Anxiety

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“Shell smashed, juices flowing, wings twitch, legs are going…”

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m going to work again, despite‒as the Beatles song puts it‒feeling low down.  My trouble is, I more or less feel low down almost every day.  What am I supposed to do about it by staying at the house?  That’s likely just to make me feel worse, because then I’ll just be alone with one of my least favorite people‒me‒and feeling non-productive and useless.

At least I wouldn’t feel “hysterical and useless”.  I don’t know if I’ve ever been what would be called “hysterical” in my life‒I tend to bottle things up and slash and burn my own figurative innards (and sometimes my literal skin) rather than outwardly flipping out‒but if I have, it’s been quite a long time.

I guess I was probably close to hysterical the time I called the old version of “the hotline” and got picked up by a few undertrained Palm Beach County deputies who did nerve damage to my left wrist with a poorly applied handcuff before dropping me at a clearly underfunded emergency mental health facility.  But I think my hysteria was at least somewhat justified at the time.

That was when I was out on bail, had already lost everything, was effectively homeless, and had very few hopes for much good happening ever again in my life.

I wasn’t wrong, either.  Even the psychiatrist whom I saw for the follow up to that 24-hour hold admitted that he thought there was no way someone wouldn’t be depressed if they were going through what I was experiencing.  He knew I was a doctor, as was he, of course, so he had a certain amount more personal sympathy than he might have had for someone else, but I think it was the shape of the situation, not the specifics, that he thought worthy of despondency if not outright despair.

Anyway, that was a horrible stretch of time, and when I was offered a plea bargain I took it, not because I was actually guilty, but because I saw no way of fighting the whole stupid thing with no money and no real allies in the process.  I hoped at least to have it done in a relatively short amount of time (three years minus gain time) so I would be able to see my kids again before I had missed too much of their lives*.

This highlights how utterly, damnably inadequate our criminal “justice” system is.  The fact that a person who can afford a private attorney can consistently expect fewer convictions, lighter sentences for lesser “crimes”, and even often doesn’t serve time despite having been convicted (see The Donald) than people who don’t have the capacity to hire private lawyers is an absolute and inexcusable travesty.

The word “justice” should not be allowed within a hundred lightyears of that system.  I would say it’s a joke, but jokes are more worthy of respect.  It is, instead, a low-flying, long-term catastrophe, and no one who would like to live in a just society should support it as it is.  No one should be allowed to have private representation in criminal trials unless everyone gets it.  Otherwise those with more money are effectively not subject to the same laws as everyone else, and that includes everything from petty shit up to murder (see OJ), which at the very least in practice violates the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Don’t even get started on sex crimes.  I think we all know how rarely and haphazardly they are punished, let alone prevented.

It would be amusing if someone set up a service whereby they would provide assistance to women (and, yes, men) who were the victims of unpunished sexual assault by helping to get rid of the bodies of their assailants (if they killed them themselves) or just helping to delete the perpetrators from start to finish.  Of course, this could easily run afoul of the crucially important notion of due process, without which laws might as well not really exist, but our government(s) are failing miserably in that crucial area anyway.

Enough fantasizing.  I barely have the energy to get up and live my own so-called life, let alone to set up illicit vigilante services.  I am very tired and I am in continuous pain, and I have very little notion of anything good happening in my future.  A few things in my life now are wonderful, of course‒my youngest, my sister, my brother, and yes, my son, since at least I know that he is doing well, and of course, you readers are pretty darn great‒but I know that I am not wonderful.

I am not much more charming or beneficial than a growth of black mold or a teratoma (or even a less benign tumor).  Maybe tumors and mold growths have rights of some sort in an idealized world, if any living thing does.  But they cannot expect to be welcomed or loved or supported.  They are generally only worthy of removal and destruction if anything at all.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, but then again, I don’t know what the point of much of anything is, least of all the point of me.

Whatever.  Never mind.

*That turned out to be a pipe dream.  I also stayed in Florida instead of remaining with my parents up north after getting out of prison for basically the same reason.  I was severely and devastatingly disappointed when my kids themselves asked me not to pursue my legal right to visitation once I was out, because it would be too disruptive of their lives.  I could not in good conscience selfishly force myself upon their time‒not after I had screwed everything up so much and hurt them thereby‒so I acquiesced.  I can easily sympathize when people don’t want me around.  Anyway, now at least I am interacting regularly with my youngest, and that’s a wonderful thing‒it’s better than I surely deserve‒but my oldest still doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.  Most of you reading this blog post have read my stuff before and have some acquaintance with my mind; can you blame my son for not wanting me around?

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“Nothing to do to save his life, call his wife in.”

What a strange night and morning it has been.  I had a terribly disjointed sleep, which itself is not surprising‒in fact it’s more or less par for the course‒but then I dozed off for a bit just after 3.  Then I almost overslept for my reserved Uber to the train station.  I reserved the ride to make sure I wouldn’t be tempted to walk any part of the way to the train, since my knees and hips and everything else are still bad, and I have taken significantly less naproxen than usual, so I am very stiff and sore.  But I didn’t set my alarm, because I’m almost always awake anyway.

I was able to scramble and even to shower and then make it for my ride without any penalties, though that wouldn’t have been too horrible an outcome if it had happened.  Indeed, I might have then bit the bullet and gotten an Uber all the way to the office.  That would cost a lot more, though.

