anger

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“But when the blast of war blows in our ears…”

     It’s Friday, and it may, once again, be a true end of the week for me, though if it’s’n’t*, I’m sure I’ll write a new post tomorrow, barring‒as is always implicit‒the unforeseen.

     I’m in a bad mood this morning, though not in the usual sense.  Of course, I’m often, perhaps even usually, in a mood that others would consider bad; they certainly wouldn’t want it for themselves.  Although, I would never say “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy”, because that’s just not true.

     If someone were indeed my “worst enemy”, then I would wish to visit upon them just about any form of pain and suffering and other synonyms for torment that you can name, and I would be more than capable, psychologically, of delivering that torment personally.

     As a doctor, when I was in practice, there were innumerable times when I had to cause pain to people I was trying to help (e.g., phlebotomy, lumbar punctures, paracentesis, incision and drainage of abscesses, etc.).  I did it without hesitation when it was indicated, though I always strove to keep any pain as minimal as possible.

     Also, I’ve been in places and in situations where violence was always waiting, and you needed to be capable of violence to protect yourself from potential violence from others.

     So, yeah, I would be more than emotionally capable of delivering any suffering I’ve ever known to someone who merited it.

     Of course, in reality, I wouldn’t really waste time delivering torment to someone who was somehow my “worst enemy”.  I’ve learned at least some lessons from fictional and real world situations of that kind:  don’t put your enemies in death traps, don’t gloat over them (while they’re alive), don’t draw things out.  Just delete them, as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Surely that’s the only sensible way to deal with someone who is truly your enemy.  The world will be a much less stressful place for you with any true enemies erased from it.

     Of course, you don’t want to be mistaken about that.  One shouldn’t use force unless it is legitimately necessary, and only against those who merit it‒ideally only against those who initiated or threatened it.  If they call the tune, so to speak, then there can be no legitimate moral complaints about the fact that they need to pay the piper.

     So, yeah, that’s the kind of bad mood I’m in this morning.  I’ve learned of something terrible that happened to someone I (distantly) know and like, at the hands of someone who had apparently been trusted by the person I know, and who was much bigger and stronger.

     I am, of course, in no way involved other than being aware of it, and of course, such acts occur all over the world, every day.  That doesn’t make accepting them any easier, nor does it make me any less angry.  If anything, knowing that one act of violence by a bigger person against a smaller, weaker person is just a tiny sample of a much larger statistic is ever more maddening the longer one contemplates the fact.

     However, the “madness” that can seize one in the event of an injustice, especially a violent one‒and the examples committed by those who are supposed to be in positions of protection and service are particularly common and especially egregious of late‒raises and reinforces the all-important issue of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

     This is why the concept of due process is even more important than the concept of punishment.  The tendency toward the feud, toward vendetta, is very strong in humans, and it can become a self-perpetuating and self-justifying process that leads to terrible injustice and unnecessary suffering.

     That being said, though, anger can be quite motivating, at least if it is anger unmarred by too much self-loathing.  So, though I am in pain this morning, and did not sleep well at all, I have a bit more physical energy than usual, at least for the moment, because when one becomes angry at an injustice, one wants to be able to do something about it, even if it is not within the reach of one’s arm at the moment.

     For instance, it’s much easier to motivate oneself to workout when one thinks of it as getting into shape to be best able to deal with unjust physical violence if it should become necessary.

     I’ve certainly let myself become softer than I ever used to be.  I do still work out nearly every day (with appropriate rest sessions) because when I don’t, my chronic pain becomes worse.  But I’ve left behind the martial arts practice I used to do, and I stopped learning new stuff along those lines quite some time ago.  I’ve also not been watching/reading things that motivated me along those lines in quite a while, but I may want to indulge in them a bit more, now.  If nothing else, they can get me motivated to get in better shape, and that’s almost certainly going to be a benefit.

    If it should ever become necessary and useful to use better conditioning to protect someone from harm, or to take action against those who commit harm against the innocent, well…I suspect it would probably be a better world if more people became more ready, willing, and able to use violence against those who initiate or threaten it.

     There’s always the critical rub of people being prone to bias and mistake, to rush to judgment, and to scapegoat.  Which brings us back to why the rule of law, and due process, is so important.

     But what does one do when those who are supposed to be part of the rule of law and to enforce and to bow to due process choose to betray their oaths and their duties, and do not submit to the rule of law themselves?

     The answer is probably obvious, but feel free to write your guesses in the comments below.

     Have a good day.

*In case it’sn’t clear, I combined the contractions “it’s” for “it is” and the contraction “isn’t” for “is not” into a next-order contraction.

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My charity is outrage, life my shame, and in that shame still blog my sorrows’ rage.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and it’s thus time for my now once again weekly blog post.  I hope you’re all pleased.

