Anxiety

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“Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.  Thursday night, your stockings needed mending*.”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I’m feeling a bit better than I have so far this week.  Perhaps I really did have a virus of some type that my body has been fighting.  If so, it triggered/worsened symptoms of already existing pathologies in my body—in my back and hips and shoulders and other joints, and so on—in addition to making me feel achy and feverish, though without the actual fever.

I can’t really blame my psychopathology on a virus, unless it’s some form of mental virus**, or more likely some lifelong accumulation thereof.  Such “viruses” are rarely acute and self-limited, though they could be, I suppose.  What, after all, is a momentary fad or brief obsession, perhaps with a song, or the spread of a particularly funny new joke, that goes away before long?

I don’t really think my mental issues are primarily caused by acute memetic infection, if you will.  They started a long time ago.  In any case, my brain is apparently of an atypical type, at least based on my autism diagnosis, and that creates a substrate on which supervening inputs can become prone to cause certain forms of pathology.  Depression and anxiety are two of those things that are very common in those with ASD—significantly more so than in the general population***.  The statistics on autism indicate that suicidal ideation and attempted and successful**** suicide are much more common in people with ASD than in so-called neurotypicals.

I often think of depression—at least in some of its forms—as a sort of weather-pattern in the mind that becomes self-sustaining in the right circumstances, rather like a hurricane or other massive storm system.  One doesn’t find hurricanes in environments that are not conducive to them—Siberia and the like, for instance—but in minds that are the metaphorical equivalent of the tropics, such mental storm systems may be much more common, and sometimes very destructive.

Who knows, maybe ECT treatment for severe and recalcitrant depression is something akin to the (ill-advised) notion of dropping large nukes in the middle of a hurricane to disrupt its pattern.  If hurricanes occasionally had the tendency to obliterate all or even most life on Earth, we might be willing to try something as extreme as dropping nuclear weapons in a developing tropical storm system to disrupt it, if we could find no other solution.

I wonder if even the large storm cells that occur over places like the great plains of North America could be considered something like episodes of depression (the fact that some weather systems are called “depressions” relates to the barometric pressure, and should not be construed as in any way related to psychiatric depression, other than etymologically).  To what would a “super cell” that produces massive tornados be analogous?

Of course, there need be no actual analogy, because the weather concept is a metaphor, really.  But it is not completely a metaphor, so I don’t think it’s too frivolous to push the notion further in order to trigger some thoughts.  Complex systems like the brain and the weather, with internal feedbacks and feedforwards and “feedsidewayses” that can lead to vicious and/or virtuous cycles can have actual attributes in common if looked at in the right way.

It’s a bit akin to how the motion of a pendulum and the oscillation of a circuit and the “probability waves” of quantum mechanics can be described by very similar mathematics.  Also, the relations between pressure, flow, and friction in fluid dynamics with voltage, current, and resistance in electric circuits are almost spookily alike.

This probably demonstrates something rather fundamental in the nature of reality.  Perhaps it’s distantly related to the fact that geometry seems to have a deeper influence on the workings of reality than one might at first think, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Pythagorean relations and the appearance of Pi (π) in often surprising places.

This is all speculative stuff, and I’m not being very rigorous in my thoughts, though I’m trying not to be too frivolous.  But I think this is a good place to wrap up this post for today.  I hope you all are doing well and that you continue to do well, and even better, that you improve at least a little bit, in at least some way, every day.  You might as well.

*Has anyone reading ever actually mended their stockings (or darned their socks, as in another Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby)?  I have mended a sock at least once in my life, and probably more than once, but nowadays socks are so readily available that I tend just to throw them away when a hole develops.  I guess that’s a testament to how “spoiled” we are in the modern world.  Incidentally, I added the Thursday part of Lady Madonna to this quote-based title because I realized that I’m never likely to use it on an actual Thursday blog post, because for those I use mutated quotes from Shakespeare.

**In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a replicator of the mind, and it has become a useful scientific term, in addition to being a slightly imprecise shorthand for usually humorous pictures of various kinds shared online.  Such memes can become highly potent self-replicators in various senses, and they can combine in ways that make them more prone to spread, in “meme-plexes” of various kinds.  Some are useful for the organism, and so could be considered beneficial viruses (memetic rather than genetic) while others can become terribly destructive, at least in certain circumstances.  Certainly the mind-virus(es) associated with the Jim Jones cult was/were lethal to most of those who were infected.  Likewise with the Heaven’s Gate viruses.  Some of such comparisons can be a bit glib, but others are robust and can be subject to rigorous study.

***I’m not referring to a prison-based “general population”, though at times the metaphor of modern society as a prison is truly warranted, especially for those of us with atypical brains.

****There are times when I would think of a completed suicide as indeed a thoroughgoing success, i.e., a positive thing overall, but here I’m just using the term “successful” to mean “having completed what was intended, as intended”.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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Missing AC units and one man’s lack of mental health

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and that’s better than it still being Monday evening, which wasn’t so fun.  I got the notice that my AC unit had been delivered yesterday afternoon, but when I got back to the house, it was nowhere to be seen, and my housemates had not seen it let alone brought it in out of the rain.

