Anxiety

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No more Shakespeare quotes for now – they’re just pretentious and irritating, anyway

Hello and good morning.  I don’t really know what I’m going to write about today—even more so than usual.  As you may be aware, I don’t tend to begin my blog posts with any clear subject matter in mind; I just start writing.

This is not, by the way, how I write my fiction.  There, I tend to have the basic plot in my head from the start, but I don’t outline or anything along those lines, except in my head.  I just write the story as it comes to me, but it’s clear that it develops below the surface when I do it.

I must say, I’ve become very frustrated recently with the process of trying to share my books and/or music with different people via, for instance, Instagram and Threads, which I mentioned earlier this week (I think).  I briefly even rather liked interacting on Threads, because it seemed like there were a lot of interesting but otherwise “normal” people there—normal to me, anyway.  I left occasional comments here and there that got shared and “liked” and to which people responded more positively than negatively.  I even had one person comment, on something I’d written:  “Nicest.  Reply.  Ever.”  Really.

Well, now I’m blocked (temporarily) from posting and replying or anything on Instagram and Threads, but when I was shown that there was some kind of suspension and I “appealed”, it said something along the lines of “Oh, so sorry, that was a mistake.  You haven’t done anything wrong.”  I don’t know if something had been flagged because I sometimes had the page open on a computer still when I looked at it on my phone or something and commented from more than one machine in quick succession, or what.

Anyway, I’m still blocked from sharing or commenting—supposedly through the 17th, though it’s unclear whether that means the beginning of the 17th or the end thereof.  And it’s kind of taking the wind out of my sails.  I don’t actually think that the universe “sends messages” to people, but nevertheless, it is possible to learn about the nature of things from the consistent pattern of events.  Once bitten, twice shy, they say, and I’ve been bitten too often.

There’s the old saying about the fact that a cat that walks once on a hot stove will never do so again, but will also never walk on a cold stove.  Often this is presented in a derogatory fashion—oh, those poor, simple-minded, overly risk-averse creatures who cannot understand how stoves work!

But cats are no more foolish for avoiding stovetops than a human would be for looking both ways before running into a usually non-busy street.  You might rush into such a road a thousand times without incident, but that doesn’t matter if on the thousand-and-first time you’re killed or maimed for life.

There are some things in the world, of course, that are well worth at least some risk of burning your feet or getting hit by a car, but being able to interact on Instagram and Threads with people who seem interesting or, at least, seem to be members of a species distantly related to mine, is not one of those things.  And it’s certainly not worth it just to try vainly to spread word about my books and music.  The world will little note nor long remember much of anything, and it will certainly not remember anything about me.

So, anyway, it was a stupid idea, but it was briefly slightly exciting, at least on the level that something counts as “exciting” for me—meaning that I’ve had a few quiet chuckles here and there, encountered some people who shared some potentially useful resources (I doubt I’ll be taking advantage of them, given how that inquiry has worked out) and even looked forward to people’s responses on the few occasions they happen.

Most of the people who “liked” my shared songs* and books and whatnot are probably bots, anyway.

Oh, and by the way, to the “brilliant” people who run Brilliant dot org—when a person comes back to your site to study and learn about things, and then is immediately afterward bombarded with emailed warnings and pop-up alerts about “your streak is about to end” in clear attempt to cajole them to come on more frequently, for people like me, it makes me want to avoid the fucking thing, which is what I’ve ended up doing for long stretches several times now.  That’s particularly frustrating, because otherwise I like Brilliant.org a lot, and think it is a good learning venue, at least a supplemental one.

I also just finished the latest volume of a light novel series I’ve been reading that was pretty good, and that’s frustrating, because there’s not even a scheduled release date for the next volume, and I can’t seem to find anything else interesting to read.  So, life continues to be a quiet, subtle, understated Hell, that burns not with open flame but with slow, steady friction as if one were constantly being rubbed by burlap and sandpaper.

Oh, well.

TTFN

*One of which, ironically, was “Like and Share”.

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There is no title–just a lease. Ha ha.

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m on my way into the office again, since we are open today.  And therefore, as I warned you, I am writing a blog post.

I have no idea what I’m hoping to gain by doing this.  I have no clear notion even of what in principle could be gained from this.  However, I am a creature of habit, as well as of compulsion and desperation, so, well, I’m doing this.  I also try very hard to be a man of my word, though I probably fail as much as anyone does at that.

I don’t really have much news to discuss.  There’s little percentage in discussing the actual news, i.e., events from around the globe, since in the modern world saying something online that someone disagrees with is tantamount to being a revolutionary religious heretic in their eyes, endangering not only the world but the souls of the unborn.

