anhedonia

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The noonday demon lurks everywhere

It’s Monday morning and, yes, I’m writing another blog post.  Isn’t it exciting?

I’m basically doing this because I have nothing else to do.  By which I mean I have no other real outlet on any kind of regular basis.  I don’t write fiction anymore, I don’t draw (or paint…nor do I do any sculpting, for that matter, but I haven’t done that in nearly 35 years).  I haven’t even diddled around on the guitar in about two weeks, and I haven’t played any kind of keyboard in far longer than that.  I certainly haven’t played any video games in I don’t know how long (unless you count the Euchre app on my phone).

I tried to download a chess app.  Well, actually, I did download one; it’s not as though that’s challenging.  What I tried to do was get interested in chess.  However, before I’d even gotten through one game against the computer, I’d remembered just how boring I find chess, even though I won that game.  It didn’t help that, because it was a free app, ads would pop up that would supersede the game now and then.  I uninstalled it.

Similarly, I tried again to get on Brilliant dot org and learn and/or review some stuff, and that was fine as far as it went, but the stupid Brilliant people (somewhat of an oxymoron, I guess) have the app set up so that it sends all sorts of irritating emails and (if you let it) cell phone notifications about how your “streak” is going to come to an end, so you should go and do a couple of review problems to continue it…it’s so annoying that I don’t go back on the app, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m supporting Sabine Hossenfelder by using it, I would unsubscribe, so I would no longer be tempted to annoy myself.  People at Brilliant take note:  my loyalty to Sabine goes only so far.

It’s a shame, because I kind of like doing the stuff on Brilliant when I’m doing it, but the last thing I want is to trigger all those intrusive proddings that make me want to find where Brilliant is headquartered and burn the building to the ground.

I also have the Babbel app, and though I had briefly started learning a bit of conversational German, I fell off that (again, after irritating emails and push notifications).  Still, I think now I may try to start learning some Russian.  There’s nothing political in this, it’s just an interesting language.  It’s different enough from English to be engaging, and Mila Kunis speaks Russian.  So do many of the people in Ukraine (they don’t offer Ukrainian on Babbel, but I figure Russian would be a start) and as the Beatles sang, “The Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind.”  Ha ha.

Anyway, I like languages, generally.  I’ve often said that language (especially written language) is the greatest invention of the human race, the one that made nearly every other invention possible.  Learning another language helps you understand your own language more deeply, and to get a sense of the nature of language itself, how it varies, what things are constant, and so on.

So, I set myself up to start Russian, but I didn’t actually start it yet.  Is that what they call “executive dysfunction” nowadays?  In my case it might be better called “middle-management dysfunction”, or perhaps even “janitorial dysfunction”…though that latter sounds like it might be a euphemism for incontinence.

I don’t know what to do.  Nothing is really interesting.  Certainly nothing is fun.  Nothing really even gives me any relief from anhedonia; I can only distract myself through autogenous damage, if that’s a term.  Cuts are best, but burns are less obtrusive‒people tend to freak out about blood too much, whereas no one can see burns at the moment they occur.  Burns leave deeper and more damaging scars, also, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I’m trying to read an old, previously abandoned light novel series that I’d started because I liked the anime.  When I’m done with that‒which will be soon‒I think I’m going to be out of anything I can even force myself to read.

All of this is trivia, of course; it doesn’t matter‒because I don’t matter.  I don’t do any good for anyone, including myself.  I don’t really interact with anyone, except a weekly (ish) phone call with my sister.  I don’t have any friends to talk to or with whom to hang out; everyone I love has at some point decided they no longer want to be around me, so I don’t intend to fall into that trap ever again.  My memory is too damn good for me to forget how much that shit hurts.  It all still hurts.

“Life is pain, Highness,” the Dread Pirate Roberts said.  But it is not mandatory.  One can opt out if one so wishes.

I hope you all have a good day.