Before I go any further, does anyone out there know any way to reset the default font in Microsoft Word back to Calibri?  As I have mentioned before, I cannot stand the new Aptos font.  If I could send a terminator* back in time to kill the mother of the person who designed that font, I would be strongly tempted to do so.

But, wait, you might say.  Surely if I have access to terminator and time travel technologies, there must be other, less homicidal ways to change the basic font of a word processing program.  That may well be so, but violent matricide is all such a person deserves, I’m afraid.  Anything less would not convey the degree of my antipathy.  I’m inclined to say the entire family tree should be eliminated, but eventually the line of any living person intersects with the line of all people alive on the planet, so to wipe out the oldest ancestor would be to wipe out a common ancestor to all living humans, thus wiping out the whole human race.

Hey, wait, maybe that’s not such a bad thought.

While we’re at it, maybe we can go back over three billion years ago, to that warm pool about which Darwin spoke, and spray some Lysol, thus aborting all life on this planet.  I suppose life might start randomly again somewhere else, even if one did such a thing.  After all, it happened pretty quickly once conditions became conducive, implying that it might not do just to wipe out the spot where the ancestors of all actual modern life began, but might instead be necessary literally to sterilize the whole planet.  But how do you do that if even the collision with Theia that is the presumed origin of the moon didn’t do it?

Still, while the origin of basic life seems to have been a strong or at least a rapid tendency, the formation of eukaryotes and then multicellular life seems to have been much harder, taking another two and a half to three billion years after the earliest life to evolve on the planet.  So maybe, if a different proto-life had formed, life would never have progressed beyond something like bacteria.

Okay, well, I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t like Aptos.  And now that I’ve finished the first draft of Extra Body, I think I may in future switch over to using Google Docs for my word processing.  I hate unnecessary change in the first place—such as all the tweaks and upgrades and nonsense that all the apps and systems are constantly enacting, and the changes in WordPress that nearly always make the platform less convenient—but when they are changes for the worse, I really cannot abide them.

What misguided notions led Microsoft to think that their weird little new font with its curlicues and malformations of letters would be an improvement?  Can entire software companies develop global degenerative neurological conditions?  Or is it just a matter of the second law of thermodynamics, ensuring that any local cleverness is an ephemeral exception?

Just look what’s happened to the United States.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have completed the first draft of Extra Body as of yesterday morning.  I did not write on Friday, because I really felt like crap, mentally.  I honestly suspected that my brain was crashing, experiencing a burgeoning system failure (speaking of degenerative neurological conditions).  But then, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings, I wrote a total of 5,599 words, bringing the final first-draft tally to 80,676 words, at 123 pages.

I don’t know if the tale is any good, but it’s certainly impressively long for something that was imagined as a short story.  I’m going to take a very brief break before I begin my intended draconian editing process, during which time I mean to transcribe what I’ve typed so far of HELIOS** into a spiral bound notebook so that when I get to the appropriate stage, I can just continue writing that first draft by hand.

Of course, this is all extremely speculative.  I don’t expect that it will come to fruition, because I know that I simply cannot survive as my life is and—more importantly—as I am.  In case you can’t tell, I’m constantly almost completely defined by tension and hostility (though I do my best never to allow them actually to be released unjustly; I may almost always wish to wipe out all life in the universe, but I almost never do it).  The world, the planet, the biosphere, what have you:  none of it seems natural to me, none of it seems good or beautiful or welcoming.

I feel like I’m already in some Lovecraftian otherverse, not just a stranger in a strange land but an alien entity in an alien universe, where there are not even an integer number of spatial or time dimensions.  I truly sympathize with Agent Smith in the original The Matrix, when he says, “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer.  It’s the smell—if there is such a thing—I feel saturated by it…”

Of course, I don’t think he was literally saying that it was solely the smell that bothered him.  This was merely the metaphor, the shorthand, the figurative focus of his antipathy.  The sense of smell is merely the most elemental, the oldest, the most direct sense, and it tends to elicit the most visceral responses.  Even bacteria can be said to “smell” the world.

Lest anyone be fooled, I want to make clear that it’s not politics and social dysfunction and the like that make me so antipathic toward the world, though politics is pathetic and contemptible.  But politics—including dishonesty, hypocrisy, willful stupidity, delusion, political violence, and all such manifestations of primate dominance hierarchical jockeying—has always been pathetic and juvenile and worthy of sneers and nausea (as well as occasional mordant, contemptuous laughter).

Anyway, that’s about a thousand words in this post already.  I could go on and on spewing vitriol, but I don’t think it would make much difference.  I don’t know how I can possibly survive as I am, as things are.  More to the point, I don’t know why I would possibly survive as I am, as things are.