Of course, one of the expressions that most irks me in this vein is when people say that someone is “destroying their existence” or something along those lines, by what they’ve said.  This is obviously nonsense.  I try very hard not to say unkind or hurtful things to people‒courtesy is the lubricant of civilization, after all‒but mate, if I wanted to destroy your existence (and acted on that want) you would not be complaining about it; you would not exist.

This is part of the stupid conflation of words with violence, an idea that can only really be held by those who have little experience with real violence*.   I’m sure I’ve discussed that here before, and it doesn’t really bear repeating.

Yesterday morning, I had a little bump up in my mood and energy level, which I didn’t understand, but I also didn’t really question at the time.  Maybe it was because the holidays are over or something, I don’t know.  Maybe it was because a reply I made on threads got hundreds of likes‒which surprised me‒or because a deliberately stupid joke I made in response to another thread got a decent number of likes and no fewer than two people posting gifs of famous scenes of people saying “Boo”.  That made me chuckle, because it was more or less exactly the response for which I was hoping.

I don’t like to think I’m that shallow, for such things to significantly give me a boost, but who knows?  This stupid human body and limbic system with which they saddled me has all sorts of bugs and hacks and workarounds that just piss me off.

Anyway, such online responses are very temporary and shallow for me, enjoyment wise.  And yet, alternatively, when other people actually contact me directly via social media, in most cases, my immediate response is stress, tension, hyperalertness, anxiety, etc.  And in me, any form of fear quickly sublimates into hostility and battle-readiness, usually in a very literal sense.

I often have to take hours and hours before I can reply to a simple greeting through one of the various messengers (even ones that aren’t obviously bots trying to sell something or other, which I ignore) and sometimes it takes me days.  Even ordinary SMS messages can be stressful.  When I hear the text alert on my phone, my usual reaction is either “What do you want!?” or “Oh, shut up, will you?” before I even know who sent the text.

Even positive texts from friends and family, perhaps in response to my own holiday greeting texts sent to them, cause tension, even though I’m glad to receive them.

I suppose one could call it anxiety, but that’s not exactly the way it feels‒though maybe I’m splitting hairs.  Anyway, I just feel at a loss whenever anyone tries to communicate with me, especially if I’m mentally engaged in something else.  I feel as though I’ve forgotten entirely what one is supposed to do in such situations, but I know that I’m inclined to say or do stupid things.

So, I have to pause and think and give my brain time to digest the fact that someone has messaged me.  Somehow, it always feels as though it is a threat‒ironically, it can be more threatening to receive messages from someone I like than from someone I don’t, because those are people whose opinions about me matter to me, at least in principle.  And I know I always screw up relationships with people who matter to me.

It’s even stressful to see when I have comments here‒but please don’t let that dissuade you!  I want comments, I appreciate them, just don’t take it personally if I take a long time before responding to them.  I won’t say preparing to respond is as bad as trying to work up one’s nerve to walk across hot coals, but maybe it’s analogous to preparing to jump into a very cold lake.  Even if you know that, once you get used to it, you’re probably going to enjoy it, every time there is a kind of “stage fright”.

It’s analogous with physical contact for me.  I have no skill with how and when to initiate physical contact with someone, whether comradely or romantic or whatever.  This skill I have never been able even to begin to acquire, let alone to master, though back in the day I got pretty good at faking my way through seeming to feel natural with verbal interactions at least.

This probably has been a large contributing factor in my dolorous and limited romantic history.  Even when with someone with whom I wanted to be intimate, and who I knew wanted to be intimate with me, I have near-paralytic difficulty starting anything, even something minor like a touch on a shoulder.

Part of that is an automatic warning in my head that says, “Danger, danger, you are making a mistake.  There is no way that anyone, least of all this very special person, could want you to touch them in any way, let alone to do anything further.  You are disgusting!  Don’t inflict your slimy touch on someone else, especially not someone about whom you really care.”  Well, it’s words to that effect‒it’s rarely thought out explicitly, it’s just the uncrystallized, supersaturated feeling those words convey that tends to get in my way.

Oh, and I also tend to get pretty tense when someone touches me‒even if it’s a significant other, sometimes, and even though, in the right situation, even a minor touch can be soothing‒because I feel like I don’t know how to react and I’m sure I’ll screw it up, and anyway, they’ll be in danger of catching cooties** if they touch me.  And, of course, a lot of the time I don’t really want to be touched.