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Audio blog for Friday on anhedonia, fatigue, declining entertainment franchises and Newtonian and Einsteinian physics

This is an oddly meandering audio blog that I made this morning, having little desire to write much, and it goes from my troubles with depression and lessening interest in any former source of joy to the fact that even Star Wars and Marvel franchises are going downhill (with speculation about the causes) on to physics–first Newtonian then Special and General Relativity, and ponderings about the nature of near-light-speed travel and its potential effects when a spaceship passes the Schwarzschild radius in the direction of its motion (and even a tiny dabble into cosmic strings, which are not to be mistaken for the “superstrings” of string theory/M theory).  I find no firm conclusions, but maybe it’s mildly interesting somewhere.  It’s longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully not too long.

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Methought I read a blog cry, “Sleep no more!”

insomnia

Hello and good day!  It’s Thursday again, as you no doubt know, and time for me to write another weekly blog entry.

I’ve had a rather intense exacerbation of my chronic insomnia over the last several days, so I’m worried that my writing might be incoherent and disjointed.  Of course, it’s possible that my writing is always that way, and I simply haven’t noticed.  How would I know for sure?  Still, I might be mistaken, but when I reread my writing, it doesn’t seem terribly incoherent to me.  Until and unless I receive specific feedback from others, there’s no way to fact-check the matter except through my general agreement with other readers about the quality of other writers.

Such are the vagaries of epistemology.

Insomnia has been a longstanding problem for me, certainly ever since I’ve been an “adult.”  One part of that problem is that, unlike what seems to be the case for most people, sleep is not in an especially pleasant experience for me.  If anything, it’s rather dysphoric.  I don’t tend to remember any dreams—which is disappointing, given legends of such writers as Coleridge, who are reputed to have been led to some of their greatest works by slumberous visions.

For me, sleep is at best a bland phenomenon; I have trouble getting to sleep and I have trouble staying asleep.  I don’t resist sleep knowingly, and I certainly don’t fear it in the sense that inspired the apocryphal Edgar Allen Poe quip, “Sleep, those little slices of death, how I loathe them!”  Though Poe never wrote those words, as far as I know, he does seem to have been afraid of and resistant to sleep as a harbinger or precursor of death; he clearly feared premature burial (that dread features prominently in more than one of his stories).

This is not the nature of my problem.  I have no intellectual fear of death at all, though it’s hard to eliminate the purely biological drive to keep living.  I simply find sleep, if not actively unpleasant, somewhere between uninteresting and dreary.  The only time I’ve ever experienced real pleasure both at anticipating sleep and at experiencing it was when I was taking Paxil to treat depression.  That was certainly remarkable, but the medicine had more than enough detriment to counter that one benefit*, and it never did a very good job on my depression.

There’s little doubt that my chronic insomnia and my dysthymia/depression are related, and that the tendency for sleep to be thoroughly anhedonic to me is part and parcel of my dysthymia, though it long predates the latter problem.  I don’t remember any time in my life when sleep held real allure for me.  This tendency has been useful in many situations; I’ve never had trouble being an early riser, and when on call—either in hospital during residency, or from home later on in my practice—I never had much trouble quickly coming awake and being able to focus on whatever problem might need my attention.  And, of course, indifference to sleep was a very useful trait when my children were babies, allowing my then-wife to rest through the night far more often than many new mothers can.

Feeding and rocking my infant children in the silence of the night, now…that was a truly hedonic experience par excellence.

Nevertheless, like every organism with a nervous system, I do require sleep, though the nature of that need is far from fully understood by science.  When I go without enough of it, for long enough, it wears me out, and I know that it affects my cognitive functions, as well as my moods (though there’s a real chicken and egg problem involved in this latter issue).  So, I try—sometimes only halfheartedly, I’ll admit—to avoid succumbing to my insomnia.  But it can be hard just to lay in bed doing nothing and waiting to see if sleep arrives…or if it returns, as the case may be, when I awaken far too early in the morning.  I don’t tend to feel anxious or particularly stressed at such times, because again, I don’t particularly enjoy sleep, but I sometimes get angry at myself, knowing that I’m going to regret my sleeplessness later.

