chronic pain

by

Wotan can KEEP this day as far as I’m concerned

Okay, first off, to begin with‒or should it be “with which to begin”?‒it is the 6th of May today (a Wednesday, though that fact is not terribly relevant) and to continue the Star Wars related references, I will note that today is the date of the Revenge of the Sixth.

Get it?  It’s a bit tortured, I’m afraid.  I don’t think anyone would have come up with the notion had it not been for “May the 4th be with you”.  That, at least, is a more straightforward play on words, and is specific to this month and that day.  “Revenge of the Sixth” doesn’t specify the month; one could, in principle, use that line on any 6th of a month.  But one would not, because this day is “celebrated” only in reaction to Star Wars Day on May 4th.

It’s sort of funny and fun, but it reduces the Sith to merely a perverse notion, existing only in reaction to the Jedi, like a whole order of Force users acting out the parts of rebellious teenagers.

Of course, probably that was sort of what happened in George Lucas’s mind when he came up with the Sith:  They were the anti-Jedi, a parity-violating, distorted reflection of the “good guys”.  But, of course, a whole philosophical movement that sprang up only as an enemy to another is intellectually and narratively vacuous.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the moronic religious people who seem to think that if one does not believe in God, then one must worship Satan.  It can be very hard for some people to get around the whole “if you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy” notion.  Only in this case it’s not even a philosophical enmity, but is merely a reactive enmity.  Also, it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that such a situation would seem to imply that whichever of the two sides came first would be assumed to be the “good guys”.

But one doesn’t look at any random patch of spacetime and think, “if there’s no electron in this spot then there must instead be a positron”, or vice versa.  As a matter of physics and of logic, this is a pretty glaring error.  Just as indifference, not hate, is the complete absence of love, the default state of reality is not the opposite of some particular presence, it is simple absence.  In physics, that means all the quantum fields being in their vacuum states, with minimal energy (it’s not zero because of the uncertainty principle).

In the Star Wars extended universe, the Sith have a background that is separate in origin (I think) from the Jedi.  I think they began as a race of Force users.  I could be wrong about this; I’m not all that much of a Star Wars nerd.

Ask me questions about the backgrounds of things in the universe(s) of my stories and I could share some serious lore with you.  But no one is going to ask me about those because essentially no one has read them.

Boy, it would be cool to have someone write fanfiction based in the worlds of my stories.  I remember reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction while waiting for the next book(s) to come out, back in the day.  Some of it was bad, of course, but not much of it, and some of it was really quite good.  People who love to read and feel the urge to write an homage out of love for a work and its characters tend to be at least somewhat okay at it.

Some of it was downright brilliant.

Of course, humans being what humans are, some of it was smut.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, when you get right down to it.  Members (ha ha) of a sexually reproducing species are going to tend to find sex…engaging, to say the least.  Every human alive (and that has ever lived) comes from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who had sex at least once*.  That includes your parents and your grandparents, by the way.  You’re welcome.

In a species like humans, those who are more into sex and more driven toward it and obsessed with it are, ceteris paribus, going to have more offspring.  It won’t take very many generations for any genes that make one less interested in sex to fade out of the gene pool‒again, and very importantly, ceteris paribus.

All other things are essentially never equal, of course, and there are complex tradeoffs in all such behavioral tendencies, but that’s a can of bees I really don’t have the energy to open right at this moment.

I’m in a truly terrible amount of pain this morning, I’m afraid, continuing from last night and yesterday and so on. and it’s making it a bit hard to write, though that somehow doesn’t keep me from running off at the figurative mouth.

I think it would be harder for me not to write right now, though.  I don’t know for sure.  I haven’t tried.

Even thinking about not writing at all makes me feel squirmy and cringey and quite strange.  It’s not quite as bad not to play or listen to or sing any music‒which I haven’t done for weeks now, alas‒but that does also feel bad.

But I think if I were to stop writing, and at least every week sharing my writing‒particularly now that I don’t have access to Facebook or Threads‒I would pretty rapidly feel that I didn’t even exist.