I don’t know how I got onto this topic, but anyway, my temporary boost yesterday lasted only a few hours.  I didn’t sink to as low as I had been on Thursday, but after all, if you’re treading water, it may seem for a moment, due to the chaotic action of the waves and maybe a random burst of extreme effort from you, that you have risen higher above the surface of the sea…but you will not stay elevated.  You will sink back down to the level of whatever passes for neutral buoyancy, after briefly dipping lower.  And, of course, unless you reach shore or a passing boat finds you, sooner or later, you will drown.

That is, unless you’re lucky enough to be eaten by sharks.

*Or perhaps those who have suffered brain damage due to real violence, but those people can be cut a lot of slack.

**Figuratively speaking.  I don’t have lice (which is what I am led to understand the term “cooties” originally meant) nor any other literal contagious infestation or infection.

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And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale blog of thought

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—the first Thursday of the new year, the first Thursday of the month, and the second day of 2025 (AD or CE depending upon your preference).

I’m heading in to the office already this morning.  It’s not the first day back to work in the new year, though; we worked yesterday, as well, and it was quite a longish day.  We also worked on New Year’s Eve, though we got out an hour earlier than we would have because I shook my head and expressed some outrage (I was in an even more foul mood than usual) that we were not getting off early.  I didn’t have any celebration to attend nor anyone waiting for me, but I thought others might want to get to something of the sort, and anyway, I just really wanted to escape the noise.

It was ridiculous that we worked yesterday (though unfortunately it turned out to be a successful business day).  In the plaza in which our office sits, we were the only business open, and this is a full-scale strip mall with dozens of shops and restaurants and offices.  The people at work who wanted vapes or to get something from the bakery or from the nearby restaurant were all out of luck.  The only places open were gas stations and our office.

Oh, and also my coworker, the one with whom I share various duties, was out sick Tuesday and left early yesterday.  This is not his fault, obviously, unless you mean it’s a design fault, but that fault is true of everyone, and my coworker certainly didn’t design himself.  But it meant that, especially on Tuesday, when I had to do payroll in addition to the other stuff, I was particularly frazzled.

It didn’t help that I knew, quite painfully, that I was not going to be “celebrating” the new year.  Why would I celebrate it when I had wished or yearned throughout the year for 2024 to be my last year?

In fact, on Tuesday—that was New Year’s Eve, in case you didn’t put that together and/or you’re reading this well after it was written—when I was feeling more horrible and stressed out and angry and sad than even I have felt in a long time, I developed a plan, if it merits that term.  I was not hungry during the day, and so I did not eat anything at all.  It occurred to me that I had a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at the house and about half a bottle of vodka as well.  They have both been there for quite some time, since I rarely drink.

My thought was this:  I’ve been on a relatively low carb diet for a few weeks, so I have relatively little stored glycogen relative to the usual amount; what glucose was in my system was probably largely the product of gluconeogenesis, which is the creation of sugar from various amino acids, mainly by the liver.  I figured on stopping at a gas station near the train station when I was heading back to the house and picking up some bottles of Diet Coke (which also has no sugar, of course) and then that evening drinking vodka and Diet Coke and Jack and Diet Coke, all on an empty stomach.  This would have not only the obvious effects of alcohol in disinhibiting behavior, but ethanol also suppresses gluconeogenesis—this fact is responsible for at least some of the typical effects of a hangover.

My thought process, if it merits those words, was basically to hope to get drunk enough and hypoglycemic enough either maybe to have a seizure (unlikely) or just to loosen my inhibitions enough that I would have the courage to use one of the means of suicide that I keep always nearby nowadays*.

When I thought about my plan, though, as the day went on and I finally headed back to the house, it seemed like a pain to stop in the gas station.  I was already exhausted.  I figured, okay, well, I can just drink liquor straight.  Once you get started, once the alcohol begins to take effect, drinking it becomes easier.  However, the thought of being drunk felt very unpleasant, and more importantly, I knew that if I did not work up the strength to go through with my “plan”, drinking the alcohol, especially with no food, would probably lead to a severe exacerbation of my chronic pain.

So, instead, I watched some stupid videos, feeling regretful but not willing to risk worse pain in an attempt to do an end run around the bastard urge for self-preservation and escape my constant physical and psychical pain.  I took something to help me go to sleep (which I don’t usually do on work nights), and I puttered around listening to the sound of all the amateur fireworks going off, feeling annoyed by them, for several hours, and I did not die—not even of natural causes.  And despite my attempts, I slept less than usual, largely because of the noise, but also partly due to my (very inner and apparently unrecognizable to others) turmoil.