It was raining, in case I hadn’t told you.  It still is.

Anyway, I looked around the nearby houses and then I checked with Amazon, and I called FedEx, who said that their info was that it was delivered.  I went to the website with them and saw the delivery picture‒which was not of the house where I live.

I got pretty frustrated, because it was raining a fair amount, but I looked at the picture and thought it might be the neighbor’s house.  But it had not been there when I’d looked around.

I was already wet, so I went to their house and knocked on the door, so irritated by the whole process that I was willing to interact with other people.  It turned out they had brought it inside because of the rain.  They graciously (and with some difficulty, since it was both heavy and awkward) brought it out for me.

Then I had to lug this 50 pound box, with no real handles, back to the house.  I’m feeling the effects of that in my back quite a bit, and I hold FedEx responsible.

In the end, at least I got it set up and started using it last night.  I won’t say it was miraculous, but I was able to use a blanket part of the night last night for the first time in a long while.

I guess it can’t expect it to make a life-changing difference, but it’s better to be at least a little cooler than I was.  It can’t be a bad thing‒or, well, it’s always possible in principle for it to be a bad thing, but I would give that quite a low likelihood.

As for everything else, well…I’m still at a loss.  I don’t know what to do, and I feel no why to do anything.  I guess it’s appropriate that June is (among other things) Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, though it might better be called Men’s Mental Lack of Health Awareness Month.

Apparently, according to the statistics I have recently seen (this was on social media, so the precision and accuracy must be considered at least potentially lacking) men die from suicide three times as often as women.  And, of course, people with autism spectrum disorder die from suicide a similar multiple compared with those who do not have it (and the proportion may be as high as 25 times that in non-autistic people, but I’ll stick with 3 times for the moment).

So, if those variables are independent, which they probably are not completely, then I would be nine times as likely to die from suicide as a neurotypical woman.

That sounds alarming, doesn’t it?  Nine times the risk?  Like corduroy pillows, that’s the sort of thing that makes headlines.  But if you think about it, those statistics and probability ratios give you almost no information.  Before you can decide to act on that risk multiplier, you need to understand the baseline risk/rate of occurrence.

If 10% of neurotypical women die from suicide (an absurdly large and entirely imaginary percentage) then with my relative risk of 9 x the baseline, it would seem that I would have a 90% risk of suicide.  If the women’s rate were a bit higher, my risk might even seem to be more than 100%, which is a mathematical absurdity.

On the other hand, if neurotypical women committed suicide at a rate of .000001, or one in a million, then my risk would seem to be .000009, or just shy of one in a hundred thousand*.  That wouldn’t be too terrible.

This is why you should not get alarmed if you hear some statistic such as “people with red hair have a hundred times the chance to spontaneously combust as non redheads”.  You need to know what the baseline chance is to know if there’s anything worth worrying about**.

As for my personal risk of suicide, well, that’s not vanishingly small.  I have numerous risk factors, including the single biggest predictive risk factor.  As a rough estimate, I would say that, despite the fact that I’m a 55 year old white male with some pertinent family history, I think my risk of death by suicide is significantly higher than my risk of death due to heart attack; it’s probably bigger than my chance of having a heart attack, even a relatively minor one.  That’s not a fixed number, of course.  Many things can change all these relative risks.

Unfortunately, I don’t honestly expect my own risk of suicide to go down significantly, or even at all, as time goes on.  My internal life seems to be steadily growing slightly bleaker, and even blanker, every day, and none of the things that used to bring me comfort or at least engage me seem to be of any interest.  If anything, I feel my likelihood is increasing over time, though maybe it’s staying the same but each day is a new roll of the dice, so over time, the likelihood increases.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  I don’t have the wherewithal to change the situation myself; if I did, I wouldn’t be in this situation.  I’ve already tried a great many things.

Anyway, I hope the weather is more pleasant wherever you are, and that you have a very good day.

*The actual rates, while apparently difficult to tease out with great precision, are quite a bit more alarming than my second scenario.  In the UK, for instance, it seems that about 1% of people are autistic, but 11% of suicides are by autistic people.  The rate of suicidal ideation among people with ASD is way higher than that in the general population, starting in childhood (which I can confirm in my case), when the rates of ideation and attempt are reported as high as 25 times that of the general population.  Also, overall, the expected lifespan of autistic people has been measured at about 54 years.  Even given typical statistical variance, I’m about due.

**Since there is not a single confirmed case of spontaneous human combustion, despite what you may have heard, even a multiplier of a hundred may leave one so close to a zero probability that being hit by an asteroid might be a more realistic concern.

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What shall we do now?

Well, it’s Wednesday now, and since I have no appointments for X-rays or anything similar, I am heading on in to the office.  It’s continued to be a hectic time, and today is supposed to be the day on which we finally begin to do business in the new office, though many things have been moved during the day over the last few days.  I would have thought that the uprooting and shifting would have made working more difficult, but we’ve had very big days, especially yesterday.