I have no real life here from day to day.  There is no joy, there is only (attempted) distraction.  Other than my episodic interactions with my youngest child (which are distinctly good and real and joyful to me, a real oasis in the desert) everything in my life from day to day feels less real than the events of the most banal video game.

Yesterday, I started searching eBay and other online sources for used ECT devices (they are out there) and looking up whether one can legally buy insulin over the counter (one can, to some degree), or what medications are prone to produce seizures.  The idea was to see if it would be possible for me to induce a seizure in myself and hopefully treat my depression.

I know it can’t help my underlying ASD, but ECT and other kinds of induced seizures have consistently been shown to work against even highly treatment-resistant depression.  I have tried every class of (legal) medication and many different types of therapy for my dysthymia/depression.  I think most regular readers can tell just how well that arsenal has worked.

Of course, pain complicates everything.  It taints everything, it erodes everything, it corrodes everything, it corrupts and desecrates everything.  I really want it to stop.  Sometimes I want it to stop at nearly any cost (at least to me, though I can’t in good conscience invoke avoidable costs upon other people).

If I thought inducing seizures would help my pain, I would probably just do it.  I know how to make such things happen‒the research I did yesterday was just to indulge myself so I could more realistically fantasize about the outcome if it were to work.  It was one of those distractions I mentioned above.  But having seizures would probably make my physical pain worse, since seizures are not easy on the body.

They could also kill me, but that would be far from the worst outcome.

Death‒not necessarily seizure-related death, but death generally‒will probably be the only thing that relieves my pain.  Well, “relieves” is not really the right word.  But could death be what ends it?  Yes.  And thankfully, no one is dependent upon me or is very close to me or is really used to having me around, so the collateral damage would be minimal, no matter what all the simple-minded (but well-meaning) Instagram videos try to tell you.

Maybe I’m just as well off not to be able to go to that site anymore.  Everything there would be irritating.  Though, that’s just like more or less everything else in the world, to be fair.  Right now, I could almost wish for everything else in reality to cease to exist so I could just enjoy some silence.  But that would be unkind and terribly presumptuous.  It would be better to go back to the nidus of the pain and pluck that out.

Have a good day.

Though I suspect Mr. Smear would disagree with me:

by

“I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders…”

I almost started this post by writing “Hello and good morning,” but I can’t really do that, or future readers‒and possibly even some current readers‒might think this was a Thursday blog post.  But this isn’t a Thursday post.  It’s a Tuesday post.  It’s a “Taco Tuesday post”, really, since Taco Tuesday is a thing (an advertising thing, mostly, but still a thing I like).  Pertinent to that, today is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo.

It’s not a terribly clever name for a holiday.  It’s about as bland as “The 4th of July”.  At least that’s not the official name for that holiday; the official name is “Independence Day”, which has specific significance, since it is the date of the signing and release of the Declaration of Independence.  I try never to wish someone a happy 4th of July, but say, “Happy Independence Day”, because it’s an important thing to know and recall (for an American).

Of course, there may be an actual, official title to Cinco de Mayo, but if there is, I don’t know it (if there isn’t, I still don’t know it).  I don’t even recall what the day commemorates.  I know it’s not the Mexican Independence Day equivalent.  If anyone out there knows what it is off the top of his or her or their head, please let me know in the comments below.

“Please let me know in the comments below” could be a nice part of some rap, couldn’t it?  It’s got a good rhythm and an internal rhyme.  If you’re a rapper and want to use that phrase, please do.  But let me know about the final product, please.  I’d be interested to see what grows up around it.

I could, in principle, write such a rap myself‒I’m reasonably good at rhythmic rhyming‒but just try to imagine me producing and performing a rap song!  I’m almost certain that would be one of the worst signs of the end of the world.