Anyway, I hate the very notion of being late for something, even if it’s not really important and was a deadline/time semi-arbitrarily chosen by me.  There’s no one really in my life for me to disappoint, other than myself, of course, and I’m already almost always disappointed in and by me.  Still, the notion of being late is mortifying to me, and I really need to struggle to resist as much self-loathing as possible, so it’s best not to fail at one of the few things at which I usually succeed.

So, here I am.  I made it to the station and I’m writing this post.  To that degree, at least, I am successful.  I am, of course, a failure at pretty much everything else.  Certainly I have failed at nearly all the things that have been truly important to me.

C’est la vie, I suppose.  Some people succeed through no credit of their own, and can thereby develop a sense that they are special and divinely protected or some such stupidity, when in fact they are some of the least impressive humans around.  Other people‒many more, it seems‒fail and fall despite having done everything they could, in the ways they were told they ought to do things.

They keep trying to be and do good, trying to achieve success and stability, maybe even trying to have a family and a career.  But they end up seeing everything fall apart, feeling it crumble in their hands even as they try to hold it together.  Indeed, often their attempts to buttress and repair things seem merely to speed up the destruction and exacerbate the decay.  Then, finally, they die alone, surrounded by no one (or at least by no one they know, no one who loves them, if such people even exist).

C’est la mort as well, I guess.  The universe makes no special deals.  It makes no promises, either, other than its implicit “promise” always and only to proceed by its own rules, though we only incompletely know what all those rules are.  It certainly never said, “If you do everything right according to these very human-invented and evolved and imagined rules of behavior, I will ensure that you have something at least approximating the good life you have been told to seek and to expect.”

The universe doesn’t actually say anything at all, come to think of it.  Well, it “says” stuff in the sense that people are part of it, and they say various things, but they in no sense represent the intentions and thoughts of the universe (these do not appear to exist, so people could not represent them).

The universe, as far as we can tell, has no larger scale intelligence and intentions.  It merely is, if the concept of “mere” applies to something that may well be infinite in spatial and temporal extent, and at the very least is much, much larger than anything humans evolved to grasp directly, and also much, much smaller and more finely grained than humans ever evolved to grasp directly.

I guess “mere” is in the eye of the beholder.  And joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks, as Foamfollower often said.  Though I doubt there is much, if any, joy for anyone anywhere in “hearing” my words.

It’s hard for me even to say that I have joy in writing them.  I certainly feel internal pressure to write them, and going with it does relieve some of that tension, and that relief could be called joy, I suppose.  But I don’t think that’s what poets and plasterers and everyone in between really imagines when they speak of “joy”.

Still, we can only take what the universe gives us.  It’s not offering any exchanges.  And it’s not as though we can just go somewhere else to see if they have a better deal.

So, I guess we do what we can with what we have where we are and try not to let ourselves get distracted by foolish notions that the universe owes us some reward.  As far as I can see, the universe “promises” us only one thing, and‒also as far as I can see‒it never fails to deliver this, sooner or later.

Anyway, I hope your weekends are starting off more auspiciously than mine is.  Of course, my weekends always have the major drawback that I am there, and so far, it is certainly a drawback today.

Please take care of yourselves.  I hope you have some joy this weekend that isn’t just a dishwashing liquid.

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I am near the end of my rope with this

Well, here we are again.  It’s Saturday, and as I warned you, I am writing/have written/will have written a blog post.

Is this a good thing?  Is it a bad thing?  I suppose that’s all in the mind of the reader (or the avoider as the case may be).  I don’t think there’s any final, objective assessment of the goodness or badness of me writing (or having written) this blog post.  Everything happens as it must, I suppose.

There’s nothing deep about that.  I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason, as if there is some telos to reality; as far as I can see, there’s no reason (ha!) to suspect that there’s any deep meaning to things other than simply that they are.  The universe does what it does, physics does what it does, and once it’s done, it doesn’t change and could not in any sensible way have been otherwise.  Thus, everything happens as it must, in the sense that it had no choice.

I’ve gone over this ground many times before, I’m sure.  There must be figurative ruts in this thought path deep enough to be able to fit the Loch Ness monster, if you flooded the ruts with water, and if there were a real monster (other than humans) associated with Loch Ness.

Sorry.  I had a very bad sleep last night, even for me, and here I think we can bring an objective measure of badness to bear.  Sleep that doesn’t last and doesn’t bring any refreshment is sleep that’s not doing what is expected of it, and that’s bad.

I don’t think I got a single uninterrupted hour of sleep last night.  That doesn’t mean I slept only less than an hour overall; I slept in fits and starts, as it were, but the total was probably a few hours.  I have been fully awake for about three or so hours already as I write this‒since a little after one in the morning.  So, it’s been quite a poor night, because I certainly didn’t go to sleep very early.

[Aside:  doesn’t the word “manifesto” sound like something a stage magician might say when apparently conjuring something out of midair?  Alternatively, perhaps it could be the name of a breakfast cereal:  Try new Manifest-Os!  Part of this complete breakfast!  Sorry, that thought came to me as I was briefly recalling a video I watched last night.]

Such is my life now, or my “life” as I ought to write, with scare quotes (or should that be “scare” quotes?).  Of course, life is life; it is what it is, like Popeye and the God of Exodus.  My life is no more meaningless than that of the dead “palmetto bug” I flushed down the toilet this morning.

It’s not all that much more meaningful either.  Yes, I write a blog and I go to work, and I’ve written books and songs and such like, and most importantly, I have two children who are awesome*.  But maybe that giant cockroach had done the equivalent in its own millicosm**.  For all I know, its importance to the world of coprophages is unparalleled, and will be remembered for many generations, perhaps forever.