It’s good I guess, but it’s annoying, because it means I’m very stressed out by more than one thing.

I’m still quite beat, by which I mean I’m so very tired and worn down and exhausted.  I told the boss yesterday that this last week plus had been one of the top five hardest weeks of my life‒and I pointed out the various other horrible weeks I’ve had so I could try to put it in perspective for him‒but I really don’t think he quite got the point.

I think my inability to convey how I feel, or the tendency for it not to show, as well as my own inherent tendency toward a kind of nihilistic stoicism, means that people don’t really know or at least don’t understand when I’m feeling truly horrible.  I’ve said before that this is why the line from Pink Floyd’s Brain Damage resonates with me so much:  “And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear, you shout and no one seems to hear…”

I don’t even feel I’m at some breaking point anymore; I think I’m already broken, but I’m hobbling along because of inertia, holding the remnants of me together with paperclips and twine and baling wire.

Anyway, I’m exhausted.  I wish I could get back into writing or drawing or creating songs and doing music or studying more science and math, but though I have had passion for all those things at various times, there is only so much one can do to produce creative things in a vacuum, with nearly no feedback or appreciation, before one gives up.

Van Gogh had a similar situation, I guess (not that I am comparing my ability with his) in that he produced many brilliant works of art, but only one was bought by anyone in his lifetime and no one but his sibling appreciated his ability.  And, of course, finally, he shot himself in the torso and died from the wound not long after.  I can sympathize very much, even with his choice to shoot himself in a way that would not be immediately lethal.  It’s both a fear thing‒a lethal shot is scary to do‒and a form of self-punishment and self-hatred‒one doesn’t feel that one deserves an easy death.

I don’t know what I, myself, am going to do.  I’m just too exhausted from my current situation, and from the feeling that I need to use the bathroom 24 hours a day.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I’m very tired, as I said, and it’s only early morning.  But, of course, my sleep is even worse than usual because of the whole bathroom urgency and flank pain thing.  Ah, whataya gonna do?

I hop that what you will do is have a good day.

***

Addendum:  Well, I’m at the office, and even though the Wi-Fi was supposed to be still active this morning in the office, it seems the movers, such as they are, took the router over with them.  My phone’s mobile hotspot function doesn’t get good enough reception here, and so far the public Xfinity Wi-Fi doesn’t seem to have any ability to do adequate data, so I cannot get anything done at the office.

Why did I bother to come in?  Well, of course, that was largely because I couldn’t sleep and there was no air conditioning at the house, but I also like to get a head start on office stuff.  I’ve even finished the last of the series’ of “light novels” with which I was trying to distract myself, so I can’t even count on any reading to help me.

I apparently will not have a closed area in the new office where I will be able to be at least partly cut off from the noise and all.  I wish I had just stayed at the house today, and maybe never left again.  I don’t even have a guitar here anymore, because I gave away my black Strat.  That action was one of those “gesture” things, to be honest, and I was hoping someone would pick up on the point of it, but either they didn’t recognize it, or‒more likely‒they don’t really much care.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  There are very few people for whom it would actually matter if I die.

I’ve finally been able to get the Xfinity thing working a bit, so I should be able to post this.  After that, I don’t know.  There’s just too much for me to deal with right now.  I wish I could just go to sleep and stay that way.  I hate this life.

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You blogs, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and here I am writing another blog post to prove that yesterday’s was not a fluke nor a false flag nor any other term beginning with “f” other than perhaps “fair play”.

By the way, I may have previously used the Shakespeare-based title above‒it’s just so easy to make, and I’ve always loved that line from Julius Caesar‒but I don’t care.  It’s too perfect for my current circumstances to miss the chance now.  I mean, blogs and stones?  Come on!

I’m on my way to the office, and speaking of stones, I am far from being over the process of having, let alone passing, my kidney stone.  I’m trying not to overuse my pain meds, largely because they tend to have diminishing returns, and I want them to work when I really need them.  Also, they are quite…well, constipating.  Now, it’s true that I didn’t eat all that much over the course of the early part of this week, and of what I did eat, much of it didn’t stay down.  Still, I went Sunday through Wednesday without doing anything but peeing.

I have been doing a lot of that of course, deliberately.  It is not pleasant.  The pain is not like it was Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday, but it still doesn’t let me forget.  And, of course, we’re moving office this week, and that adds extra hecticity*.  

I don’t know how much you all would want to hear (that I haven’t already said) about what went on in the hospital.  I did talk about it a great deal yesterday.  I suppose I’ll play it by ear and just bring up things that occur to me as interesting.

I have not yet made my follow-up appointments, but I need to try to do so today, if I can.  Even writing about it makes me feel very tense and anxious.  I know there’s no good reason for feeling anxiety and resistance toward such things, but at least now I know something of the cause:  It has to do with ASD, with possibly some pathological demand avoidance, but also just with associated, fairly severe, social anxiety.

But I have to try, and I want to try.  I’ve been rather impressed by the hospital and its associated staff and attending physicians and their network and such, and I would like to get myself plugged into their system if I am able to do so.