And here I am, writing the first blog post of the new year.  I’m alive, and I’m not happy.  I have no friends, my family is far away, and I certainly have no capacity to try to upend and alter where I am, anyway, not on my own—the very prospect of trying to change my life, to move, to go somewhere else, these things are horribly stressful inherently, and I have no strong reason to think any of them would make any difference for me.  I am fundamentally alone, and I probably have always been so, despite past temporary delusions to the contrary.

Of course, so is everyone else, I guess, depending on how you mean it.

Anyway, here we are.  I’m working this Saturday, so I guess I’ll probably write a post then, too.  How lucky for you and for me, right?

yippee.

Well, my train’s about to arrive.  I hope you enjoyed this little, shitty blog post, and that you’re having just a wonderful new year already.  Yeah, right.

TTFN

*I have no fewer than two good lengths of rope, both tied into quite good nooses; a goodly supply of flammable liquids (more than three gallons) with which I could self-immolate; of course I have numerous blades, including very sharp razors and scalpels and box cutters and the like, with which I could open up some arteries; and I have various OTC medications that, especially in combination, could be toxic enough to be lethal.  Also, I’ve been scouting the area for easily accessible high places without closed-in roofs (mainly parking structures) which are high enough that, if I jumped, it would probably be fatal.  I have no guns anymore, alas, but there’s always the nearby Atlantic Ocean, always within sensible walking distance, and then again, there’s always just the long, open road.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.

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Monday morning, heading down

I already started writing this once, but it seems that Google Drive didn’t save what I had written, even though I had titled it and checked it.  This has not happened to me before, as far as I can recall, but it seems to be par for the course for me right now.  So, I’m starting over, though I’m not going to try to recreate the beginning of my previously initiated blog post.  It was just a bit of nonsense, anyway.

I’m really not doing well, though I seem to have a difficult-to-break habit of acting as normally as I can when interacting with other people‒I don’t want to cause problems or trouble for the people who care about me.  But I’m not doing well, even for me.  My depression is terrible (or I suppose one could say it’s very good and impressive as depression goes), made worse by the changing of the seasons and the clocks.  My chronic pain is as bad as ever and somewhat worse than usual.  My overall health is poor.

I’ve had more than one person from back where I grew up, including family members, tell me I should take a break and come to visit them, but when I try to consider it, I cannot see myself being able to work out the logistics of such a thing.  My “executive function” is at its lowest ebb.

I’m basically out of gas and coasting along until I crash into or go over the edge of something.  Or perhaps it would be better to think that I’m an airplane out of fuel, not a car‒gliding along as best I can and trying to see if there’s any way for me to make a landing.  But I cannot apply any power.  I can only go along with the air currents through which I am steadily descending.

Also, I’m mortified at the thought of anyone who used to know the person I used to be seeing me as I am now.  It reminds me of the stories of Syd Barrett coming to visit the band members of Pink Floyd in the studio after having to leave the band because of his mental health issues and them not even recognizing him.  Having seen the various photos, I can understand their confusion, and I can also imagine how horrifying it must have been for him to realize how much he had changed and how he did not belong with them anymore; that he was not the person he used to be.

So many of the lyrics in the greatest Pink Floyd albums refer to Barrett’s oh-so-changed nature, from Brain Damage‒ “and if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear / you shout and no one seems to hear / and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon” ‒to Shine On You Crazy Diamond‒ “remember when you were young? / you shone like the sun… / …now there’s a look in your eye / like black holes in the sky” ‒and, of course, Wish You Were Here.

Anyway, I feel like I’m a warped mockery of the person I used to be, like one of the creatures twisted by the Illearth Stone in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to land safely on my own, but I cannot bear the thought of trying to ask someone to help me, especially someone who used to know me.  I’m ashamed of me.

I’ve also been ill lately, as regular readers will know.  I missed work again on Friday, and‒of course‒the office did tremendous sales that day.  I fight to avoid superstition, since I don’t think there’s any sort of magical process happening, but I do think it plausible that my presence has a psychological effect on the other people in the office, dampening their spirits.

I feel sickly and sweaty.  The AC unit in my room at the house seems to be malfunctioning, but having it repaired or replaced would involve having other people come into my living space, such as it is, and that’s a repulsive thought.

Also, the washing machine doesn’t seem to be working right.  It washes, but I don’t think it rinsed properly yesterday, nor did it spin and drain properly.  You would think at least that would mean that my clothes should smell of detergent, which is not so bad, and at first that seemed to be the case.  Now, though, at the office early in the morning, I feel like I smell of cat urine, or something does.  I haven’t yet been able to locate the source, though.