Though, if that’s the case, maybe I should do a rap, come to think of it.  If by doing so I really could engender the end of the world*, it could be worth doing it.  I could put everyone out of their misery.  As for those who aren’t miserable, well, we have Sweeney Todd’s words to address that:

 

“They all deserve to die

Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.

Because

In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett

There are two kinds of men and only two:

There’s the one staying put in his proper place

And the one with his foot in the other one’s face

Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you.

No, we all deserve to die!

Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I

Because

the lives of the wicked should be

made brief

For the rest of us death will be a relief

We all deserve to die!

 

And I’ll never see Johanna…”

 

Okay, well, that last bit is the beginning of another segment of the song, in which Sweeney laments his lost daughter.  I won’t get into the plot more than that right now, but it’s a great musical.

The film version with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and so on was excellent, though apparently Johnny Depp didn’t know whether he could sing (adequately for the role) when Tim Burton asked him to play Sweeney Todd.  He knew he could play music, but singing “lead” was just not something he had done.  So, according to what I’ve heard, before accepting the role he went off in solitude and practiced singing (to confirm he could do it) before coming back and saying okay.

I’m glad he did it.

As an aside, I suspect that anyone who can do various voices and accents and who also can play and hear music almost has to be able to sing reasonably well, if they practice.  The tools required to make alternate voices and accents are more or less the same as the tools for singing specific tones and notes.  You also have to be able to hear tunes and to hear yourself and adjust to hit the proper note, but as I said, Depp was already a serious musician.

Okay, well, that’s a lot of erratic stuff, isn’t it?  Clearly I have no specific agenda here (trendy or otherwise) at least not any conscious one.  As for what goes on in my unconscious mind, well, I don’t know what that is, more or less by definition.  If I knew what it was thinking, it wouldn’t be unconscious.

Of course, there’s always a legitimate question whether the unconscious mind actually has its own internal self-awareness, or even more than one, but this is pretty much speculative for now, so I’m not going to get into it or its implications.

Boy, wow.  I’m really feeling pretty incoherent right now.  As you might have guessed, I didn’t sleep well last night, even for me.  As for pain, well, large portions of my body feel somewhat as if they have already been embalmed, but the sensory nerves‒the nociceptors, at least‒are still working.  If anything, they’re working too well.

Ah, well.  I’ll wrap up now with these almost kindly but ominous words, again from Sweeney Todd:  “You are young.  Life has been kind to you.  You will learn.”

Please have a good day if you’re able.

*“Engender the end of” also has a good cadence or rhythm or whatever as well as a bit of an internal rhyme.  You could go on with something like, “Engender the end of the trendy agenda,” or similar.  “No rapper can rap quite like I can”, eh?  That’s a fact for which all rap fans can be grateful.

by

May the 4th be yadda, yadda, yadda

First, let me get the irresistible, nerdly, liturgical invocation (or whatever you should call it) out of the way:

There, that’s that.

Yes, it’s “Star Wars Day”‒because of the play on words, y’know?  So, I give a nod to it, since I like Star Wars and I like plays on words (with some exceptions here and there for both “likes”).

I think I’m going to keep this short today if I can.  My back and hips and ankles and knee and hands/thumbs and shoulder and all are really uncomfortable, and they have been so despite my attempts at various interventions and despite the fact that I rested this weekend.

Well, I didn’t merely rest.  I did go for a couple of moderate walks over the weekend, one about 5 miles, one about 4 miles.  But I took my time, I wore good shoes, I walked on nice, level pavement and so on.  In between, I tried to take it easy on my back and whatnot; I even took a short break or two during my walks.

It’s probably not logically sensible for me to say that my interventions did no good; after all, I don’t know what the outcome(s) would have been had I done differently than I did.  It could have been better, it could have been worse, it could have been the same*.

Anyway, it’s all very frustrating, and it doesn’t help my sleep, either.  I was going to say that it doesn’t help my insomnia, but of course, it does help my insomnia, making it a much more effective (and affective, ha ha) disorder.