Well…“forever” is quite a heavy lift, as they say.  But maybe its memory will live as long as cockroaches endure, which is likely to be longer than humans endure, unless humans proceed very carefully.  Of course, human records and so on tend to deteriorate over time, being recopied, adjusted, edited, lost and found, reinterpreted through the lens of later ideas that did not exist when original events took place, and gradually just eroded by entropy.

Perhaps palmetto bugs have more relatively durable means of keeping records‒it seems quite unlikely, but it’s not literally impossible.  Even so, they cannot be exempted from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  As Saruman said (in the movie, not the book) to Gandalf about the prospect of anyone standing against Sauron:  “There are none who can.”

Okay, well, I’m veering from the imagined lives and memories of the good and great among cockroaches to quoting the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring.  My chronic and acute lack of sleep is definitely having its effects.

I truly don’t know whether this post has been worth writing, let alone reading.  I guess that latter part will be for each of you to judge.  But, to make your judgement, you must actually read the post‒if you want your judgement to have any reasonable basis‒and then it’s too late for you to decide it wasn’t worth it, except perhaps as a lamentation.

Well, I hope the rest of your weekend has no further causes of potential rue.  Thank you for reading my blog.

Addendum: I have discovered that WordPress has changed their shit again, and I cannot access the editor I used to use. I don’t know why, and they cannot seem to figure out how to reactivate it, but it is TOO MUCH RIGHT NOW. I don’t know if I am going to keep doing this. They call themselves “Happiness Engineers”, but if so, they’re rather comparable to the engineers that made the Tay Bridge in Scotland. It all comes crashing down. I’m already at my wits’ end this morning, as you can probably tell. This blog is one of the only little bits of satisfaction I have on a regular day, and they’ve screwed that up. Fuck WordPress, fuck this blog, and fuck this whole stupid planet.

*They got the “awe” part from my “aw(e)ful” nature, and the “some” part from their mother’s “fearsome” character.  Thank goodness they didn’t inherit the full “awful” (the full aw?) from me, nor did they inherit the other two half-words and end up just fearful.

**This is a new word I just made up.  I thought “microcosm” isn’t the right term‒a roach is not on a millionth of the scale on which I live.  I don’t think even its mass is that relatively small, but I’ll look it up***.  So, I thought, “A thousandth scale seems better, and we have micro and nano and pico scales, so why not ‘millicosm’?”

***Its mass is nearly that small relative to me, but its other dimensions are nowhere close, and since the “micro” in “microscopic” generally refers to one-dimensional measures, my choice still can apply.

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Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my blog and blows it in my face?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.

I had to check the date on my phone a few times in a row to confirm that, yes, not only is it really Thursday, but it is also the 19th of March (in 2026 AD/CE).

It’s not that I thought I must have gotten the day and date wrong.  I keep track of these things and recheck these things all the time, often coming from different directions; I usually have at least a couple of methods by which I am able to reconstruct what day it currently is.  But I always feel‒a bit more strongly than is warranted‒that not only could I be wrong in principle (as is always the case) but that I am not likely to be right.

A similar thing occurs when I do the mental addition to update the various totals on “the board” when people get deals at work.  Intellectually, I know that I’m good at it, and that I’m rarely incorrect.  But “emotionally”, I don’t feel like I’m right.

Even after I check my numbers 3 different ways using Excel (there are 3 totals that should match, and if they do, it’s much more unlikely that I’m wrong), I don’t feel like I’m sure that it’s right, even though intellectually, it’s all but a certainty.  I mean, this is mathematics here, one of the few areas in which we can obtain answers with logical certainty.  And I’m pretty good at it.

I even occasionally deliberately say to myself, after confirming in those 3 ways that I got all the mental arithmetic correct, “Yes!  I am the king!”  It’s an attempt to feel good about myself in a slightly silly way, which is the only way I allow myself to feel good about myself.  But it doesn’t work much, if at all.  It feels like what it is:  a scripted, fictional remark.

This may be part of the problem I have long had with self-affirmation, autosuggestion type things.  If I say good things to myself about myself, I don’t believe them.  in fact, I feel very squirmy and uncomfortable inside when I try to say good things about myself, or to tell myself that I like or love myself.  It’s as though I’m committing some grotesque violation of ordinary decency.

I don’t feel as though I’ve done something truly horrible mind you; I don’t feel as though I’ve harmed some helpless person or otherwise victimized the innocent.  It’s more akin to sticking one’s bare hands into a big bowl full of maggots.  I just feel that I’m disgusting and pathetic and that I make myself more so by saying things that sound as though I’m pretending I’m not disgusting and pathetic.

I recognize these as emotions that are not good guides to the empirical world; intellectually, I can handle them, assess them, recognize their irrationality, and call the judgment made.  But I have not yet been able to shake those feelings, and they are not fun.

I cannot convince myself, down to my bones, that 2 plus 2 equals 4…at least not when I’m doing the figuring.  I know I’m right in a logical sense.  I’ve perceived no reason to doubt my answer, other than the stupid fact that I am the one making it.  But I cannot seem to shake‒or I have not yet been able to do so‒the idea that I may very well have the whole thing fundamentally wrong, and that this is not just a remote, theoretical possibility.