Oh well.  Whataya gonna do?

I’ll tell you what I’m going to do:  keep chugging along, I suppose.  The editing of Unanimity continues to go well, despite a few computer issues; I’m still enjoying the story and the characters.  And, of course, my footnote reminded me that I have a substantially begun novella waiting in the wings, which I may even complete someday.  And, however much I tend to begin my blog posts with no clear idea where I’m going in any given week, it’s still a rewarding process.  If nothing else, I amuse myself, and that’s got to be worth something.

Hopefully, at least occasionally, some of you enjoy it, too.

TTFN

*When coming off it, I did have two experiences of sleep paralysis, which I’ve not experienced before or since, but which were astoundingly vivid and thoroughly terrifying.  The first centered on the comparatively benign illusion of a lion resting on my body and holding me in place, and the second—far worse—involved an indescribable, extradimensional monstrosity pinning me to my bed.  I’m somewhat proud to say that, on that second occasion, rather than try to scream or anything of the sort, I was able with great effort to force my head into motion—or to imagine that I did—and I bit the effing thing.  This woke me up fully at last.  I immediately recognized the well-described phenomenon for what it was, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling truly frightened for several long minutes afterward.  A version of that second experience has appeared in a current work in progress, the novella tentatively titled Safety Valve.  So, I guess I have used “dream” experiences to inspire my writing upon occasion.

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…or close the blog up with our English dead.

BrokenWall

 

Good morning, everyone.  It’s Thursday again, and time for another weekly blog post.

I wish that I had more that was new to share, or at least different from what I usually discuss.  I’m quite afraid that I’m going to bore those who read my blog every week.  Unfortunately, the process of writing—at least as it refers to long novels and/or to songs written and performed individually in snatches of very limited spare time—is a long one, and it doesn’t change noticeably from day to day or even from week to week.

Unanimity is proceeding well.  I’m nicely into the third editing run-through, but with much farther to go, and with much more trimming to do before I reach my goal.  Similarly, I’ve been working (intermittently) on the remix and re-recording of Breaking Me Down, very much a personal vanity project…which I suppose could also be said of any novel as well.  The music will surely be ready for release long before the book, but then again, it’s a seven-minute song compared to a seven hundred plus pages long novel, so it’s not too surprising that it should take less time, even considering the different levels of my expertise in the two fields.

On other matters, well…there’s not much to say that seems worth sharing, but I’ll share some of it anyway.  I continue to be unable to rouse myself to get involved in social media—or social anything, for that matter.  I really don’t have the capacity to socialize at all outside of work, and I do precious little of it during work.  You are, at this moment, experiencing the most social thing I do in any given week, at least for the last several months.*  How lucky for you!  Despite ongoing treatment for dysthymia/depression, I’m afraid that the reality of both traditional and newfangled media is just too depressing in and of itself for me to survive.

Of course, avoiding them doesn’t particularly seem to help my problem, either, and I can’t blame social and other media too much; the issue seems very much to be on my end of the keyboard and/or smartphone.  After all, I’ve lately been unable to enjoy even good music.  This morning I started listening to my most reliable Spotify playlist, comprised of my favorite songs by Radiohead, Pink Floyd and the Beatles, and I quickly got bored to the point of disgust and just shut it off.

The Beatles, for crying out loud!

And don’t even get me started on the fact that when I even contemplate reading any of the Harry Potter books, or even The Lord of the Rings, I’m filled with ennui bordering on physical revulsion.

There are well over two hundred books in my personal Kindle library, ranging from Physics, Philosophy, Biology, Neuroscience, Behavioral Psychology, and History to classic literature, science fiction and fantasy, all the way up to modern light novels.  It’s hardly an unweeded garden that grows to seed; it’s a stunningly beautiful garden by its very nature.  But right now, it doesn’t catch my interest any more than would a patch of garbage-strewn mud.  I find myself (somewhat ironically) resonating, as I often do, to a line from the Pink Floyd song, Nobody Home:  “I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.”