They seem quite generous and caring as a tendency and policy.  They do everything from providing free meds for when you go home to getting you a Lyft if you don’t have a ride.  I think that’s pretty nice.

It was oddly nostalgic, being in the hospital.  Well, I suppose it’s not so odd.  I spent much of my earlier adult life in and around hospitals, from med school to residency to medical practice, nineteen years in total.  I guess I miss it.  It was nice working with intelligent, disciplined, professional people at all levels and being able to relieve and even prevent suffering, all while getting a good amount of intellectual stimulation in the form of understanding and solving complex problems.

I don’t expect that I will ever do it again, though.  There are ways, I am sure, to fight to try to get my license back and so on, but it’s not the sort of process for which I have any avidity.  When civilization falls apart, as it appears to be about to do, I can perhaps find a time and reason to lend my skills to the survivors, if I am one of them, which seems unlikely.  Otherwise, I don’t feel a lot of enthusiasm for supporting the world as it is.  Humans have revealed themselves over and over‒by and large‒to be inadequate to tasks that require actual cooperation and consideration and compassion and humility.

It’s ironic that humility is so challenging for humans.  Given how profound their limitations and failings are (despite undeniable strengths, as well) you might imagine that humility would be easy.

But somehow, the default setting even of those who try to be humble is to characterize themselves as absolutely worthless‒which from a certain point of view is always true, but which misses the point of real humility.

Humility is not self-hatred or self-contempt or self-destruction (from which, to some, the only rescue is through some imaginary supernatural being); it is a recognition that one is and will always be limited, capable of error, and incapable of being perfectly objective about oneself and the nature of one’s existence.  With such self-knowledge, one will tend to be better able to make good choices about oneself and others.

Maybe I should try meditating again, to try to keep myself calm when possible.  It might help with my serious social anxiety.  It would probably also help me to get less upset over the idiocy of the current administration**.  And perhaps my mind would then be more useful overall.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and try not to get too upset, yourselves.  The world is going to end soon, but that has always been the case‒it’s just a matter of time scales.  On other scales, even a single mayfly’s life is practically eternal.

TTFN

*I think I made that word up, but it seems too good not to use.

**It would be nice to administer a fair amount of current to the members of this US administration, though‒alternating current, with enough voltage and amperage to cause serious discomfort, but not enough to kill them…at least not quickly***.

***See?  Upset.

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It’s the end of the month as we know it

It’s the last day of April in 2025, which means tomorrow is the beginning of May.  This is also the last day of the official Autism Awareness Month, and tomorrow begins the official Mental Health Awareness Month.

That last term is a bit odd.  If mental health is the norm, we don’t really need to be aware of it, except perhaps to be thankful if we have it (I certainly don’t).  It’s the lack of mental health‒you know, mental illness or even mental injury‒that we would like to be aware of and make better.  But I guess some people feel that’s too stigmatic or negative or something.

I think that’s silly.  Do we euphemize cancer?  Not really, not when we’re dealing with it seriously.  All the cancer awareness things slap you in the face, and they more or less say, it’s cancer, take it seriously, we want to fight it.  But what does it mean to be aware of mental health?  We don’t want to fight that, we want to fight for it.

I’m aware of mental health as a concept, of course, though even there, things can be a bit nebulous.  I guess health in general is just the notion that things are functioning more or less as they are supposed to function.  But that allows a fair bit of leeway.  It’s also somewhat relative.  If it were “normal” to be as healthy as Captain America, for instance, Usain Bolt might be considered a bit sickly, and most of the rest of us would be functionally disabled.

It’s hard to convince oneself that the average person, in America, at least, is as mentally healthy as one would like them to be.  I suppose that shouldn’t be too surprising.  Mental health (or the relative lack thereof) is measured largely by its interactions with the surrounding civilization, and that has been changing quite rapidly, from any kind of evolutionary standpoint, especially in the last few centuries, and especially in the last few decades.

Small wonder our brains/nervous systems often don’t function optimally in this realm.  The human (and humanoid/replicant/changeling/alien) brain is remarkably adaptable, but it is not a blank slate upon which just anything can be written at will.  There’s plenty of hardware that’s specific to certain kinds of functions, and there are read-only aspects of the operating systems and even the user interface (which we call consciousness when it’s combined with something akin to the Windows task manager).  We can’t rewrite the firmware yet, and we may never be able to do so.  We have trouble even changing current programs or loading new ones.

Well, that was an unplanned digression…which may be a redundant term.  Are planned digressions even truly digressions?

I was mostly just thinking this morning about what such a pair of months might mean to me.  Both of them are pertinent, since I have issues relating to both “awareness” subjects.  But so many of the things I see shared, particularly about “mental health”, are things I already know, but which have obviously not been adequate to improve my mental health.

Heck, I remember paying real attention in high school in our psychology lessons, reading all the abnormal psychology stuff, knowing that there was something off about me, but not seeing any good answers.  Of course, this was in the 80s, in a public high school, so the material was pretty simplistic and out of date even for the time.