Anyway, I’m just worn out, and I see no future of any kind for myself, other than the obvious and inevitable one.  I find myself wishing for something like tuberculosis (like that other infamous “Doc”, Doc Holliday), or even cancer, just so that I could have some inescapable deterioration that could not be denied, but that might afford me a chance to say goodbye to people I love.

I don’t think that’s likely to happen, though.  My version of cancer is the disease in my head, frankly‒or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the disease that is my head.  Depression has a rate of premature mortality that is higher than that of many cancers.

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  Sorry to be a bummer on a Monday morning, but then, I’m a bummer every morning, really, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. 

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An inconsequential blog post

I don’t know if I’m going to write any fiction this morning.  I didn’t bring the laptop back to the house with me yesterday, and my insomnia is acting up, so I’m headed into the office very early and writing this on the way.  If I do write any fiction, I guess I’ll update this to let you know.

Of course, it’s nothing new that my insomnia is acting up.  Though I sometimes don’t talk about it‒since I’m sure it gets terribly dull for readers, though not as much as it is for me‒I have poor sleep every night.  I’ve been taking Benadryl nightly now for about a week, but its effects are limited, and of course, it has side effects.

Clearly, of course, humans are not adapted to the modern world, and I’m not adapted to it, either, though I don’t consider myself truly human.  So it should be no surprise that I am not optimally healthy in this world.  I’m also pretty nearly alone, with only long distance communication and “work friends” as well as a greater number of people at work who should feel lucky I haven’t mastered the “force choke” like Darth Vader.  I guess what they really should be glad of is that my frontal loves are well developed in that I have good impulse control and a strong sense of personal ethics.

I’m very tired and yet tense, which I’m sure you know is an exhausting combination.  It’s like being a rat in one of those old psych experiments that looked into learned helplessness.  I try to keep myself busy with writing stories and with music and with learning science and math and programming and other things, including philosophy and psychology‒I already know a lot of biology, of course‒and those things are distracting, and they can even be interesting.  But there’s no real point to any of it.  I can’t really talk to anyone about most of it, except info-dumping and watching even well-intentioned eyes glaze over.

I was thinking of trying to see if I can post this to Instagram in addition to Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter.  I have an Instagram account, of course.  I inherited it with my Facebook account, so to speak.  But I don’t know that I’ve ever posted anything on it.  Most of the video and picture sharing stuff isn’t really my cup of tea.  I’m certainly not something anyone really wants to look at, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m getting close to my destination.  Maybe I’ll pick this up later.  Unfortunately, so far there have been no fatal car accidents for me.  I guess that’s good.  I wouldn’t really want to take innocent people who are mostly trying to make a living with me just so I can die.  Better to do that sort of thing literally as well as figuratively alone.

‒

I’m at the office, where I’ve been for a couple of hours now.  I haven’t written any fiction.  I did try to look into Instagram, but as far as I can tell, you have to post videos and/or pictures there, and like I think I said, no one in their right mind wants to look at me.  I didn’t try too hard to figure it out, to be fair.  I’m not really all that concerned.  It doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, sorry for not writing fiction today or having anything positive to say.  Maybe I’ll be back in a better frame tomorrow.  Who knows?  Not me.

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I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”

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My poisonous (or poisoned) thoughts

I’m disappointed to have to tell you all that I did not write any fiction yesterday.  I didn’t write any in the morning, having written a longish blog post.  Then, by relatively early in the workday, I had become mentally exhausted.

The “music” in the office doesn’t help, since it’s loud and basically unrelated to anything about what we do‒it’s just there for background noise, to dampen the sounds of other people on their phones, or to camouflage it, to break up its signature.  But also, it was just maddening to see again how slipshod and unreliable people are, how little they care about how what they do affects other people (or themselves).

Early in the day, a few minutes after our official starting time, I looked out at the office‒as the person who keeps track of who’s there and who isn’t and when people arrive and leave‒and could see that perhaps only half of the people in the office were there yet.  I noted this to my coworker, who grimly nodded with obvious resigned disapproval.  I told him, as if realizing it for the first time, that it really bothered me.  And it really does.  It’s both contemptuous and contemptible.

We long ago moved our starting time back an hour, nominally to make sure people could get to work on time more easily, since traffic in south Florida really can be terrible.  However, that did not change people’s lateness at all.  It made no discernible difference.

Unfortunately, people suffer no consequences for being late, so there is no incentive for anyone to do otherwise.  They are also not penalized for working over into lunchtime or past the official end of the day (it is often the people who arrive late who also stay late).  So, basically, I never get an adequate break time, since there’s no sensible way for me to go anywhere outside the office during lunch, and those who started break on time restart work on time, and so need support people to be available.

