperware containers in the middle.  I guess in my worry about dehydrating, I had overcompensated, and my stomach was just irritated by the water, and almost none of it got absorbed.

That didn’t last long, though, because there’s only so much one can throw up when one has drunk two liters of water but hadn’t eaten yet that day.  I did get a cramp in my upper abs from the heaving, which was not fun at all.  I was pretty wiped out, and I recognized my sunburn at that point; most of my usual walking is early morning and later evening, so I haven’t walked in the sun for a while.

It turned out, based on my pedometer, that I had hiked almost exactly twelve miles (it had taken almost six hours, but that was with a lot of stopping).  So, that was quite a trek for a Saturday—longer than I had planned for it to be, but my shoulders were far more troubled than my legs, and indeed, they were the most common reason why I took breaks.

I did get a few new minor blisters, because of the combination of the long distance and the new boots, which were quite good in general, but which are, of course, going to rub in different places than my usual shoes.  It was a good starter hike, though, and I mean to keep working my way up, because I have a goal/plan in mind, and I don’t want to be hindered by silly things like blisters and sore shoulders, and other things I can condition myself for ahead of time.

Anyway, it’s probably been a boring blog post, and my sister has already heard the story, so she’ll probably be really bored by it, but it was a bit of an adventure, and was not without its own minor perils and pains.  I’m going to try to work in more walking during my typical days, though I may take the bus home from the train today, just to let the blisters rest.

Further bulletins as events warrant, or probably even as they don’t.

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Brief thoughts on habits, and locality of points of view, and the causes of headaches

I’m going to try to make this short today.  Of course, it won’t be as short as yesterday, when I didn’t write a blog post at all; my apologies for that if you were disappointed or concerned.

I was “at home” yesterday with a migraine headache, which I suspect was triggered partly by the tension from my sore thumbs, though obviously that’s not the whole story.  Then again, when is anything the whole story?  If the universe is infinite, and especially if there are multiverses‒of various levels‒then even describing everything in our visible universe would not be “the whole story”.  We’re left relying on some analog of perturbation theory to try to make sense of most things in the world.

I’m also going to try to make this short because‒stupidly enough‒I’m writing this on my phone again.  I had intended to bring my laptop with me when I left work on Wednesday, but I was stressed out, and (ironically) distracted by the pain in my hands, and by the usual person who keeps us late, who kept us late.  So, I was a bit rushed when leaving, and I screwed up and left the laptop behind.  Habits are things of powerful inertia, which is a good reason to cultivate useful ones.

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day lying in my room with the lights out, listening to some YouTube videos with the sound low.  My brain still feels rather soggy and squishy, like a wrung-out, beat-up old sponge, but I doubt that comes across as being any different than how I usually come across.

Hopefully no one was too worried about me when I didn’t write my usual blog post yesterday.  Honestly, someone who reads my blog regularly enough to notice that I didn’t write one as usual would probably long since either have seriously started to worry about me in general or would simply have given up on me as a lost cause.  They would not be unjustified in either case.  I don’t know what to say to such a person, since I don’t really know what to say to myself.

I’m not sure what topic readers might be interested in discussing, today.  I’m too frustrated to want to get into politics, because frankly, most politics seems to be a panorama of billions of apes who could easily get together and come up with workable solutions to their problems, or at least with working solutions, things that could be tried and adjusted and tweaked, but they simply are not in the habit of rising above their immediate monkey natures.

It’s not so much a problem that they respond to local pressures and incentives‒that’s the nature of reality itself, and me indeed be a good definition of locality; it can’t be avoided, any more than a closed system can choose to ignore the conservation of momentum or the 2nd law of thermodynamics.  It’s that they don’t even try to lift their heads up and look out beyond their own habitual points of view, their own emotional reactions and pre-digested judgmentalism, to try to get a bigger and deeper awareness of objective versus subjective reality.  Ironically, this would have the effect of potentially making those more distant pieces of information into local pressures and incentives, because they would be in their heads.

I don’t have high hopes for the human race, though there are occasional glimmers of promise here and there.  Unfortunately, it seems that too many people think that anyone who doesn’t agree with them about all matters other than purely aesthetic taste‒and sometimes even that becomes a dividing line‒is not merely wrong but is actually evil.  But no two people will agree on absolutely everything, because the phase space of possible thoughts and values, if not infinite, is vastly larger than the space of all thoughts that have ever been.  So, this attitude effectively balkanizes the whole human race into 8 billion individual instances of solitary versions of “Us” set against a vast sea of Them.

Maybe we should take a hint from George Harrison and have all people who so “proudly” display their pronouns on various social media* simply use “I/Me/Mine”.  Most of their little proclamations appear‒to those of us observing humans from the outside‒simply to be akin to the non-functional constructions of bower birds or the dances of bird of paradise, not the well-considered but provisional positions of creatures with sophisticated minds.  They might as well pin a leek on their lapels or put a sign in their shop windows reading “worker of the world unite”.  Or they could just whistle “Dixie”.