I also used to own books about psychology, self-hypnotism, self help, lots of related stuff.  I didn’t know what it was with me, but I knew that I was strange.  I was pretty good at pretending to be “normal” in a sense, but a lot of even that was just me owning and sometimes exaggerating my odd habits as if they were normal things.

It helped that I was known to be smart, and also that I was raised to be polite and not to be mean or cruel or condescending to people.  That was pretty easy; while I was good at some things, there were many things with which I had difficulty, and I knew that only too well.  I still don’t feel very comfortable riding a bike, for instance, and many athletic pursuits requiring agility have always been hard*.  I also was truly abysmal at dealing with girls/relationships.  I had no idea how really to interact in any kind of would-be romantic way, nor to recognize if someone liked me, nor to let anyone know that I liked them.  I’ve not grown out of that problem.

Anyway, so I’ve been dealing with issues of mental health for as long as I can remember, including a time when I was really quite young and I almost made myself unable to talk after getting upset about some interaction and telling myself that I just wouldn’t talk anymore.  When I finally (after several hours) decided to talk again…I almost couldn’t do it!  I really had to force myself, and almost panicked before I finally was able to squeeze out some words.  That was frightening.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that to anyone before.

So, anyway, I’ve been weird my whole life, and I’m no less weird now, but now I am alone, and I have lost pretty much everything I worked very hard to get or be or create as well as nearly everyone I care about most**.  I recognize that it’s not impossible that good things will happen for me in the future.  But I can see pretty clearly that it’s really unlikely.  What could lead me to think otherwise?  Only some profound delusions could do that, and though I cannot rule out delusions in myself, if I have them, they are not of the optimistic variety.

Geez Louise, this is such a pointless post‒just like my pointless life.  I need to wrap it up and be done already.  I hope you have a good day.

*It turns out at least some of this was related to my congenital heart defect, which was discovered when I was 18, and for which I had open heart surgery in the summer after my freshman year in college.

**By this I mean they’re not around, and most of them don’t want to be around me, not that they’ve died‒except my parents, of course, but that was basically natural.  Still, there was a long stretch when I didn’t even interact with them.  It wasn’t as long as the time since I last saw my own children, but it was still very painful.

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“Everything is…broken”

Hi, everybody.

(Hi, Dr. Nick!)

I am writing this blog post on my mini laptop computer this morning, because I’ve been getting sick and tired of writing on the “smartphone”.  I’m also getting sick of writing blog posts to some degree, so it’s best to make it relatively easy on myself when I can, and when I have the gumption, or the will, or the “spoons”, whatever you want to call it.

We have some new people at the office this week, so depending on how many of them would be able to show up, I may be working tomorrow.  If I do, I suppose I’ll probably write a blog post tomorrow morning.  So, I guess you’ll all know whether or not I’m working based on whether or not there’s a blog post.

Of course, if I don’t work tomorrow, there will be no blog post (or at least it’s very unlikely).  And, definitely, if I die (or become gravely or catastrophically ill or injured) before tomorrow, there will of course be no blog post.

As for everything else, well—to a good first approximation, everything else sucks.  Although the universe as a whole may actually be doing the opposite of sucking, since the cosmologic constant, or Dark Energy, or whatever, appears to be leading to the universe’s accelerated expansion.  But metaphorically, at least, the universe could still suck even while it expands (you could even say it blows).

None of my problems are resolving, nor are any improving, to be honest.  I can’t even accept telephone calls from people I know, nor can I seem to find the energy to play any music, nor to write any fiction.  I am more or less all out of “spoons”*, or nearly so.  And I don’t seem to be getting as many of them replaced when I do get them.  It’s as though my subscription has been downgraded.

That’s all metaphorical, of course.  When I say spoons, I’m referring to all members of the dairy professions.

(That was a Life of Brian reference.)

I’m sorry that I keep pausing while writing; I hope it’s not too boring for you while I do (ha ha).  I’m having some difficulty concentrating.  This is at least partly because my left eyelashes seem to be getting tangled and poking at parts of my eyelids in the wrong way, and I have not yet been able to locate and remove the offending lash(es).  This used to happen only to my right eye, but apparently things are changing themselves up—equal opportunity offenses, I guess.  Sometimes I feel like I want just to pull my whole eyelid off, it’s so irritating; it’s hard to ignore something that’s basically poking you in the eye.

My back and legs are already flaring this morning well above their baseline, and I feel like I got even worse sleep than usual.  I’m not as overtly angry as I was yesterday, not because the causes are any different, but because I’m just steadily more exhausted all the time.  I don’t have the energy to do anything much.  I can barely conjure the will to do this.

And, of course, my depression and my ASD and the related anxiety and all that continue to make life uncomfortable at all moments, and there are very few things that make up for it.  Even food is losing its taste.  Where is Lestat to turn me into a vampire?

Well, I know that isn’t going to happen because that doesn’t actually happen.  It’s called reality.  Google it.