The world is disgusting, my life is almost entirely uncomfortable and frankly painful, and above all, I find myself disgusting.  I try to distract myself with writing, and with some music, and with studying physics and mathematics and languages, using various books and apps and so on.  I even pretend I have friends by watching YouTube videos of people reacting to songs movies I like.  But nothing is fun.  And none of my chronic pain and sensory issues have improved.  And don’t even get me started on insomnia!

Oddly enough, I think I would feel less alone if I were truly the only person on the planet, or if I were a castaway on an island.  Perhaps I’m wrong, of course; that is purely speculation.  But it feels like it would be the case, and that’s not a good feeling.

Well, I hope (and suspect) that most of you are doing and feeling better than I am.  That almost has to be a good thing.  Please take care of each other and yourselves.  Despite all the people and things I feel that I might wish didn’t exist, or that could be obliterated, you are among the rare few to whom that doesn’t apply.

TTFN

*As in the movies created by James Cameron, not the line that separates night and day on an astronomical body illuminated by a star.

**A little less than 3,000 words.

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The enemy of my Self is Myself

I mean to try to keep this post relatively short today, and only partly because I’m writing this on my smartphone and don’t want to make my thumbs feel worse.  It’s mainly that I just don’t have much to say or talk about, and certainly nothing uplifting.

I tried to do a few relatively upbeat posts‒for me, anyway‒on Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I don’t think they’re as popular as my depressed and nihilistic posts.  It’s rather ironic; one might imagine that upbeat posts would be the ones people would prefer to read, but I guess that may not be true.  I shouldn’t be surprised that it surprises me, probably; people often make very little sense to me.

Anyway, I’m just tired.  I left work slightly early yesterday with a bad headache and just feeling horribly stressed out and tense and angry.  I don’t know if it was that things were particularly frustrating at the office, or if it was the usual fact that I cannot escape from the person I loathe most in the world:  me.

I often say that I hate the world and I hate my life‒at least, it feels as though I often say it, because I say it in my head a lot.  Maybe I don’t say it aloud or in writing as often as it feels as though I say it.  I haven’t kept track, and I don’t mean to do so.  That would be truly boring.

But of course, the reason (one of them, anyway) I don’t just change my life‒or try to change the world‒is that I cannot escape the common denominator that is the single biggest contributor to the fact that I hate the world and hate my life:  I hate myself.

I wish it were otherwise.  It would be nice to love myself, I guess.  I wouldn’t have to be narcissistic or anything.  It doesn’t require a delusional or overinflated self-worth to love oneself, any more than it need be irrational or delusional to love one’s spouse or one’s children even when one can see and knows their imperfections.  No one is perfect, after all‒I’m not even sure what the term could mean when applied to a person.

One can love another person even when angry at that person.  One can punish one’s children when they misbehave, and one can choose not to indulge all their wishes precisely because one loves them and hopes to guide them toward being the best people they can be.

So love doesn’t have to be stupid or delusional.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean one can simply choose to love someone.  I’ve tried to train myself to love myself, with positive self-reinforcement, with cognitive therapy, with auto-suggestion, with written lists of my positive attributes, and even with self-hypnosis.  Obviously, I have not succeeded.

Even when I’m stressed out and irritated by everything that happens at the office‒by the noise, by the overbearing “music”, by the stupid little rituals, by the personality conflicts, by the frequent interruptions when I’m doing one task and people just come in without preamble and start asking me about something else entirely*, as if I were a machine just waiting for them to give me work‒even when all these things are happening, the thing that bothers me most is that I am with me.

That’s what I feel, and it’s what I’ve been fighting and it’s the fact in spite of which I’ve been trying to be positive, at least in my writing, but that’s not really working.

When I was writing fiction, that seemed to help at least a bit‒and sometimes a lot‒but there’s only so much fiction one can write that almost no one reads before one feels as delusional as if one believed one had magic powers.  But it is true that writing fiction is good therapy, as Stephen King has pointed out on more than one occasion, and if I could do it full time without other commitments, I might again find the energy to do it.  Unfortunately, if I want to stay alive‒which is a rather big “if” a lot of the time‒I have to work, like everyone else, and my mental energy is used up and more than used up.

Anyway, that’s that.  Yesterday I was very stressed out and had a headache and yelled openly at my closest friend in the office and came within a hair’s breadth of breaking my tablet and my back Stratocaster.  I banged my head on the wall a few times to release some of those destructive urges, and that didn’t help my headache.

Yet I didn’t sleep well at all last night, even for me, despite going back to the house somewhat early.  I don’t feel rested; I almost never feel rested.  The very air through which I move feels like viscous, heavy smoke, burning my eyes, poisoning me as I breathe, impeding me as I try to walk, pressing down on me as I try to stand up.  I need to stop.  I need to rest.  I need to sleep.

*This is a bit akin to people who will come up and start talking to one when one is reading, as if someone who is reading must be unoccupied and just waiting to be of service to other people.