Only thirteen channels of shit?  If only he’d known how many channels of shit are available for us to swim in nowadays.  Don’t tear down that wall too quickly, Pink.  There are real walls being contemplated that are far more pathetic and disappointing than anything that goes on behind yours.

I just had an interesting and coincidental personal revelation:  I was considering using a particular line from early in “Hamlet” for the title to this week’s blog, but I suspected that I’d already used it for that purpose.  So, I checked and discovered that, not only had I indeed used it previously, but I had done so on August 23rd of 2018, one day shy of a year ago.  That’s weird.

I’m not aware of any particular reason why late August should trigger such specific associations for me.  It’s not as though I have “end-of-summer blues”.  I live in south Florida, for crying out loud; the end of summer is when the weather gets more pleasant.  And it’s been many years since I needed to feel despondent about an upcoming academic term.**

Now that I think about it, though, this isn’t the first time since last August that I’ve considered re-using that line in the title of a blog and had to go back to catch myself.  It’s one of the most well-known of Shakespearean quotes, trailing behind only that most famous soliloquy from “Hamlet”, a few from “Macbeth”, and perhaps some smatterings from “Romeo and Juliet”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and maybe “Richard III”.  Oh, well, I’ll just go (or will have gone, really), with a portion of a quote from “Henry V”, instead.

Ironically, and regrettably, I can find no interest in actually reading any of the aforementioned plays.

Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace this morning, it seems.

TTFN

*No, let’s be honest; it’s years, veering towards decades.

**And, in all honesty, I never once dreaded the coming of a school year, whether primary, secondary, university, or professional school.  It’s always been something to which I looked forward eagerly.

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For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men’s blog

Desert desperado

Hello and good morning!  It’s another Thursday, and therefore time for another blog entry.  In fact, this morning, when activating my computer (which had self-restarted due to one of the seemingly endless “updates” from Windows…which don’t appear to engender any improvement of function whatsoever) I began, by force of habit, to seek out the last point at which I had been editing Unanimity.  Then I caught myself and remembered, “Wait, it’s blog day.”  Those were, as well as I can recall, my actual internal words.  Maybe I should re-christen this day of the week.  Who knows, if my writing eventually comes to influence the wide world enough, we English speakers might cast aside the traditional Norse name, which gives homage to a character now most widely remembered as being played by Chris Hemsworth.*

If I had a hammer…

It’s been a fairly drab and inauspicious week for me.  There’s not much going on that wasn’t doing so already.  I certainly haven’t been keeping up with current events or anything else floating around regular, virtual, or social media.  I occasionally go on the Google News “App”, just to skim through the headlines, but I don’t think I’ve so much as clicked on a single story in well over a week.  I haven’t even been listening to podcasts, or to Audible books, or even to music during my commute.  I just can’t seem to stir any interest in anything, even in books and shows and movies that used to enthrall me.  All this, despite months of ongoing treatment for my dysthymia/depression.

Oh, well, whataya gonna do?  The universe does not bargain, it cuts no special deals, and it makes only one promise to us all.

I have of course, as might be obvious from my comments above, been working steadily on Unanimity.  I’m approaching the end of the book for the second time (really the third, if you count when I wrote it).  Much, much works remains to be done, of course, but I’m still enjoying the story.  Thus, at least one person in the world will do so, and I suppose that’s a good enough reason to have written it.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I have a difficult time self-promoting, and I’m at least mildly embarrassed bordering on ashamed when I force myself to do it.  At times in the past I’ve rued this character trait of mine, and I’ve wished I could be much more of a sounding brass, but the advents of Kanye West and Donald Trump have reassured me that grandiosity is vastly overrated.**  There’s probably a happy medium somewhere (who runs a successful fortune-telling shop, one presumes), but if there is, I haven’t located it.