Well, this post is going nowhere, isn’t it?  I guess in that, it’s like everything else, including the universe itself (as far as we can tell).  It’s some measure of how far I’ve sunk that the first draft of this little tidbit of a blog post has taken me over an hour to write, and again, this is on my mini laptop computer.  Given that I can generally type far faster than I can speak, that should give some indication of the degree of my dysfunction.

That’s it, I’m done with this for today, I’m out of here.  I unfortunately did not die yet this morning, so here we go again with the blog post.  Couldn’t I at least be hospitalized?  Heavy sigh.  I guess I’ll finish with a quote from a great artist who took what was probably the sensible course: “Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

*All Out of Spoons was the original title for the old Air Supply song All Out of Love, but they decided that wasn’t catchy enough**.

**That’s a lie, of course.  At least, it is as far as I know.

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I am a detriment…goo goo ga choob

I’m feeling very grumpy this morning, which isn’t anything new; grumpiness is a common part of chronic depression (AKA dysthymia).

I have known some people who find anger/grumpiness preferable to being simply down and discouraged, but I really don’t like being angry.  I feel wrong and evil and ashamed when I get angry.

My inherent instinct when angry is to want to act on my anger physically; I’m not a big verbal arguer.  At least, if I am arguing verbally, it’s generally not in anger, but entails me trying to explore the truth (or otherwise) of a particular topic and to spread or gain better understanding of it.  But when actually feeling anger, what I want to do is to destroy the object of my anger, literally, so that I don’t ever have to worry about it again, whatever it might be.

I guess I’ll just have to deal.  Or maybe I’ll finally just lose my temper and get into serious and severe trouble.  More likely, I’ll just take my anger out physically on myself, as I usually do.

I have excellent “self-denial subroutines” to keep me from hurting other people (though not so much to keep me from hurting myself).  As I’ve said before, I have an instinctive sense that I do not have any right to comfort or satisfaction with pretty much anything.  So, I don’t usually even try, because as often as not, at least when I notice, trying makes things blow up in my face.

This relates, at least tangentially, to an interaction I had yesterday on Threads.  Someone there had posted something along the lines of “my therapist told me she was proud of me today”.  I thought that seemed quite nice, and I answered, honestly but with a bit of self-deprecation, that I didn’t think I had ever had a therapist say they were proud of me.  I added a little ^_^ emoticon to make it clear that I wasn’t moaning about it, just trying to take a light-hearted approach and reinforce the fact that this person’s therapist’s words were positive and nice and unfortunately rare.

Then, a little while later, the original poster replied to my comment, saying she was proud of me that at least I was going.

That’s a little saddening and embarrassing, because I am not currently going to therapy.  I’ve gone to therapy quite a lot in the past; my comment was not a fictional one.  But I haven’t gone in a long while.  The last time I felt desperate enough and tried to do therapy through BetterHelp—which I chose because I could not find a way to go to a therapist’s office and work it into my schedule—I had just gotten started working with a therapist there and feeling relatively comfortable when she had to go on extended maternity leave.

I don’t hold that against her, obviously, but it was frustrating, verging on heartbreaking, if you don’t mind me seeming a bit melodramatic.  I had really needed to force myself to try to go through with that and to start with a therapist*; to have it suddenly vanish was both frustrating and deflating.

It’s a bit similar to my catastrophic interaction with the suicide hotline years ago, when morons from the PBSO came and got me and handcuffed me and took me to a shithole mental health place, where I was for all of twenty-four hours.  At least I got a brief referral through that place, but I didn’t really stick with it, and of course, I ended up going to FSP before too long, anyway.

Since then, I have been particularly nervous about using the hotline, though there have been many times when I’ve looked at it online, and even more times when my search engines have recommended it to me based on some web search I’ve been doing.  I did give up and use it once, a year or two ago, refusing to divulge my location to them.  But even with that, it’s very nerve-racking to seek help in a time of crisis and to have to worry about some Barney Fife type coming and taking you away.

If I wanted to be hospitalized for my mental illness**, I would go to a hospital.  I know how to do that.  I’m not afraid of hospitals.  I just don’t think they would actually do me any good.  I’m not convinced that anything will do me any good.

This is not mere pessimism (though that surely enters into my figuring).  It’s just that the human race has not understood the mind and brain well enough to have reliable treatments for certain things.  It’s a bit analogous to the plague, which is caused by infection with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, if memory serves, and which is easily treatable (nowadays) with simple, common antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin.  But if you got the plague before antibiotics were invented, going to a hospital for treatment would be pointless, useless, and probably counter-productive.

Anyway, I’m going on and on about nothing, and using more words than necessary to do so.  In case you couldn’t tell, I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, so the words flow more easily.  But it’s all just me flailing about like a paranoid, feral cat.  When you can’t know what you can trust or upon what or whom you can rely, the natural reaction can be just to keep your distance from everyone and everything, because some things that seem like they might be helpful will end up hurting you more—and yes, it seems always possible for one to suffer more than one already is.