It’s quite frustrating.  I might even say that it’s maddening, except that it seems to be the madness, itself.  It doesn’t matter how well I know and understand something intellectually, how much I know, empirically, that I’m right about something.  Somehow, I always just seem to feel that I, in and of myself, am wrong.  And so must be most of the things I do, unless I am ridiculously careful and check and recheck and triple check* everything.  And even then, I just reduce my anxiety about things a bit.

I have real sympathy for Hamlet, who didn’t want to take vengeance upon his uncle for the murder of his father without being able to convince himself beyond all reasonable doubt that he was not being misled by the apparent ghost of his father.  It makes sense to “have grounds more relative than this” when it comes to killing the king of Denmark, even if you’re the prince.  You don’t want to kill someone in the name of justice or revenge unless you’re really darned sure that they deserve it, otherwise you are committing an irrevocable crime.

Doing arithmetic, on the other hand, is rarely so consequential**.  Neither is failing to turn off a bedside lamp before leaving my room in the morning.  Nor is even the possibility of having failed to lock one of my locks when leaving the house.

But these things often lead me to feel that squirmy misgiving, almost a kind of deep formication.  It’s very annoying.

Oh, I’m also never quite sure‒emotionally‒that no one is going to push me off the platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train at the station***, so I’m always glancing around to make sure no one’s right behind me or coming too close, and if they are, I pay significant attention to them, preparing to dodge or fight back if attacked.

You’d think, given how often I think about the benefits of being dead, that I would be less worried about being randomly murdered at the train station.  But there’s something infuriating about the prospect that someone else could choose to kill me.  That would really tick me off (so to speak).

Anyway, it’s weird, and it’s quite frustrating.  It’s also exhausting.

They say there shall be no rest for the wicked.  I know that’s just part of a prophecy, and therefore bullshit, but in the real world, there shall often be no rest for those who feel that they are wicked.  The actual wicked, of course, probably often sleep the deep, deep sleep of the innocent (as Radiohead sang), because they do not see themselves as wicked.

They probably see themselves as perfectly fine, even great.  Some of them even seem to imagine that they are the greatest (whatever) of all time, and they often suffer no serious consequences for that intellectual failure.

Justice is not a natural force, unfortunately (despite all the bullshit, misguided, popular talk about “karma”); it’s something that has to be forced, if you will, that has to be constructed.  And the people who are most careful about trying to get things right are generally the sorts of people less likely to want to be “in charge” of things.

“And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their courses turn awry / And lose the name of Action.”

TTFN

*Not to be confused with Triple Sec or whatever that liqueur is.  I’ve often wondered if there was ever a Double Sec or even a Mono Sec/Uni Sec.  Probably not.  I suspect the true etymology is based on something that does not mean “threefold” in any sense.  But I could be wrong about this.

**Even the failure of that Climate Orbiter that famously broke up in the atmosphere of Mars was due not to an arithmetic error, but an error of units:  One group involved in the project was using metric units, the other was using so-called imperial units, and nobody seems to have checked.  I cannot imagine what I would have felt if I had made that error.  Seppuku would probably feel too generous.

***This occurred to me because, as I was writing, I was on the train platform getting ready to board the oncoming train and I experienced that minor paranoia, as I nearly always do.

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Man overboard

As the real weekends go, it was better than most, to paraphrase The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  By this, I’m referring to this last weekend, the two days before this day, of course.

I did not work on Saturday, which is good, because that would have been the third time in a row.  I also got to hang out with my youngest on Saturday, and we watched about four episodes of Doctor Who together, which was good, good fun.  I cannot complain about that in any way.

I have though a weird, disquieting, sinking sort of feeling that it may have been the last time I will see my youngest, or maybe anyone else that I love.  It’s is not one of those reliable sorts of feelings, like those that lead one to new insights in science or mathematics or what have you.  It’s probably more a product of depression and anxiety, the feeling that anything good in my life is sure not to last, if it happens at all, because I do not and cannot possibly be worthy of anything good happening to me.

Is that irrational?  Of course it is irrational.  It cannot be expressed in any sense as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how many digits they may have.

Wait, wait, let me think about that.  My thought, my feeling, was expressed above finitely.  That is, of course, a shorthand for what is really happening, but even if one were to codify those processes down to the level of each molecular interaction that affects any neural/hormonal process that contributes to my feeling, we know that must be a finite description (though it could, in principle, be quite large).

Even if we’re taking the full spectrum of quantum mechanics into account when describing my mental state, we know that quantum mechanics demands a minimum resolvable distance and time (the Planck length and the Planck time) below which any differentiation is physically meaningless.

A finite amount of information can describe the events and structures and processes in any given finite region of spacetime.  In fact, the maximum amount of information in any given region of spacetime is measured by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of an event horizon that would span exactly that region, as seen from the outside*.

Any finite amount of information can be encoded as a finite number of bits, which can of course be “translated” to any other equivalent code or number system.  So, really, though the contents of my mind are, in principle, from a certain point of view, unlimited, they are finite in their actual, instantiated content, and can therefore certainly be expressed as an integer, and thus also as a ratio (since any integer could be considered a ratio of itself over one, or twice itself over two, etc.).

So, in that sense, my thoughts are not irrational.  Neener, neener, neener.

In many other senses—maybe not the literal, original sense, but in the horrified, cannot accept that not all numbers can be expressed as ratios of integers because that makes the universe too inconceivable, sense, among others—I can be quite irrational.

It’s very difficult to fight one’s irrationality from the inside, alone.  Even John Nash didn’t really beat his schizophrenia from within as shown in the movie version of A Beautiful Mind.  Also, his delusions in real life were far more extravagant and bizarre than those which appear in the sanitized version that made a good Hollywood story.