Okay, well, I guess that’s what I was going to write about today.  Who would have guessed?  Who would have bothered to make a guess?  Probably no one.  Why would anyone bother thinking about a creature like me?  I wish I didn’t have to think about me, frankly, so I can’t hold it against you if you don’t want to do it.  I’m tired of the whole mess already.

Oh, and incidentally, my pronouns are “It/it”…other than first person pronouns, obviously.  Those are “I/Me/Mine”.

*Which, I suspect, most of them do as a badge of fashion‒like wearing a ball cap with the emblem of a sports team‒not as any deeply thought out statement about the importance of such tags and identifiers.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

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The sound and the fury of sore thumbs

I’m writing this on my laptop today because my thumb joints (especially in my right thumb) are severely painful and inflamed.  Okay, technically it’s the base where my thumb attaches to the wrist and palm, not the actual interphalangeal joint within the thumb, but I’m not going to split hairs or phalanges right now.  Although I guess I just did that, didn’t I?

I’ve tried to cut out any other activities that cause my thumb(s) to hurt—other than handwriting things at the office to fix incorrect or missing information on paperwork, and even that hurts—but it has been to no avail.  It seems extremely likely that it’s the writing of blog posts on my phone that is making things—thumbs—act up.  I wouldn’t give it a 100% estimate, but it’s mightily close.

Fortunately for me—though perhaps not for you—I hardly use my thumbs at all when typing on a laptop keyboard.  So this gives them a bit of rest.

I guess it’s just as well that I haven’t gotten any feedback encouraging me to complete either of my partly completed stories or to start a new one, because if I had done so on the phone, I probably would have needed to give up on that.  Ditto for if I had decided to write it out long-hand, since the use of pen and paper even a few dozen times a day seems at least to cause the joint to flare up, and writing a book by hand again would probably have caused similar problems or worse ones.

I did listen to and begin editing that voice recording I made while walking to the bus stop on Monday, but I’ve decided not to post it.  Quite apart from the fact that I merely said inane things—which was, after all, as expected—the fact that I walk pretty quickly gave my voice a peculiar wobble that reminded me just a bit of Katherine Hepburn, though with a lower frequency of wobble.  No disrespect intended to the great, great actor that she was, but I just felt weird about the recording, as if I were doing a disrespectful impression.

I’ll try to make a sedentary audio recording sometime soon to upload here and as a “video”, if I can keep up my motivation to do anything at all.  No promises!

I’ve noticed that my readership, as well as my “liker” ship has gone down recently, possibly because my writing has become more depressing as I’ve become more depressed, though I feel as though my writing has been pretty depressing all along.  Also, I haven’t been reading (and liking, when it’s accurate) other blogs as much as I used to do, largely because I haven’t been reading (or liking in any sense) much of anything lately.

I’ve been forcing myself to reread some things that I know I’ve liked in the past, so I read a bit of Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality—he’s as good as it gets for entertaining and reasonably deep science explanation—and then skipped over to reread Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe, which is also a great book.  Tegmark even refers readers to Greene’s book for a discussion on the possibility of making new universes deliberately if inflationary cosmology is correct*.

Anyway, I’ve gotten somewhat tired of even those two excellent books, and was going to switch to Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time, which is not better (or worse) but at least discusses things like the eventual end of our universe as we know it, and so seems more appropriate to my mindset.  However, I did receive a pre-ordered Japanese light novel yesterday that I hadn’t recalled was coming, so I’m reading that first.  I will probably be done with it by midday today, even only reading it during breaks and lunch, and even though today is payroll day.

It’s a pleasant enough story, but of course, even though it’s about a “loner”, it entails the loner having friends and a girlfriend and doing various activities, and anyway, he was never a loner because of awkwardness or rejection of or by others—he’s one of the most self-assured characters in the story—but simply because that was what he preferred, no sour grapes required.

This is the second, and apparently last, of the “light novels” of this series.  The characters are nice, and their interactions are free of the usual stupid melodrama that so often infects fiction about “normal” people when there are no deadly forces facing them, just the idiocies of other humans, so that’s pleasant.  I hate when stories create “drama” out of nowhere by introducing unrealistic misunderstandings and conflicts.  If you just gave your characters supernatural enemies to fight, you wouldn’t have to invent personal difficulties that make them look like kindergarteners on a playground, but with less sense of fairness and personal responsibility!

That book won’t last me more than about half a day, probably.  I always get weird when I read those stories, anyway.  I feel almost as if I am the characters, and I begin to think and even talk to myself as if I were—heck I even find myself thinking that way when playing phone-app euchre immediately after, in my thoughts toward my “partner” and the other two “players”**.  It’s very strange, and it doesn’t last long, but it’s quite melancholy, and tends to make me feel worse about myself once I return to myself, and no one needs that.  Just being me is bad enough as it is.