I’ve encountered a few germs of ideas for new stories this week—probably short stories—and jotted them down in my memo app, as I do.  That’s always pleasing in at least a small way.  There are many, many such little phrases, sentences, and paragraphs in the that file, but it’s difficult to predict how many of them will eventually become full-fledged stories.

I’ve also been diddling away at musical projects.  As I think I’ve said before, I’ve been working on a rebuild of Breaking Me Down, my personal best musical, or at least lyrical, expression of depression (sounds like a blast, right?).  I’ve learned a thing or two since I first threw it together, and I think it’s definitely improving.  I’ve also been working on a new song, which will be slower and will probably sound moodier than Breaking Me Down, but its words are much more…well, not entirely positive, but at least ambiguous, and its ending is, if not truly uplifting, at least hopeful…I think.

It’s a tough situation where you’re not even clear about the meaning of your own poetry.  Oh, well.

And that’s pretty much all I have to report for the moment.  Apologies if it’s not very gripping, but most days, and most weeks, are ordinary, after all.  I hope you’re all well, and that your futures are very bright indeed…but not so bright as to be blinding.

TTFN

*Not to say he doesn’t do a terrific job.  It’s not easy to make Thor—the comic book character—cool, but he succeeds in spades.

**Especially by the grandiose.

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“And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

mars-landscape-3d-model-obj-fbx-blend-mtl

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday.  Today’s holiday is rather less prestigious than last week’s:  it’s International Convenience Store Day!  (Actually, I just made that up, but if it isn’t International Convenience Store Day, since in much of the world the date would be written as 11/7 rather than 7/11, then at least it ought to be National Convenience Store Day in the US).

I’m afraid my previous post wasn’t well-read, or at least it wasn’t well-“liked”.  Possibly this is because it was a holiday last week and people didn’t read blogs as much as usual.  Possibly, though, it’s because I was so serious and grumpy about what I was writing.  I do think it’s an important subject, but I guess people didn’t find it gripping.  Maybe it was just so obvious to everyone that it didn’t bear repeating…though given what we see in the nation I somehow doubt that.  Maybe I’m just whining.

That last proposal seems to be the most promising hypothesis.

Of course, I’ve continued to edit Unanimity as well as my short story Free Range Meat.  The latter is close to releasable form, and I’ll probably publish it before the end of July.  Cover design has yet to begin, but I have the general idea in mind, and I don’t think it’ll take much work to accomplish.

I’m pleased to find that I’m continuing to enjoy reading and editing Unanimity.  That doesn’t mean that anyone else will enjoy reading it, but at least it will have one fan in the long run.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I was nervous about this.  As I wrote it, and as it continued to get longer, I occasionally thought to myself that this thing feels like it’s never going to end…and not in a good way.  Rereading it, however, has been pleasurable, and I’m getting quite a lot done.

I particularly enjoy the fact that my villain, who is also sort of the main character, continues to be and act like a likeable, nice guy, even as he does horrific things, and he’s not just pretending.  I don’t know why it tickles me so much, but it does.

In other news, I’m sad to report that I’m still having trouble finding and reading new works of fiction.  Well, “finding” new works of fiction isn’t hard, they’re everywhere, but finding ones that get my attention, and which I can sit down and read and enjoy, has been very difficult for some time, and it seems to be getting worse.  TV and movies, despite the shorter required attention span, have likewise failed to grab my interest.  It’s even hard for me to go back and pick up books that I’ve read and loved before, which is truly bizarre.  When I do like a story, I tend to read it and reread it and reread it, over and over and over again.

As a case in point, when Book 6 of the Harry Potter series came out, I was one of the midnight buyers, and once I bought it, I devoured it rapidly.  I liked it so much that, by the time Book 7 came out, I had read its predecessor a full seven times, not counting the times I listened to the audio book while commuting.  Yet now, though I have the book handily available in my cell phone on Kindle at any time, I feel no urge to read it or any of the other books in the series.  Some of that may be partly due to negative associations; I enjoyed reading and discussing those books with my now-ex-wife, we both having first been introduced to them by our niece.  But that can’t be the whole story—at least I don’t think it is.  After all, I started reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, in junior high, if memory serves, and I’ve read those (and the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever) literally dozens of times, well into adulthood.  (I’m not talking about two dozen, either.)  Yet lately, I can’t get interested in them (nor, in the case of Thomas Covenant, the more recent sequels).