So, though I’m chagrined to have been told by someone that they were proud of me for doing something I’m no longer doing, I don’t necessarily think I’m wrong not to do it—though I recognize that I may be fooling myself or even that my thinking may be frankly distorted.  Maybe I would do better with therapy now that I know I have ASD (the brain kind, not the heart kind).  I don’t know.

Sorry for this post going nowhere.  I apologize for wasting your time, and for wasting the time of everyone else who’s ever had to interact with me.  I’m sure all my former therapists could have used their time better by seeing someone else during the hours they saw me.

There’s little doubt in my mind that if I had actually killed myself in the past, on one of the occasions on which I almost did so, the world would probably be at least a slightly less miserable place where I currently sit.  And while all possibilities of happiness would have been foreclosed for me, at least I would no longer be lonely and in pain and overflowing with self-loathing.

*I tried to get in touch with the therapist I had seen most recently (before my whole debacle).  Actually, “try” is misleading; I did get in touch with her, but she was no longer seeing patients, and in any case, she didn’t have any offices that would have been reachable from where I now live and work without a car.  I asked for recommendations in the area, which she provided, but that still would have required driving, so I had to resort to online help.

**I hate that people euphemistically refer to psychological/psychiatric troubles as “mental health” as in the rather absurd statement “suffering from or dealing with mental health”.  That’s like saying someone is troubled by physical fitness.  No, I suffer from mental illness.  It’s not mental health.  It’s the opposite of mental health.  I wouldn’t even know what it would mean to suffer from mental health, but it doesn’t matter, because mental health is something with which I am not burdened.  Likewise, I do not bear the burden of physical comfort, I suffer from chronic pain.  These pathetic, touchy-feelie euphemisms seem counter-productive to me.

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“…the only thing that’s real.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m writing this on my smartphone instead of the laptop computer.  There’s no important rationale for this choice, it’s just the way it turned out.  There are causes for everything that happens, but there aren’t necessarily reasons.

I was terribly stressed out yesterday, though arguably nothing too Earth-shattering happened.  Just quite a few unexpected and frustrating but relatively little things occurred that led me to want to hurt myself, and I wanted just to give away my black Strat at the office as well as a very cool piece of hiking equipment that I have that my boss really admires*.  I just wanted to divest myself of everything and go off and, I don’t know, try to swim to Morocco or something**.

I don’t feel much better this morning, but at least it’s been going reasonably “according to plan”.  I’m still in stupid amounts of pain, since right when I woke up.  Nevertheless, I did my morning exercises and got ready for work, though I feel almost as though my upper body and my lower body are hanging by a thread from each other.  Only nerves seem to connect the two sometimes; otherwise it feels as though my upper half is merely balanced atop my lower half, and as I sit, stand, lie down, walk, and so on, it wants to fall off its perch, and that process hurts.

I haven’t actually played guitar in weeks.  I’ve “wanted” to, intellectually.  I even got the red Strat out at the house, putting away the SG, because the Strat is my second favorite***.  However, that hasn’t led to me playing it, though I came close at least once over the weekend.

I of course also haven’t played piano/keyboards, partly because my keyboard is covered with superfluous clothes and other things that just need a place to be.  It’s shameful, I know, but I have little room for storage.

I also haven’t written any fiction or done any drawing, and I don’t even have any modeling clay, though the discussion of my pain made me think of when I used to play with clay every day (hey hey!).  Occasionally, one would get a single hair mixed in with the clay by accident, and then if you were splitting the clay, the two bits would sometimes be held together only by that hair; that’s how my back feels a lot of the time.

When I shift a little, at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, it feels as though my upper and lower halves want to separate, but they’re held together by the collected nerve fibers that carry all that lovely pain and spasm and electrical sensation back and forth to and from my brain.

I won’t say I wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone‒there are quite a few people in the world who merit such pain and much, much more, and yet they live with impunity.  Many of them have been doing their dirty deeds for quite a long time, and even if they were to die violent deaths tomorrow, they would already have gotten away with nearly a lifetime of successful villainy and will suffer no more than most people are near the end of their lives.  Indeed, these people will probably have better, more attentive health care in their final moments than most people who have done no willing harm to anyone.

Lovely universe you’ve got here.  (It wouldn’t) be a shame if something happened to it.

Also, you can’t threaten such people with stupid points like “history will judge you”, because such people don’t tend to give a shit about that kind of thing.  Many of them probably secretly believe themselves to be immortal; they certainly don’t care about what the milling masses think of them after they’re dead.  And any concept they may have of an afterlife is clearly not worrisome to them, or not enough so to deter their foul deeds.

And here I am, feeling like I am slipping very painfully off my lower half even as I write this, despite aspirin and naproxen and Tylenol and heating pads and Icy Hot and Voltaren cream and CBD and Delta-9 gummies and all that.

It’s too much.  If I cannot get this to improve soon, I may move up the deadline of my plan, because I am tired of being not only depressed and anxious and autistic (with all that that entails) but also just in chronic fucking pain every fucking second of every fucking day for more than 20 fucking years!!!  There is no sign of it abating.

Have a good day if you can, and thank you for reading.