Not that I would prefer to be anyone else.  It’s a bit like Winston Churchill’s purported quote about democracy—I am the worst person in the word for me to be…except for all the other people I could be.  Something like that.  It doesn’t quite work, but you probably get the idea.

Anyway, I’ve already written more, and well before the bus has arrived, than I usually write at all using the phone; there’s no doubt that I write quickly on my laptop.  I should probably wrap this up soon.  I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow if my thumbs are still killing me.  I’ve tried various treatments, both topical and systemic, and even tried wrapping my thumb up a bit, but so far to little avail.  It hurts like a son of a bitch***, and the joint is getting unstable, so that when I shook my hand in the air—briefly—trying to distract myself or loosen it up somewhat, I could feel it pop out of joint slightly, and that didn’t help with the pain, as I’m sure you can guess.

I suppose, if I write at all, I’ll write tomorrow’s post on the laptop.  I honestly feel like wrapping this whole thing up, along with everything else, not just for the day, but for good, so to speak.  There’s no point to any of it.  It’s not helping my depression, that’s clear.  It’s not eliciting any good recommendations about help or insights, or any mythical, heroic rescue of any kind.  It’s not providing any kind of therapy.  And it’s not getting me started back to writing fiction again.  So what’s the point?  It’s just the proverbial, Shakespearean tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I’m in pain all the time, I’m alone, and I have no capacity to act on my own behalf, which means that frankly I deserve it if I crash and burn—literally or figuratively—and just die without any revelation or meaning or recognition.  But I’ve always really known that I deserve that, anyway.  I’ve never even really been in denial about it, or at least not for quite a long time.

I don’t know.  If I write tomorrow, I guess you’ll see it here on my blog.  If not, I don’t know what I’ll be doing, if anything.  I can’t make any promises one way or the other, honestly.  Sorry about that, Chief.

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*Greene points out that it would likely be quite disappointing, since, based on General Relativity and the best of the rest of our theoretical understanding, in the original universe, the new universe would just turn into a tiny black hole, and the creators would have no access to their new universe.  Of course, this presumes they don’t discover some means by which to access other universes semi-directly, but if you can do that, why do you need to make a new one?  In any case, as far as I can see, a very small black hole is going to become an immediate, violent source of Hawking radiation that would fry anything around it with tremendous force before it fully and rapidly evaporates, but presumably such an advanced technological civilization could shield themselves from such things.  A bigger question is, when the black hole evaporates, what, if any, effect does it have on the nascent universe?

**They’re all just computer generated.  I have no interest in playing any kind of game online with strangers.  I can’t even deal with interacting with the other people on online support groups or subject-matter groups about things in which I’m interested; I surely don’t want to play card games with strangers.  Anyway, I have more in common with simulated, computer-generated people than with “real” humans.  I even talk to them sometimes.

***This expression, presumably, refers to a puppy.  Do puppies tend to hurt a lot?  Well, they do when they bite you with those tiny little, needle-sharp teeth!  Ba-dump-bump, crash!  Waka, waka, waka.

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Walking words, a bad “life” habit, and cheapened love

I don’t recall if I already mentioned it, but yesterday I did a little trial recording, using my headphone mic, while I was walking to the bus stop.  I said nothing of significance, of course, but then, the argument could be made that there is nothing that of real significance.  But let’s not venture down that path of inquiry for the moment.

I just wanted to let you know that I had done this recording, and that I am probably going to edit it (for noise reduction, at least) and post it here and probably as a YouTube video, unless it’s really just too embarrassingly dull or stupid.  Maybe there are those who will find interesting the words I self-consciously mumbled to myself on the way to the bus stop.  Maybe they really are interesting.  Perhaps I have world-changing insights when I do my walking, and I just haven’t realized it because no other person has hitherto heard them.

I wouldn’t recommend betting much money on that, but I cannot say that it has a literal zero probability.  I can just say that it’s probably close enough to zero for all practical purposes.

If I were following usual human protocols, I would tell you that I uploaded the recording to my Google Drive and then downloaded it to the desktop‒both of which are true statements‒but that I didn’t have the chance to edit it yet.  This last bit is a cop-out fiction, one of a type to which it seems almost everyone from toddlers to centenarians turn.  If I were to say I hadn’t had the chance to edit it, that would be not merely an error, but technically a lie.

I had chances to edit it; I even had times when I was relatively idle and could readily have edited it, but did not.  I simply had no will to edit it‒it’s that “executive function” thing, or whatever the current jargon is.  For most of the day yesterday, if I’d had to use mental effort to breathe, I would have suffocated.  And I would not have felt disappointed to do so, though I guess it would have been uncomfortable…for a short while, anyway.