Anyway, it’s appalling that already, by Tuesday, I was simply mentally (and emotionally) exhausted.  And I know it’s not just the specifics of this job that wear me out.  If I were to do any job I’ve ever had in the past, I think I would be similarly worn out; the exact time until it happens might vary slightly, but I don’t think it would do so by all that much.

Even as early as high school, I used to get into these states in which I felt just completely empty, and would have been “happy” to stop, to end right there.  They didn’t happen as often, and I lasted longer between them‒that’s redundant, isn’t it‒and I think I recovered more quickly and easily.  But it went on into college and med school and residency and practice and all that has come after.

The medical work, though harder, was somewhat less enervating, because there were intellectual challenges and the ability to make a real difference for people, and there was a degree of respect.  Also, one was working with professionals at all levels, and that’s reassuring.

I was labeled with depression (then later also, and more generally, with dysthymia) fairly early, and certainly started having these feelings of wanting to die, and more specifically wanting to kill myself, at a young age.  Obviously, there’s some inherent degree of “typical” depression here, but I wonder how much of it might be due to undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder‒assuming that even applies to me, which I think it probably does.

I have no real capacity to seek out diagnosis or help for it or for anything else, frankly, so it’s hard to get any kind of “official” feedback.  Between a kind of learned helplessness from chronic internalized stress (and chronic pain), and my own social dysfunction and my ever-present self-hatred and self-destructive urges, it’s hard even to begin to take care of myself.

Actually, I don’t know if it’s the case that, fundamentally, I hate myself so much as that I hate my experience, my moment to moment interaction with reality.  It’s so often so very unpleasant.  At the very least, there is no single day that I can recall that didn’t include some significant moments of what one might call “spiritual revulsion”, a kind of nausea and stress about how unrational and unsane the world is, at least from my point of view‒and ultimately I have no other viewpoint from which to gaze upon reality.

I think my self hatred is a kind of rationalized conclusion combined with a sort of “halo effect”*.  If the world is so anathema to me, so much of the time, then I must just not be suited for this world.  So, I’m defective, or at least, I’m not the right organism for the job.

Also, since so much of life is persistently unpleasant, and since the single common variable in all aspects of that unpleasantness is me, then I cannot help but have residual disgust and hatred stain my image of myself; it accumulates over time until it’s thicker than a rhino’s hide and as disgusting as the slime of a hagfish.

I don’t know what I can do about it, unfortunately, other than either declare myself the enemy of the world and act accordingly or destroy myself.  Or, I suppose, I could do both.  No matter what, I don’t think I can go on much longer.  Then again, I’ve felt that way off and on for quite a long time.  But it’s becoming more frequent and more persistent‒the pulses are longer and closer together.

My reserves may be deeper than I would ever have expected them to be, but they cannot be infinite.  Certainly on the scale of the duration of the world, I must either lose my mind or destroy myself (or both) before much longer.

In the meantime, I’m going to have to do my fiction writing in some other way, if I do it.  I’ll need to do it earlier in the day, before the troglodytes start arriving and making their noise.  I may give up and use the laptop computer, because the handwriting is really exacerbating the soreness at the base of my thumb.  Maybe I’ll do it in the mornings after my blog post, or instead of it on some days.

I did fiddle with my guitar a little yesterday, so to speak, but that’s far less fruitful than writing, so maybe I’ll just give up on that.

Ultimately, I should probably just give up…period.  Until I do, I guess I’ll keep poisoning the Internet with these, my gloomy thoughts.  Enjoy!

*Perhaps “horns effect” might be a better term in this case.

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Monday’s blogger at least still likes to learn

Hurray, hurray.  It’s Monday.

It’s probably hard to tell from the printed words, there, but I was being sardonic with that opening pseudo-exclamation.  I’m not excited that it’s Monday and the beginning of a new work week.  Then again, I’m not excited by much of anything.  Staying at the house doesn’t seem likely to be exciting, either.  There’s not much I can think of doing or any place I can think of going that seems exciting.  Nearly all the things in the world are on some spectrum from boring to stressful.

I don’t recommend this as a way of being, not even to myself.  I’m trying to find ways around it, or rather, to counteract it, but all my previous attempts have not succeeded in any durable fashion, as should probably be obvious.  Various medications, various therapies, lifestyle changes, exercise‒none of it has worked.  Some time ago, I had some hopes that trying marijuana that a former friend had would at least help my pain, if not my depression, but it did neither after two tries, and when I tried too much when I was in particularly bad pain, it made me quite sick to my stomach.  I was throwing up for a few hours (not continuously, of course, but it was still pretty bad).