If one escapes from mental illness from within, one has to consider it largely a matter of luck, like a young child who doesn’t know anything about math getting a right answer on a graduate level, high order differential equation problem.  It’s physically possible; heck, if it were a multiple choice question, it might even be relatively common***.  But it’s not a matter of being able to choose to do it right and to know how it was done.

Severe mental health issues are going to need to receive assistance from outside, almost always.  This is not an indictment of them or of the need for help.

Surely, someone who has been swept off the deck of a ship by a rogue wave cannot be faulted for needing help from those still on the ship of they are to survive.  It would certainly seem foolish and almost inevitably fruitless if such a person tried to claw his way up the side of the ship to get back on board when there is no ladder and no handholds.  He should certainly not be ashamed that he cannot swim hard enough to launch himself bodily from the water and back onto the surface of the vessel.

One cannot reasonably fault such a person for trying to do the superhuman.  A person might try to do practically anything rather than drown or be eaten alive by some marine predator.  But, of course, barring an astonishing concatenation of events such as the time-reverse of the splashing entry into the ocean happening and sending the person out of the sea just as it was entered, such efforts will not succeed.

And though it might be heartening or at least positive for one to receive encouragement from those still on the deck—don’t drown, keep treading water, you can do it, you’ll make people sad if you drown, you deserve to stay afloat, I’m proud of you for treading water yet another day, it’ll get better, this won’t last forever, you’ve made it this far so you know you can keep going, you don’t want the people who know you to feel sad because you drowned, etc.—in the end it might as well come from the seagulls waiting to pick at one’s floating corpse.

Mind you, certain kinds of words can be more useful than others.  Words like, “Hey, around the other side of the ship there’s a built-in ladder; if you can get over there and time things right, you might be able to grab the lowest rung when the waves lift you, and then climb up,” might be useful because they are directions for using real, tangible resources that we know can make a difference.  Also, words like, “Hang on just a bit longer, we’re throwing down a life preserver on a rope so we can haul you up” would be useful, obviously, unless they were mere “comforting” lies.

Alas, though one could reasonably expect such literal assistance if one were washed overboard—the “laws” of the sea are deeply rooted in the hearts of those who work there, and they include a general tendency to help anyone adrift to the best of one’s abilities—when it comes to mental illness, the distress and the problems are difficult for others to discern and easy to ignore.  Calls of distress are often experienced as annoyances, and even treated with contempt, since those hearing them cannot readily perceive that they themselves might be similarly washed overboard at any time.

But, of course, they might be.

I don’t know how I got on this tangent, but I guess I never really do.  I just go where my mind takes me, and my mind is not a reliable driver.  It is, though, a reliable narrator.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  Nothing does.

Anyway, here we go again into another work week, because that was what we did last week.  I wish I could offer you better reasons, but I’m really only good at breaking things down, destroying things, not at lifting anyone or anything up.  That comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers.

*From within an event horizon, the volume could be much larger than the spacetime that seems to be enclosed from the outside, because spacetime inside the horizon is massively curved and stretched.  It’s conceivable (at least to me) that there could be infinite space** within, at least along the dimension(s) of maximum stretch, just as there is infinite surface area to a Gabriel’s Horn, but only finite volume.

**See, mathematically, one can stuff infinite space inside a nutshell.  Hamlet was right.  He often was.

***Perhaps this explains why certain types of mental health problems can respond well to relatively straightforward interventions, and even to more than one kind of intervention with roughly comparable success, e.g., CBT and/or basic antidepressants and such.  These relatively tractable forms of depression are the “multiple choice problem” versions of mental illness.  This does not make them any less important.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, you filthy animals.

Well, guess what.  It’s Saturday now, and I’m writing a blog post, which can only mean that I am working today.  At the last minute, the schedule of the office was changed and now we’re working.  And we’re supposedly going to be doing this now every other (meaning alternating ones) Saturday.  But, of course, I worked last Saturday.  And who knows how things will change in the future?  I’m pretty sure not even the boss knows, because he changes the specifics somewhat irregularly, though there are always colorably reasonable purposes behind such changes.

I suppose I could merely have said, “No, I’m not coming in this weekend.  I worked last weekend, I had to walk to the bank after work and I caused my knees and my pain in general to flare up badly, and that problem continues.  I need a fucking break.”  But, of course, I’m not really built quite that way.  I have been too strongly trained to operate on the approach that to shirk going to work is to be a jerk*.

So, here I am, at the office, and it’s the middle of the night.  That’s right, when it got to be time to leave, I was in too much pain to want to ride the train‒it’s not comfortable to sit in, and I usually have to go to the upper levels to find a seat, which is a little exacerbating and occasionally exasperating‒and I didn’t want to pay to Uber back to the house like I did on Monday and then Thursday for the above reasons, so…I stayed here in the office overnight.

I’m tired of being in pain, I can tell you that.  I wish it were the sort of thing one could simply “get used to”, but biology does not tend to select for creatures that can get used to and ignore pain.  That would defeat the whole usefulness of pain.  Make no mistake:  like fire alarms, pain was and is (and probably always will be) terribly useful.  And “terribly” has more than one legitimate meaning here.