My life is really uninteresting to me‒not in its specifics, necessarily, but in its mere fact.  It doesn’t hold any inherent interest.  It’s just a matter of habit, and I don’t know that it’s a very good habit.  It might, in fact, be a bad habit, though I guess you couldn’t call it a self-destructive one, at least not by the usual meaning of that term.

I can’t quite kick that habit yet, but I am working on it, and it is my intention to do so.  It’s just not good for me or for those around me, this life business.  Every illness and pain and sorrow that exists comes as a consequence of being alive.  I can’t recommend it as a habit.  It’s uniformly fatal, for one thing.

At the very least, we should protect the children from exposure to it‒in media, in toys, in advertising and so on.  Although…protecting the children would eventually become a moot point if one does that.

Obviously I haven’t yet thought this through fully, and also, my tongue has been in my cheek for the part where I was making recommendations for others.  I’ve no business doing that about such matters.  On the other hand, the preceding description of my personal attitude and intentions is not at all untrue; for me it’s just a matter of preparation and a bit of working up my courage.

Switching gears to other matters, but returning to notions of usual protocols among humans: is it just me, or is it just in south Florida, or is it something else, or are people saying “I love you” to coworkers and other non-family members a lot more often than people used to say it?

I don’t like it.  I could sometimes say that I hate it.

I think it’s perfectly okay for spouses and siblings and parents and children to say they love each other‒these are people one knows well, deeply, intimately, people who are integral, important parts of one’s life.  Loving them is natural, it’s good; they are in a sense part of one’s identity.

But when I hear people at work telling each other they love them, as while saying goodbye for the day or whatever, it cheapens the concept, it seems disgusting and disingenuous.  Sometimes it even seems manipulative, as though it’s an attempt to invoke a familial level of fealty and benefit by invoking such a powerful term.

To me, love is serious and important, maybe the most important non-survival-related thing in the human world, though it’s certainly not all you need*.  I don’t want co-workers telling me they love me, but sometimes they do say it.  My internal process when this happens‒in addition just to feeling squirmy and tense and uncomfortable and almost grossed-out‒is to think, “You don’t even really know me, you don’t share any common interests and experiences with me other than work, you certainly don’t seem interested in anything in which I am interested, you haven’t read my books or my blog or anything else I’ve written…you simply can’t love me, not in any sense that means anything.  You’re lying to me, to yourself, or to both.”

I suppose these people might think they are fulfilling some kind of Judeo-Christian edict of loving their neighbor as themselves or summat, but I don’t think that’s actually what they’re doing.  I think the words are a mere verbal ritual without meaning, and people throw them around haphazardly, as though giving their pre-school children plastic explosives and arc-welders as toys.

I even had a coworker‒who had requested feedback about something for the eighteen thousandth time and to whom I gave a rather sharp and impatient response‒who laughingly said, “I love you, too.”

I know it was a sarcastic, jokey remark, but I simply had to say, “I don’t love you.  I don’t hate you, either.  You’re fine.  I love my brother and sister, and I love my kids more than I knew I could love anything, and I loved my mother and father and my ex-wife and my extended family.  You are a coworker.”

It’s one thing if you’re honestly committed to the philosophy of lovingkindness, if you practice metta meditation, if you live your life not just saying the words but acting on them.  Then I think I wouldn’t be bothered by someone saying they love me, because it would not be some personal claim, or some attempt to achieve a claim upon me.  But otherwise, it’s almost insulting.  I don’t even love myself; I don’t need some person who barely knows me to claim to love me.  It’s not helpful to someone who hates himself for other people to fakely say that they love him; if anything, it merely highlights the notion that no honest person ever could really love me.

Him, I mean.  Him.

*With apologies to the Beatles.  No disrespect intended.

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This is an uncategorized blog post, which is somewhat self-contradictory, since “Uncategorized” is a category

Monday, Monday.

I cannot agree that, as the song by the Mamas and the Papas begins, it is so good to me, but I’ve heard that its child is fair of face and has just learned to tie its boot lace.  See how they run!

I have not been running in a long while, except for a few occasional paces when I’ve mistimed a traffic light and want to get across the street before the light changes.  But I have been walking a lot.  I walked back to the house from the train station on Saturday as I had on Friday, and there was no sign whatsoever of the bus that was supposed to have come, nor frankly the subsequent bus.

It was good exercise, though, and I’m pleased to report that I had no blistering nor unusual ankle soreness on Saturday evening or yesterday, so my body is adapting to the walking.  That’s a pleasant thing.  It doesn’t seem to be having any positive impact on my mood disorder(s), contrary to hopes and recommendations, but there’s no treatment that works in absolutely every case.

On an utterly unrelated note, I’ve noticed that, on my phone’s keyboard, if I hold a letter down, it lets me type what is usually a Greek letter using that key.  For instance, ß.  That was the “s” key held down.  If I press the “o” key*, I’m given several options, including ø and ó and ö as well as ōthers.  That’s kind of cool.