It’s ironic that THC is used to treat nausea in many cases.  Evidently, my nervous system is too atypical for such things.

I recently happened upon some videos about psilocybin, specifically that there’s a study beginning on using it to try to treat some of the negative symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.  I know it has been used to treat recalcitrant depression and related disorders, including depression in people facing terminal cancer.  Psychedelics have always sounded intriguing, and people make much of them, but I think, given my experiences with other meds, I would be very frightened to try any of them.  My mind is not my friend, and I worry that I would be particularly prone to a “bad trip”, and there’s no way to abort such a thing once it has started; one just has to go through it to the other end.

Speaking of being anxious and frightened of things that many people find beneficial, I had meant to retry riding my new bike yesterday, and perhaps to ride it to the train and then into the office today, but I find myself subtly terrified to do so.  The beginning of last week was just so exceptionally painful and horrible that I am frightened of reinitiating it.  I wish I could know that it’s something that would resolve after a time, but it seemed to worsen over the course of the three or four days I was riding, until by last Monday I was bed-ridden, and I was even grumpier and more cheerless than usual on Tuesday, if you can imagine such a thing.

I think I’ll have to forgo it.  My boss really liked the bike, and offered to buy it from me if I can’t use it, but then I need to get it up to the office, which would mean riding it.  I don’t see myself carrying it.

My train is coming in five minutes.  I’ll pause and then return to this once I get on the train.

***

Okay, I’m on the train now.  What was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, the bike.  I guess I could have it shipped up to the office.  I think Uber even provides services like that, or I could try to see if there’s a way to set up an Uber in a vehicle that can carry the bike.  It’s a thought.  I don’t see my boss making a trip all the way down to my place to pick it up.

I guess I should stick to walking, even though it’s slower.  At least I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts and such while walking.  Nothing beats The Fellowship of the Ring as walking accompaniment, since it’s all about a journey on foot.  Even walking has its troubles, of course‒I have spandex braces on my left knee and right ankle to address the little bit of walking I did yesterday, and the right side of my back is in moderate spasm.  But that sort of stuff is par for the course.  If/as I lose weight, some of that will decrease, and some of it may even disappear.

Life is annoying on so many levels.  But at least there are lots of videos on things like hyperbolic geometry and computers and tensors and matrices and Einstein’s field equations and things like that.  It’s often the case that if I find several different people explaining the same thing I end up with a much deeper understanding.  Each teacher or author or whatever approaches things in a slightly different way, with different emphasis.  When one sees a subject from multiple angles, one tends to get a more complete and thorough understanding of it.  In this, I guess it’s analogous to binocular vision, which gives us depth perception.

I really want to read Zee’s book on quantum field theory, but although these new glasses are better for such smallish print, I think maybe I should have gone even higher on the strength.  Maybe I’ll go to the drugstore over lunch and pick up a stronger pair.  It would get me a bit more exercise, at least.

Please don’t emulate or internalize my negative outlook on things; I have no desire to see a world where more people are depressed.  Do try to keep learning.  Try to build as accurate a map of the world‒in all senses‒as you can.  Be ruthless with yourself in that process.  Your biases will try to trick you, and they will never stop trying, so you need to apply active countermeasures against them.  It’s a pain, but it’s important (and often satisfying and even thrilling) to work toward as accurate a map as you can get, not one that shows a world the way you would like it to be or you believe it to be.  A poor map will be less likely to get you anywhere you might want to go.

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Another pointless blog post on another pointless day

I’m writing a blog post today—a “formal” one, not merely sharing audio and embedding video, which is what I’ve done in the previous few—not because I have anything in particular to say*, but because I decided to bring my little laptop computer along with me yesterday.  I felt that I was neglecting it, and it was probably getting lonely and sad and rather depressed, like its owner.  Then again, if I were your owner, you probably would be depressed, no matter what type of mechanism you might be, and no matter whether or how often I used you.

Of course, I know that the computer does not experience such emotions; it doesn’t experience any true emotions, though I suppose one could make the argument that its automatic functions, the ones that it does all the time—such as recommending that you install updates and its tendency to go into sleep mode when left idle—might be in some ways analogous to the basic emotions and drives of so-called higher life forms.

Anyway, I’ve done a lot of things on this computer and especially on its nearly-identical predecessors, including writing quite a few stories and some books and the like.  It’s a shame to leave it completely fallow while I’m alive (Once I’m not alive, there won’t be much I can do for it or to it, one way or the other—that’s the way that whole “not being alive” thing works).