The trouble is that in the modern world, we suffer from and yet survive injuries and disorders that would almost never have been survived by our ancestors, and we can live on with the consequences of these injuries and illnesses for decades, but our nervous systems don’t have any clear function that suppresses or diminishes pain after a while.  There’s no selection pressure favoring such a thing.  Even for our ancestors who might have survived to have chronic pain, that problem tended to develop after peak reproductive years had already passed, and so evolution literally could not and cannot detect the issue.

Indeed, it’s just barely conceivable, though by no means demonstrated, that it might be good for male humans who have injuries that hamper them to feel the pain worsen, to have it lead to them removing themselves from the population in one way or another.  When they can no longer be physical providers, in order to increase the share of resources for their offspring and their other kin, they can kill themselves, directly or indirectly, giving the genes they share with close relatives that harbor that tendency a selective advantage.  This is hypothetical, bordering on speculative, but it might make some sense.

This could also be related to female humans being better suited to endure long-term pain than males, since matrilineal support among human tribes is common***, but that’s getting ever more speculative.

Don’t get me wrong; the ideas are plausible.  But it’s just when one’s ideas are strongly plausible‒but not specifically tested or backed by clear and specific evidence‒that one must be especially harsh and strict with oneself.  It’s comparatively simple, and psychologically rewarding, to come up with plausible and logical hypotheses, but even if one is very smart, most of one’s hypotheses are going to be incorrect.  Whether you’re more Popperian or more Bayesian, the crucial usefulness of testing a hypothesis to try to refute it or to see how your credences shift is inescapable.

This mildly interesting digression doesn’t change the fact that I am in searing pain lately, and it doesn’t seem to diminish much for long.  I’m already prone to dysthymia/chronic depression (veering into the acute stage frequently) and anxiety with at least some obsessive compulsive patterns, all of it occurring in a nervous system that is…atypical from the start.

I hate the world.  I hate my body.  I hate the twisted mockery my life has become.  I hate large parts of my mind (but not all of it).  I hate being around people.  I hate being alone.  I really just ought to stop the whole fucking ride and get off.  I just need to work up the nerve and the commitment.  I’m getting there, believe me.

Anyway, I hope you’re having just a lovely Valentine’s Day.

*And to rhyme all the time is to act like a slime and be covered with grime**.

**I know, none of that makes sense.  It’s not really meant to make sense.  I just accidentally did some internal rhyming in a sentence and that stimulated me to do more of it.

***There are good biological reasons for this as well.  Mothers, and therefore maternal grandmothers, all know whether a child is their child or not, so it’s easier to know that it’s a good idea to spend effort and resources on those descendants.  Males, in general, can not be as certain.

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Saturday.  Blog post.  Work.  Why am I doing this?

Okay, well, if we must, then let’s go.  I’ll try to write something that’s at least intelligible (which may or may not correlate with being intelligent) so that people won’t feel they’ve completely wasted their time reading my blog today-or hopefully any day that they read my blog, though I cannot guarantee that.

Obviously, as noted, I am working today, though I’m not happy about it.  I’m very tired.  I’m still well within my latest flare-up of my chronic pain, and I was so uncomfortable yesterday that I couldn’t even find any interest in eating comfort food to try to distract me.

The boss actually bought lunch for the office, but I didn’t really want what they were getting.  He offered to get me whatever I wanted, and told me to order from Uber Eats and he would pay me for it.  But nothing, not even ice cream or tacos or burgers or pizza or anything appealed to me.  So I didn’t have lunch.  I had some corn chips in the afternoon, but not very many, and I had a bit of bacon in the evening, because even when you’re not really interested in it, bacon is fairly tasty.

Anyway, this morning is already starting out annoyingly, and that’s not counting the fact that I am getting up to go to work on a Saturday after working Monday through Friday*.  Not that I was asleep.  I woke up more than two hours before I got up, partly because of pain, but also because of just my chronic insomnia/low grade feeling of lack of safety in the jungle at night.

To be clear, though I am living in a subtropical region, I do not actually sleep out in the jungle.  That’s just the feeling I have, that inability to rest and stay asleep, as if I might be attacked at any instant.

I won’t get into the specifics of what is so annoying.  It’s the sort of thing that would annoy pretty much anyone, though it is not life-threatening nor is it life-deranging, in and of itself.  It is, however, one more thing, another little weirdly heavy straw placed on the camel’s back, added to the already all but crippling pile.  Also, there seems to be some kind of fungus or caustic toxin in this pile of straw, because it itches and burns like nobody’s business**.  This is metaphorical, of course, but not far from reality.

Anyway, I don’t feel well.  I’m tired, I’m in pain, I’m exhausted but can’t sleep, and even the things that often tend to give me some degree of joy are not catching my attention.  I feel chaos and decay and dysfunction everywhere, in the world and in myself, and now even in the (paid!) service I use to post my blog.

I feel almost as if I’m sliding along on a zip line over a field of lava far below, and the rope on which I’m hanging is frayed and unraveling.  I can’t tell how long it will last.  Nor can I tell how far it is to my destination.

Maybe there is no destination.  Maybe the zip line just keeps going until the rope finally gives way.  Or maybe, at the far end, you just run out of rope and your zip line rig‒whatever the proper term for it is‒zips off the end, off the top of that final pole, and you go slinging into the lava anyway.

I certainly see nothing that gives me any indication of even any relatively pleasant end to the trip.  It’s just dangling over lava until I eventually fall in, the scent of sulfur and other foul odors rising up to entertain me along the way.  But I’m strapped to the zip line, and to get free prematurely would require unbuckling the harness or cutting the line or perhaps bouncing on it to increase the rate of fraying.  It can be done, but it is intimidating because of the damnable instincts baked into my hardware.