Now if only the auto-correct could stop adding apostrophes to “its”, then I would be quite grateful.  It’s mortifying to think that I might have published a post with “it’s” when it should be “its” because I didn’t catch one of the occasions when the program wrongly replaced my correct lack of punctuation.

I suppose it’s not really important.

Yesterday was a particularly dreary day for most of the day.  It was raining out, and I did my laundry in the morning.  I did speak on the phone to my sister in the evening, and that was quite nice, but otherwise I just lolled around doing nothing but watching random YouTube videos or similar, many of which I’ve already watched before.

YouTube seems to be having a harder and harder time finding videos that interest me.  I don’t know if the algorithm has changed or what, but when I go to the main screen and it shows me the layout of recommended videos, the vast majority are just not worth checking out.

Possibly the problem is with me more than with the algorithm.  Probably.  Almost certainly.  I’ve lost interest in more and more things as time has passed, especially very recently.  I’ve already mentioned how I can hardly even find any interest in reading books that I ought to enjoy, even books that I have often reread and enjoyed every time.

New movies and shows are almost completely uninteresting, and old movies and shows are mainly boring or bring back melancholy memories.  The only new thing that I’ve really become interested in is Doctor Who, but I’ve watched every episode already, repeatedly.  The next new episodes‒three specials‒don’t air until November, in honor of the 60th anniversary of the show.

I appreciate their sense of ceremony and remembrance, but I don’t think I’m going to survive even close to that long.  Facing the nine months between now and then feels like facing a lifetime sentence in a sensory deprivation tank, or perhaps a trip through Stephen King’s “jaunt”, from the short story by that name, without anaesthetic.

How long would one need to be in total sensory deprivation before it no longer mattered how much longer it would be, because the subjective experience of time would utterly come loose from any objective sense, and all of one’s reality would become like dream time?  After that happened, could it really matter if the remaining time was long or short?  I don’t know.  I don’t think anyone knows.  And finding out would be difficult and risky, especially for someone whose mental health is tenuous at best.

I wish I could stop trying to pretend to be pleasant or happy or upbeat or whatever it is people want.  There are people out there who always ask, “How are you?” or “How are you doing?” or similar questions, and it’s rude and inappropriate to reply, “I hate my life and wish I could work up the courage to kill myself,” so I often just sort of freeze up and shrug and don’t know what to say.  It’s fairly maddening.

I would like to scream and shriek and howl, and I feel as though it must be obvious how horrible I feel most of the time, every day, but weirdly, no one seems to notice.  I don’t understand.  No wonder I don’t “identify” as human.

I don’t know how I’m going to get through another week.  I don’t know why I’m going to get through another week.  Sooner or later‒knowing me, probably later, unfortunately‒I’m not going to get through another week.  I would say that it will probably happen without warning, but I’ve given plenty of warning.  Let’s just say that, as with most catastrophic failures of structures and systems, the buildup and the deteriorations are long and the evidence is there, but the final collapse is likely to be sudden and startling and to seem to come from nowhere.  I doubt it will even be very interesting.

I don’t think there’s much that I can do about that, though.  It’s all but out of my hands.

*Not to be confused with the “doe” key, though they are often pressed one right after the other.

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She told me to walk this way…

It’s Saturday.

I say that just in case you didn’t know.  I hope most of you are relaxing at home with your family and/or loved ones as you read this.  As I write it, I am of course sitting at the bus stop.

You may recall that yesterday my back was acting up especially badly.  It did so all day, pretty much without relent, despite copious use (probably to toxic levels) of OTC meds.

In the evening, after I had ridden the train back down south, I was waiting for the bus and watching the app that tracks arrival times at any given stop, with real time updates on delays or earliness.  The timing of the train’s arrival had been such that there was a bit of a wait (about twenty minutes or so) before the next bus.

But the bus didn’t show at the predicted time, and when I looked back at the app, it had just skipped ahead to the next bus time, half an hour later.  It seemed they had simply canceled that bus without notifying anyone.

I waited about five more minutes before getting fed up.  My patience was far from its peak in the first place, after a day of significantly elevated pain, and the lack of notification‒much more so than the apparent bus cancellation‒irked me mightily.  I figured, “You know what, I don’t feel like waiting for the next bus,”  So, I started walking.

Of course, as I’m sure you could have predicted, within another five minutes, the bus on which I had given up went rolling past me.  I guess it had just been ten minutes late, but its transponder, or telemetry, or whatever they call them, wasn’t connecting with the system that updates the app.  That’s irritating, but I suppose it sometimes happens when you put naked house apes (i.e. humans) in charge of technology.