Here’s a particularly troubling case:  I recently was able to force my way through a rereading of Ender’s Game…but I couldn’t even get past the first fifty pages of Speaker for the Dead, which I recall as one of the best books I’ve ever read!

I’m too nervous even to try reading Shakespeare.  And I’m a person who once, in my undergraduate days, deliberately took two Shakespeare courses at the same time (and loved them)!

Bottom line, I’m a serious nerd/geek who has been losing interest in the things about which I am nerdy/geeky.  Even such instant gratification story-types as comic books and manga are hard to focus on.  I don’t have so much as a smidgen of curiosity about Game of Thrones, and I’m sure that in the past I would have been a delighted aficionado of those books and that series.  I haven’t even been able to get through the first season of Stranger Things, and if there’s a series that is more perfectly my kind of story, I’m not aware of it.

Thankfully, I still retain at least some of my ability to be interested in and to read about science, though even that is nothing like it used to be.

Oh, well.  Like I said above, I guess I’m a bit of a whiner.  Hopefully my kvetching isn’t too boring, since this anhedonia does trouble me, and I feel a strong need to share my sense of dismay.  Also, maybe I’m not-so-secretly hoping that some reader will have a magical answer for me, and things will turn around.  If not…well, I don’t even know.

Anyway, enough morosity.  (I know, that’s not a standard word, but I prefer it to “moroseness”, which is a standard word).  The woes and laments of a lonely author, blogger, and aficionado of various forms of fantastic fiction and nonfiction are of little real moment.  It just makes life tiring, and it’s hard for me to summon the energy to move forward.  Thankfully, one of my most enduring traits—unsurprisingly, I guess—is stubbornness.  But all things have their limits.

TTFN

 

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How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this blog!

Hello, good day, and welcome to yet another Thursday.  Next week will be the last Thursday of this month, so three weeks remain (if my calculations are correct) until the next planned episode of “My heroes have always been villains.”  Hopefully, I’ll be in an appropriate state to write that when the time comes.

I’ve been troubled by a certain issue for some time now, and I think I’ve mentioned part of it here before:  I’m having a hard time reading new fiction.  I’ve also, probably as part of the same problem, had trouble getting into and enjoying the rereading of fiction that I’ve always enjoyed reading previously.  This includes the single most reliable work, The Lord of the Rings, to which I’ve always been able to turn hitherto.  Ever since the first time I read it, I have, like Christopher Lee, read LoTR pretty much at least once a year every year.  This isn’t atypical behavior for me; when I like a work of fiction, or even non-fiction, including everything from books to movies to comic books to television series, I tend to consume them repetitively.  I’m not the sort of person to be thrown off by spoilers, obviously, because on the second reading of a book, there aren’t going to be any significant surprises.  My memory and recall seem somewhat above average; I’m certainly not going to forget major plot developments in stories I’ve encountered previously.  Nevertheless, as far as I can recall, each rereading of The Lord of the Rings, for instance, has always brought me nearly as much joy as it ever did before.

No longer.  In recent months to years, I cannot seem to take pleasure in books that have always been reliable in the past.  I’ve tried to reread the Harry Potter series recently, and even to re-listen to them on Audible, but I can’t seem to do it.  I lose interest quickly, and find the attempt unpleasant.  The same thing happens with The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, The Shining, The Stand, The Dark Tower, Floating Dragon, the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, of Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, Anne Rice, Robert E. Howard…even my beloved Shakespeare.  As Pink Floyd said in the song, One of My Turns, “Nothing is very much fun anymore.” Continue reading →