I’m so tired.  And I have no future to which to look forward.  I wish I could just find the courage to take my exit, to unbuckle from or cut the line.  I’m all alone here, anyway, so there’s no one depending on me‒other than the people at the office to a limited degree, I guess.  But one cannot stay alive merely to continue to do a job that one does merely to be able to stay alive.

It’s not as though anyone is anxiously awaiting my next book or my next song, and even the people who read my blog every time I write it are surely not eagerly awaiting it.  No one will be significantly bereft when I’m gone.  They can’t be, because no one is significantly in my presence.  For the most part, with respect to other people, I’m just a concept, a theoretical entity.  I’m not really a person someone could look at and spend time with and potentially touch (let alone help).  I’m an idea‒and not a cool one like the idea of Batman, as discussed in Batman Begins.  Thus, any idea anyone has of me now, they can still have after I die.

Don’t try idly to persuade me that this is not true.  The evidence is strongly against you, so convincing me otherwise is going to be a serious task.

I hope you have a good day, though.

*Oh, and now it turns out the WordPress has changed the way their classic editor works, making it less user-friendly, with a smaller and less clear type-face, so there’s yet another irritating thing, this one involving something with which I deal every single working day.  Perhaps this is a sign that I should just call this blog, and everything else, quits.  I don’t know if I can stand this anymore.  Living in this world is like rolling around naked in a field of nettles and brambles.

**That’s a peculiar expression, isn’t it, “like nobody’s business”?

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“I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.”

I’m going to try to keep this short today, because my energy level is petering out.  Although, ironically, depending upon one’s tendencies as a writer, it can take more effort to be brief than to ramble on*.  Still, my communication urge feels quite low.  I don’t think this will probably be all that long.

For the last several days, I’ve been striving to keep my discussions upbeat, though the topics I’ve chosen haven’t been as naturally uplifting as, say, sunflowers and hummingbirds**.  Still, for me they’ve been pretty positive (unlike the “time” component of the Pythagorean-style formula used to calculate the spacetime interval between two events).

But being positive is something that requires deliberate effort for me.  It’s not as much effort as is required for socializing in person, trying to be expressive, gregarious, and pleasant, but it is close.  And alcohol generally does not make it easier to be positive (in contrast to its helpful effects for socializing).

That’s probably good.  If alcohol were not such a very mixed and often unpleasant bag for me, I would probably be prone to have a problem with it.  As it is, its ill-effects almost always, and very quickly, overshadow its benefits.

I’ve had Valium™ I think twice or three times, all in medical circumstances, in my life, and that was revelatory.  Even though I had taken it for procedures such as wisdom teeth removal and cardiac catheterization (both happened when I was a teenager), its effects made me feel normal for maybe the only times in my life.

Normal is not necessarily better than abnormal, either practically or morally; it would probably be better to be an abnormally good and clever orc than to be a “normal” one.  But to feel at ease in one’s skin is a truly remarkable experience for someone who never has felt that way at any other time.

Maybe feeling at ease is not a good thing.  People don’t tend to accomplish much without at least a little tension and dissatisfaction.  I’ve written about the evolutionary inevitability of fear and pain before.  Well, for highly social mammals like humans, social anxiety can be a similarly inevitable tendency.  It can vary from person to person, of course, with some having it to such a degree that it becomes debilitating and some having too little, though what specifically appears as dysfunctional will depend on the overall circumstances.

Speaking of anxiety and pain, my own chronic pain has been flaring up severely for most of the last 48 hours, though I’m not sure what set it into overdrive.  Even if it’s merely some inherent cyclicity to the syndrome, there is still an underlying cause, or set of causes, as there is always a cause or causes for even the basic cycles in nature.  And if one can understand the causes of something, one has a far better chance to do something about them than if one does not.

There is not always a “why” to things, but there is always a “how” to everything that happens.  Telos (τέλος) is almost always misperceived, in the sense that it is almost always not even there (though there is a human bias to perceive it nearly everywhere, seemingly a byproduct of the human tendency, as social animals, to attempt always to read the intentions of others).  But it seems never to be utterly useless to look for ananke (ἀνάγκη) “force, constraint, necessity”.

I don’t know what I’m even getting at right now.  Probably, I’m not getting at anything, right?  I mean, think about what I just said about “how” versus “why”.  

Whatever.  I’m very tired, and not just physically‒except in the sense that everything that actually exists is physical‒but at a deep mental, one might say a “spiritual”, level.  Reality is too noisy and irritating and distracting and often disgusting.  I need some rest from it all, from everything, and probably even from myself.  If “need” is too extreme a word choice (after all, I can survive without it, so in some sense I do not need it) than I want it, and not just idly.

I crave rest from everything, I’m practically jonesing for it.  My metaphorical stomach is growling and my hands are shaking with hunger for it.  If I saw the prospect of a simple, painless, peaceful rest before me, I would probably drool.

Alas, I have merely the ongoing, ever-shifting flare-up of my always irritating chronic pain.  This doesn’t help my insomnia, of course, nor my depression.

And don’t even talk to me about my tinnitus and hearing difficulties.  No, seriously, don’t talk to me about them; I can’t hear you very well.  Just send me an email or a text or something.

Ha ha.  Okay, I guess I’m almost never grim and disheartened enough not to make stupid jokes.

Anyway, I hope you all have a better time than I’ve been having.  I think I’m going to be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.