It wasn’t too bad, though.  I decided I would just continue my walk for the 4.5 to 5 miles back to the house.  I took a route through the neighborhoods, some of which I had never passed before, though I knew the way.  It was just after sunset when I started; there was a fairly stiff breeze, and the temperature was in the sixties, so it was a pleasant walk.  It felt almost reminiscent of being out trick-or-treating back up north in my childhood.

Regrettably, of course, there were no Halloween decorations, and no kids in costumes‒I was mainly by myself on the sidewalks, listening to my shuffled “favorite songs” list on YouTube Music‒but I did see, through the large picture window of a third-ish floor “luxury” apartment building, that someone still had their Christmas tree up, and it was fully lit.

That was actually rather nice, although slightly odd and certainly unexpected.  I can understand why someone would want to keep a festive, brightly lit item around even after its traditional moment had passed, especially during the comparative holiday desert that follows New Year.  Sorry, Valentine’s Day does not count as a festive holiday!  And Saint Patrick’s Day, in America at least, is mainly a drinking holiday‒though corned beef and cabbage can be a quite wonderful dinner if one has it!

Returning to the original topic, though, I found that, as I walked, my back began to relax a bit, and before a few miles had passed, the pain had reduced to a much vaguer sensation, then finally it became insignificant relative to my normal tendency even to notice it.  My right Achilles tendon began complaining slightly* by the end of the walk, but it tends to do that anyway, almost since college, after I badly sprained my right ankle while playing catch.

Sorry, I know, this is all rather boring for a blog post, but I felt like having a mild celebration of the fact that I had soothed my back some by walking.  It hurts more again, now, starting as soon as I woke up, but it’s not as bad as it was yesterday, and hopefully it won’t become so.  If it does, I guess I know what to do about it at least.  Just having that degree of available control makes things a little better, even if one doesn’t use it.

I keep thinking about better types of subjects about which to blog‒as you know‒including medical topics and physics and philosophy and psychology and whatnot.  I still owe you all a blog post or audio blog/podcast about sugar.  I haven’t forgotten.  I just have to decide to buckle down and do it.

But motivation, or executive function, or whatever they call it, is apparently often difficult for people with ASD, as I suspect I am, and also, of course, for people with dysthymia/depression, as I know I am.  That’s not an excuse, so to speak, though both are things I certainly didn’t choose.

Who would willingly choose to be depressed?  It’s truly a thing of horror, but it’s not even exciting or interesting or even disgusting horror.  It’s just a lack of any connection, a sense of learned helplessness that precedes any learning.  And, of course, it includes an inability to be optimistic or to feel certain of anything other than how horrible a person one is.

Maybe everyone, if they could see themselves without filter, without excuse, without delusion, would grow weary of themselves, would be disgusted, would end up hating themselves, and hating the world by reflection or projection.

I’ve read that the modern Catholic conception of Hell is not Fire and Brimstone, but merely a state without any connection to God, a complete removal from God’s presence, cut off from the source of life and light.  It’s rather like the Void in Tolkien’s universe, where Melkor wandered and first began having thoughts unlike those of his brethren, and to which he was consigned after the War of Wrath.  Anyway, that Catholic notion feels like a good metaphor for depression.  It’s not fire and brimstone; that’s all too dramatic, even melodramatic, and interesting in its own way.  Dysthymia and depression are much drearier and more dismal than that.  And yet there is pain.

Oh, well.  Maybe even in the Void, a good long walk can help temporarily ease some kinds of pain.  That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

*You wouldn’t think that something named for the mightiest warrior of the Iliad would be prone to whine, would you.  Then again, he was a bit of a snotty character, and he was invulnerable other than his heel in the original story, so he probably would have moaned a lot when in pain.

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This is a virtual, placeholder title that has become “real”. Can an event horizon be far away?

Yesterday, as I noted when I started my post, I wasn’t sure if I was going to bother to find a Shakespearean quote to alter to make my title, nor to find a picture to add to the post, both as I usually do on Thursdays.  Then, near the end of the post, after I had spontaneously quoted King Lear, it just felt appropriate to find something a little later in that same speech to use for my title.  So, I did.

Once I did that, I figured I might as well find some picture of King Lear in the storm to use at the bottom of the post.  But most of the ones I found had the Jester there next to him, and various other sorts of bric-a-brac, so none of them suited.  Therefore, I did what I often do, which was to find bits and pieces of images that I could throw together and manipulate with the GIMP program to turn into what roughly suited my purpose.

My pictorial version of Lear, if you will, got transplanted to what looks like south Florida, based on the palm trees and the apparent hurricane.  This seemed appropriate, since I was channeling King Lear by quoting him.

I don’t know why I’ve decided to go into the mechanics of those processes, but it was a pretty good way to jump start today’s post.