I’m weird that way; I tend to feel a serious loyalty not merely to people, but to inanimate objects that I know don’t have any actual reciprocal loyalty inherent in them**.  People are, to be honest, less reliable than things like computers, and they have their own agendas, anyway, so it’s not as though they need (or want) my loyalty, unless they’re people who want to use me for their own benefit, in which case, screw them.

That reminds me a bit of the old “riddle of steel” that ran through the movie Conan the Barbarian, and which I think was reasonably profound for such a movie.  In the beginning of the film, we see very young Conan with his father, who is telling him what turns out to be the first part of the riddle of steel, which is that in this life, there is no living being—men, gods, what have you—that you can trust.  But that you can trust steel.  I suppose you can also rust steel, but even though it can rust, that’s a slow, predictable process, and it can be staved off if you care for the steel appropriately.

Then, of course, near the end of the movie, Thulsa Doom reveals to Conan the other half of the riddle of steel, telling him that steel is not strong, flesh is stronger.  Only living beings have drive and will and the capacity to achieve things like revenge or religion or things like that.  It’s an interesting contrast, and like I said, it’s surprisingly deep for a sword and sorcery movie.

The sequel was nothing like as good.

Anyway, that’s part of the thinking process, or something like it, that leads me to feel literal loyalty and sorrow for inanimate objects that are mine—though it seems a bit unreasonable to call a computer an inanimate object, considering that it can do many extremely sophisticated and complex things, some of them without direct human intervention.

I remember when I was little that I felt something like a real, personal, almost familial attachment to some of my toys and stuffed animals—particularly Kermit the Frog*** now that I think about it—and if I dropped them or played with them roughly, I felt bad and would even apologize.  Again, I never actually thought they had feelings or thoughts or anything, but then again, I often can’t grasp other people’s feelings or thoughts, so it makes as much intuitive sense to assume them in stuffed animals as it does with humans.

I certainly don’t have any good, intuitive sense of what goes on in the heads of humans, though I often cannot help feeling their emotions and so on, when they are nearby.  And I try to discern their patterns and their meanings through various informal algorithms, and of course by paying attention to their literal words and actions.  I find this often gives me as good a result as those of the more “normal” people around me.

People don’t seem to do a very good job of reading or understanding each other, frankly, regardless of their supposed intuitive ability to understand social cues and mores and to be able to express and receive affection.  Well, okay, that latter one is something other people are definitely much better at than I am.  I have almost no comfort level with showing or receiving affection, even with people I know well, even with people I truly, deeply love.  It makes me feel very tense, which doesn’t help, and it certainly goes a long way toward explaining why I’m alone.

By the way, I still haven’t set up any health insurance.  I haven’t been able to bring myself to call either of the two brokers for whom I have contact information.  It’s quite troubling, at some level—it’s weird not to be able to get oneself to do something so mundane.  Then again, it was never my idea to get insurance, and I don’t particularly feel that I deserve to receive health care or that I want to take care of my own health.  But that strong, uncomfortable, unpleasant resistance is nevertheless rather strange.

Oh, well.  Who knows what I’ll do?  I don’t.  I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to need health insurance, anyway.  I don’t find any joy or happiness in being alive, and I haven’t done so for quite a long time.  It’s merely the automatic functions that keep me in motion; there’s no anima, no joy, no goal of any kind.  There is certainly no meaning.

Well, my train should be coming soon.  I’ll embed the “video” of yesterday’s audio here below, for those of you who want to experience it.  I don’t really remember what I talked about, so if anyone listens, do please feel free to let me know.  And try to have a good day, if you can.

*The things I do have to say I feel that I’ve said ad nauseam nearly every day, and they haven’t appeared to do anything at all other than to make other people feel depressed along with me, rather than to garner for me any help or relief or anything like that.

**Though there are other things, such as vehicles and other practical items, toward which I feel less loyalty and affection than other people seem to feel.  For instance, I couldn’t care less about the cosmetic appearance of any vehicle I own (not that I currently own any), or whether it’s any kind of status symbol or anything.  I can admire some kinds of vehicles, such as sports cars and so on, but if I owned one, anything but basic maintenance would be entirely neglected, and it wouldn’t really bother me.  Likewise for musical instruments:  as long as they perform their basic functions, I cannot care about their appearance or any special bells and whistles—not that I am any good at playing bells or whistles.

***But come on, who wouldn’t feel loyalty to Kermit?  He’s a righteous dude.