*Thus the famous quote, attributed variously to Mark Twain or to Charles Dickens or to Pascal or even to Cicero:  “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

**The reality of which pair is probably more brutal than anything I could say about the irreversibility of time or the nature of stupidity.

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What do we call a day on which we bread and cook things in hot oil?

It’s Friday.  It’s also pretty cold here in south Florida; it’s about 44 Fahrenheit right now.  We are now just over halfway through the month of January in 2026.  Yesterday we were just under halfway through.

Actually, no, that’s not really correct.  Since January has 31 days, the 16th (today) should be considered the median day.  There were fifteen days before this, and there are 15 days after, and there is this one day in the middle that stands alone.  So, maybe I can reasonably say that we are now rather precisely halfway through January, or at least we will be at noon.

Enough of all the date and number nonsense.  I’m probably the only one here who enjoys or even notices such things.

With respect to anything else, “enjoyment” is an even bigger question.  I did spend a bit of time yesterday watching some of the rather nutty inventors/amateur engineers on YouTube making and testing various odd devices, including some particularly nifty ones, such as various kinds of homemade flame throwers.  I’ve made homemade flame throwers myself, with varying degrees of success, so it’s nice to learn from the successes and failures of these other people.

It’s briefly amusing, but that’s about it.

I didn’t do any more problems on Brilliant dot org yesterday.  I’ll try to do some today.  But so many things distract me and get in the way, and work is not the only issue.

Mainly, I think the issue is that I am mentally exhausted.  Work contributes to that, of course, but not as much as my chronic insomnia, which is no better than ever.  And, of course, there is the dysthymia, which I think is officially designated now as “chronic depression”.  I guess that’s a more straightforward term, and I cannot deny that it is fairly clear, but I like (the word) dysthymia better.  The “dys” part carries the very sharp, ancient-world imprimatur of things going wrong, of shit not working properly, as in dysfunction, dystopia, and so on.

Believe me, there is shit that is not working properly here in this head.

Speaking of working and not working, the office will be open tomorrow, I hear, but I don’t yet know if I’m going to work or not.  That will probably depend on what my coworker(s) are doing.  I guess if I am working I will write a post in the morning.  I don’t think it will be a happy one.

I tell you, that high-rise, fancy balcony room (with king sized bed) in the fancy hotel in downtown [name redacted] near me is looking more and more enticing.  The daily rate is not very expensive, even on the weekend‒especially if you’re not going to have any expenses at all afterwards.  I guess I’ll keep that option in mind and keep checking the rates online for the nonce.

I don’t know why the nonce wants me to keep doing that, but so it seems to desire.  I do a lot of somewhat irrational things for that annoying nonce.

Okay, that’s enough of driving that particular joke into the ground.

I am still having trouble calming my mind without making myself more depressed.  Still, I have to admit, depression (in general) is somewhat preferable to extreme tension and (mainly social) anxiety, especially because, in me, anxiety presents as hostility, sometimes global and even cosmic levels of hostility.  Chronic pain doesn’t help that particular set point, of course.

I’m reminded of two different movie quotes, the first regarding fear and its consequences, from The Phantom Menace, spoken by (the criminally overrated) Yoda:  “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”  I always want to reply to that with, “Yeah…it leads to the suffering of the people who pissed me off.”  But that’s not very constructive.

The other quote comes from the (criminally underrated) movie Dragonslayer, when the old wizard, Ulrich, describes Vermithrax (the dragon) with the words, “When a dragon gets this old it knows nothing but pain, constant pain.  It grows decrepit.  Crippled.  Pitiful.  Spiteful.”

I feel you there, Vermithrax.

Incidentally, I’m not sure I understand the reason for the periodic eating of individual young virgin girls; that doesn’t seem to be nearly enough calories to sustain a giant, flying reptile that breathes fire.  I guess magic must be involved somehow.  And if the energy required for survival comes from some magical field, maybe food is only needed to provide raw materials but not to fuel metabolic activity.

I’m probably overthinking this.

I could use some magic now and then, I can’t deny it.  I don’t mean “magic” such as stage magic, though when I was little I got kind of into that stuff for a while, and I had several different books on how to perform magic tricks.  I mean “real” magic, like Harry Potter or Doctor Strange or what have you.  Of course, if such things existed in reality, they wouldn’t be “magic” except perhaps for nostalgic reasons.  They would be science.

I have long been irritated by the fact that there is no real “science of magic” in the Harry Potter universe.  They have all these classes about doing magic and so on, but as far as I can tell, even someone like Dumbledore (or Hermione) doesn’t get into the fundamentals of magic, the physics of magic, if you will.

But there has to be such a thing, of course.  Clearly the magic there has laws, it’s not just a “make a wish” kind of magic.  There must be a dynamics and kinematics and so on of magic.  But even the things they supposedly investigate in the Department of Mysteries don’t seem to have anything to do with fundamental magical laws.

Again, I’m probably overthinking things.

It’s a problem a lot of the time, and it often gets in my way.  I refer you to my point above that depression is probably better than the anxiety, tension, and hostility that seem to be my other option(s).  Maybe I should just lean into my depression, stop trying to be upbeat in any way, stop cracking jokes or even watching or reading comedy, stop trying to talk myself out of certain feelings, CBT-style, but rather just embrace and embody all my nihilism and pessimism and self (and other) loathing.

I don’t know if I can do it.  Still, it might be worth a try.  It’s hard to see it making things much worse.

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.