I forgot to mention yesterday that it was Groundhog’s Day.  Or should that be Groundhogs’ Day?  Is it the day of some Platonic ideal of a groundhog?  Or is it a day named for‒and belonging to‒all groundhogs collectively?  Or is there some other apostrophe convention that applies?  Also, how much ground would a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground?*

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Anyway, it’s Friday, but I’m working tomorrow, so it’s not as though today is anything to celebrate or feel particularly good about for me.  On the other hand, it’s not as though time off is any more engaging for me than work time‒actually, it’s less so, though the physical rest can be useful.

As long as I can remember, I’ve always only socialized, if that’s the right word, with people in places where I was present for some other, underlying purpose, like school or work.  I liked my school friends a lot‒and then to a lesser extent my work friends‒but I’ve never been able to socialize with people purely for socialization’s sake.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a friend just for the sake of making a friend, though I’ve had friends who were very important to me.  But when I’m not local to them, not seeing them semi-automatically, I don’t know how to keep in contact or maintain friendships; I don’t even know how to try, really.  It feels awkward, and I feel intrusive and idiotic; I can’t seem to figure out what to say or do.  Also, I don’t really have anything to add to anyone else’s life, particularly from a distance, so I feel like I would just be a taker, or at least a beggar, even if I were able to reach out to people.

I’ve also never had a romantic relationship with someone who hadn’t approached me, really, and again, someone from “school” or work.  I have no confidence along those lines, frankly‒and no real impetus, either.  I wouldn’t even want a relationship with someone with whom I didn’t share a lot of interests and attributes in common, and whom I didn’t know well.  What would be the point?

My attitude is, generally, that having sex with someone with whom you’re not truly close, and whom you don’t know and care about a good deal, is just complicated masturbation.  And most of the time, I think people can do that better alone, and without risk of STDs and arguments and heartbreak and infidelity and all the potential nightmares that can come with a relationship.

I don’t know, I guess that’s one of the areas in which I’m particularly weird.  I am lonely, of course, but I’m not really able to do anything about it.  And I don’t think it’s that irrational to be “once bitten, twice shy” about romantic relationships, especially when one is neurologically ill-equipped for making such relationships work, and when the previous instance(s) in which one was “bitten” were severely painful, with deep and chronic ill-effects.

Better to die alone than to try to seek out a life partner when one is constitutionally ill-equipped to bring anyone joy, and when one’s previous attempts have all exploded catastrophically in the long run.  Who needs that extra-spicy, sour and caustic pain, enhanced by the fact that you thought your significant other would be as loyal to you as you were and would be to them?

Speaking of pain, my back is really killing me this morning.  Just in case you were wondering.  I’m not really sure what made it flare up.  I mean, it hurts pretty nearly all the time, but the amount isn’t constant, and I’m always trying to discern patterns in things that make it worsen or improve.  It’s the single most consistent aspect of my life, but I certainly wouldn’t miss it if I could cure it.

Still, I think there’s ultimately going to be only one escape from my pain, and though it couldn’t be called a cure, at least it’s an erasure.  Pain can be endured when one has reasons to endure it, or things that counterbalance it.  I’ve lost most of those, however, if not all of them.  All that’s left are attempts at distraction, and those are rapidly losing efficacy.  All the while I’m stuck between the poles of trying to find the courage to end it all and wondering if it’s even conceivable, let alone possible, for me to find any convincing reason to continue.

Oh, well.  I’ve got nothing on either pole right now, though I think I’m much closer to the former than the latter.  I guess I’ll “talk to you” tomorrow.

*Credit to James Acaster for that joke.  He’s very funny, in a purposely bizarre way.  His version of Pinocchio is priceless.

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I blog not you, you elements, with unkindness

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, February 2nd, and the day of the week on which I’ve long done my semi-traditional blog posting.

I don’t know whether I have the energy to hunt for a Shakespeare quote to alter and/or a picture to put at the bottom, both vaguely related to whatever “subject” I address in the blog.  But, of course, by now, you readers will know what decision I, the writer, will have made, even as you read the words I’m writing while I do not know.

It’s a bit wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, isn’t it?

Of course, the biological experience of time is much more malleable and irregular than the actual nature of time, but time is not a simple, straight, linear dimension.  It’s warped by the planet beneath your feet, among many other things.  Your physical body’s tendency to want to follow the most “direct” path through it‒and the fact that the planet is in the way, preventing you from following that path‒creates what we call gravity, locally.

When you’re free-falling, you’re coasting through time (and space, of course), and it’s the ground that actually accelerates you once you reach it.  It’s a hell of an acceleration if you’ve been pursuing your geodesic unimpeded for long by the time the ground throws itself into your path.  Human’s aren’t built to withstand that kind of acceleration.

I’m writing with my smartphone again, today, by the way.  It’s just too annoying to deal with the laptop at the bus stop.  I also wrote more words than I really had meant to write yesterday, probably because I type faster on the laptop, but I don’t think the increased number of words was associated with an increase in actual content.  I think the signal-to-noise ratio, if you will, of my blog post yesterday was lower than it has tended to be with the phone.  That’s not an objective measure, however, and others may disagree.