*It’s a machete; I don’t know why I’m being coy.  It’s a beautifully designed and made machete, no cheap throw-away crap.  This is the sort of tool one could see being handed down with pride from generation to generation.  I bought it because of the aesthetics; I rarely need a machete for practical purposes.

**I would not succeed.  I am not that good of a swimmer, but even if I were, I don’t think any human or humanoid swimmer ever could swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

***My favorite is my Les Paul (see above), which was also, like my red Strat, made by my former housemate.  That guitar has such a beautiful sound, but it is very heavy.  It’s what I used for all the guitar parts, including the little arpeggios and whatnot, on Like and Share, and also for my cover of Something, with no pedals and only a little delay.  I used the red Strat almost entirely for Schrodinger’s Head and for much of Catechism, including the solos.  I used the black Strat for the solo in the middle of Breaking Me Down.  I have not recorded anything using the SG.  That’s no criticism of it; the timing was just wrong.

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No links to famous people’s works here. They don’t link to ME, after all.

I thought for a moment that someone had been listening to me, because when I started this new Word file from the last blog post I wrote on my mini-laptop computer, it was in Calibri font right from the beginning!  Then I went and closed the earlier file/blog post, and when I had returned to this one, the base font had reverted to Aptos (which I like to call “craptos” because I don’t think it merits a more sophisticated insult).

So, it turns out that no one was listening to me, of course.

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer as indicated above.  This will probably make it faster to write, but whether it’s any better written than yesterday’s post, I cannot say.  I felt that yesterday’s writing was fairly erratic and disjointed and borderline incoherent, but I often have a difficult time judging how my writing will be perceived by other people.

If it’s fiction, I can only care up to a certain point, because I write fiction that I want to read, so I cannot try to adjust it for others too much.  I can only guess that somewhere out there exists at least one other person whose reading taste is similar to mine, and who might enjoy my stories.  So far, not counting my sister*, I don’t know of more than three people who have read any of my fiction, so it’s hard to tell.

But, of course, though my tastes have been esoteric at times—especially when it comes to my love of relatively deep scientific and mathematical and philosophical reading—I have also enjoyed some massively popular books of certain kinds.  For instance, my very favorite book of all time is The Lord of the Rings (taking it as one large book, as it was initially written), and that’s hardly a rare choice.  Similarly, I’m a great fan of Shakespeare, and it’s not as though no one else ever reads or otherwise enjoys his plays.

There have also been popular series of books for which I waited eagerly and excitedly as each volume came out, including The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Belgariad, the various Dragonlance books**, and of course the Harry Potter books.  I’m sure I’ve written here somewhere about how I read Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince seven times while waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to come out.  All of these books have been quite popular, and I enjoyed them, too.

Then again, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Twilight books, though I have written about vampires (and a demi-vampire) in one of my own books.  Likewise, I had no interest in Fifty Shades of Grey or the various Dan Brown books, and I haven’t read any new science fiction or fantasy in years, not counting Japanese light novels.

Speaking of that, I am very much impatient for some new volumes in a few light novel series I have read so far, but being light novels, they are much quicker to read than they are to publish.

In any case, I mean to say that just because I write to my own taste doesn’t mean that my stories are particularly esoteric in their nature and character.  I may be an alien in disguise, even to myself, but that doesn’t mean that stories that are bad are going to interest me.  Good stories have at least some degree of universality.  Even the Klingons love Shakespeare!***

My point is that, though I know I am a peculiar bean, I also think there are probably a lot of people (maybe not a majority, but a lot) who would enjoy at least some of my books and short stories.  But I am not good at promoting myself and making other people aware of my work.  This is probably related to my ASD and the related social anxiety, but also to my general self-hatred.  I tried to do a little promoting of my stuff at first, but it quickly became too stressful and irritating for me to tolerate.

So, if anyone out there has it in them—and so desires—to promote my stuff, even if just by sharing links and references in your own social media, that would be appreciated very much.  And while we’re at it, if anyone out there has a quick and easy cure for chronic pain*****, let me know.  Also, I want a unicorn.  (Actually, I want a dragon, but that might be harder to keep safely.)

Well, this post has probably been just as goofy and incoherent as yesterday’s.  My apologies.  That is, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case:  enjoy.  And try to have a good day.

*Not to imply that she doesn’t “count” in some important sense—she most certainly does—but just that it’s difficult to tease out the family relation from the other variables in the mix, so I cannot draw too many conclusions too easily.

**The ones that involved Raistlin, at least.  I didn’t have much interest in stories involving only the other characters of the stories.  Those of you who know those books can probably understand why this is so.

***Indeed, as the Klingon ambassador said in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country****, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

****The title itself is a Shakespearean reference, though in the movie, the undiscovered country is peace, whereas when Hamlet said it, he explicitly referred to death as the undiscovered country, one from whose bourn no traveler returns.

*****I don’t want to hear anyone saying “death” because that doesn’t count as a cure.  It makes the problem go away; it doesn’t solve it.  There is a difference.  And, don’t worry, as readers of my plan know, that is my own intended course of action if I cannot reduce my pain enough.