As for my thumbs, they already feel a bit better than they did, and they’re not giving me too much trouble now.  I have some Voltaren cream (or is it an ointment?) that I can apply to the joints if necessary, though I already take round-the-clock NSAIDs every day for my chronic pain, so it’s not really recommended that I add the Voltaren, a strong NSAID in it’s own right.  It increases the risk for kidney damage and liver damage and stomach issues and so on.  But I’m already at risk for those things (though I take Omeprazole for my stomach protection) and I don’t see easy short-term solutions to the problem.

This is one of the conundrums (conundra?  Probably not) that make opiates and opioids both necessary and yet culturally difficult‒our non-psychoactive pain medications are literally toxic to our bodies above a quite low threshold relative to their analgesic powers.  Yet pain does not easily just go away on its own in many cases‒biology is subject to much stronger pressures for pain to persist than to allow it easily to be relieved, and those incentives will remain so in any evolutionarily stable form of life.

Opiates and the like can work against nearly any degree of pain with limited direct toxicity, but with diminishing success and tolerance, requiring increasing doses over time*.  But they do affect neural circuitry, reward, and motivation, among other things, and so their use is complicated‒and it’s additionally complicated by the fact that the treatment of pain, physical and psychological, is somewhat taboo in our society.

The use of various substances in one’s own body is even criminalized, and so black markets arise to take advantage of the inevitable demand.  And without matters being out in the open and subject to expert scrutiny and monitoring and education, various abuses and issues relating to lack of access to appropriate guidance and treatment and support arise and worsen.

And they will persist.

Do you think continuing to criminalize the use of drugs of various kinds will decrease abuse and death and even violence related to the drugs?  You hypocrites!  I say to you that it is the criminalization of that use that created the black markets and abuse and danger and sordidness‒and, indeed, the majority of the deaths‒in the first place!

You punish people for trying, however imperfectly, to treat chronic pain and those who suffer from it from addressing it, and are surprised that sufferers turn to the market you have created for illicit meds.  You have the temerity to be “shocked” that people die from the unmonitored, unregulated, inexpert use and manufacture of these things which you have removed from the bailiwick of expert awareness and oversight and monitoring.  You took an area that should have been medical and made it criminal and are stupid enough to be surprised that opportunistic criminals (whether they be gangs or governments or otherwise) are not as careful and caring as actual medical professionals.

And sometimes you are so hopelessly moronic as to imagine that further punishments of both producers and suppliers‒and even users‒of drugs will change the problem or decrease it or make it go away.  As if making an already suffering person’s life even more difficult and miserable is going to diminish their urge for relief and escape from at least some forms of pain, and their willingness to risk the permanent end to their pain that is death by overdose.  I’d need to exist macroscopically in all the ten spatial dimensions of M Theory to be able to give that the eye roll that nonsense deserves.

Phew.  That was a heckuva tangent.

I don’t actually use opioids or related medications, though I have been prescribed them in the past.  They interact with my rather peculiar nervous system in ways I find truly unpleasant, though they can help with pain.  So, instead, I suffer constant daily assaults on my kidneys and GI tract and my liver, and I accept that.

It’s not as though I will seek treatment if my organs fail.  I have no insurance, for one thing, but also, I just don’t see any point in trying to preserve my existence.  Heck, I’ve been told I have a possible recurrence or deterioration of my congenital heart problem‒I’m not fully convinced that it’s really any kind of recurrence‒for which I had heart surgery when I was 18, but I have no interest in pursuing possible further exploration or treatment of it, anyway.

Let my kidneys fail, let my liver fail, let my heart fail!  Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks!  Why would I try to preserve or prolong my existence when I don’t even like myself, let alone have anyone else nearby who likes me and spends time with me***?

Anyway, that went off the rails pretty quickly, didn’t it?  It also got longer than I expected.  Sorry.

I still don’t know the answer to my initial wondering about titles and pictures‒but you all do.  And I love you for it.

TTFN

windstormandmanscaled

*Though at least they don’t directly poison livers and kidneys, and the needed doses don’t keep going up without limit, though they are nevertheless often higher than most doctors are willing to prescribe.  This is largely because doctors fear having what happened to me happen to them, and who can blame them?  The only exception to this general hesitancy is with cancer.  People with cancer are allowed to be treated with whatever level of pain medicine it takes to reduce their pain, because in the typical human “mind” having cancer pain is different, and people with cancer are special.  They’re allowed to be dependent on pain medications, because surely they have the only type of pain that can go on and on without resolving and can steal all the joy from their lives, eventually killing them.  Anyone else is just a disgusting drug addict, a scum of the Earth, and deserves merely contempt**.

**The latter portion of the above paragraph is sarcastic.

***I cannot blame them, so don’t be defensive on my behalf.  I find myself infuriating and disgusting.