I probably shouldn’t even talk about the pain’s effects on my actual affective disorder(s), dysthymia and depression.  In my experience, when you talk to people about depression, it doesn’t bring out the best in them, and it tends to drive them away‒sometimes permanently.  It’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving, I guess.

One slight “benefit” about being in enough pain, is that it blunts, or perhaps overshadows, some forms of social anxiety.  When you’re in enough pain, for long enough, you sometimes get to where you really don’t give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass what other people think of you.  Sometimes you just start to hate everything and everyone, but especially yourself and your life.

I say “your”, but of course I mean “my”.  I don’t know for certain what happens in your mind.

Oh, and by the way, chronic pain doesn’t seem to blunt other anxieties, unfortunately.  If anything, it makes one jumpier, and OCD-style anxieties and insecurities are sometimes amplified.  They seem to be with me.

This reminds me (somehow) of my metaphor about navigating through reality being like driving along a narrow road between two infinitely tall, indestructible walls**.  Rationality consists, ultimately, of keeping one’s course parallel to those walls.

If you’re driving on that road and your heading deviates from parallel by even a millionth of a degree, sooner or later you will crash into one of the walls***.  That’s you, colliding with reality.  And when anyone collides with reality, reality does not break, the one colliding does.  In a way, that’s what reveals reality to be reality.

But of course, it’s functionally impossible to pick your course perfectly along the parallel path (this is much like my point about the unlikelihood of hitting zero on the number line, see the first footnote below).  So what can one do?  One can keep one’s hands on the wheel and adjust course as one goes along, watching the walls to see if they are staying safely away from your vehicle.

This is one reason dogmatism is a bad thing (i.e., a worse than useless thing).  The odds of you picking the right direction (or right beliefs) on, say, the first try, are functionally zero.  What’s more, the odds that you have achieved the perfect direction on the 2nd or the 3rd or the 42nd or 1729th try are also functionally zero.

You will never come to the single, final answer‒at least your odds of doing so are vanishingly small‒and so you will never get to rest steering, to stop course-correction.  Sorry.  Drivers just don’t get to sleep, and you’re driving if anyone is.  The only way to rest from steering is to stop moving or to crash into the wall.

When I (or you) fight reality, reality always wins.  Again:  that’s kind of how you know it’s reality.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  Drive carefully and safely.  Don’t forget to check your mirrors and your blind spots; and don’t just trust the AI (or drivers of other cars) to steer you.

 

*It’s vanishingly unlikely to have been exactly the same, though.  There’s only one zero point on a number line, for instance, though there are infinitely many points arbitrarily close to zero (in the Real numbers, anyway).  Mathematically, your odds of hitting zero if, for instance, you throw an infinitely pointy (no pun intended) dart at a number line are, well…zero.  And yet it can happen, in principle.  That’s just thinking in one dimension, though.  The phase space describing what could have changed in my experience is probably quite high-dimensional, and things are identical if and only if you hit the point where the change along all those dimensions is zero.

**I don’t know why this thought was triggered; I wasn’t paying close enough attention to my own thoughts to see what led them there.

***If you start in the middle of the (perfectly straight) road, and it’s 25 meters to each wall, if you’re off by one millionth of a degree in your course, you will collide with the wall in roughly 1.4 billion meters, or 1.4 million kilometers, or (for those in the US) about 860,000 miles.  The fact that it can take so long should highlight the fact that you cannot assume, just because you haven’t crashed into a wall yet, that you have chosen the perfect heading.  You will still need to course-correct, or you will crash.

by

Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and blog will have his day.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the last day of April in 2026.  Tomorrow we meet a new month, same (more or less) as the old month.

I’m very tired, despite the fact that it’s the first thing (or nearly so) in the morning.  Of course, morning doesn’t necessarily mean you got any rest last night, not if you’ve got chronic pain and chronic insomnia.

The latter problem started for me several years or more before the former.  It has not escaped my consideration that my insomnia may have contributed to my chronic pain.  I am, after all, a trained physician and scientist with a fervent desire to understand…well, everything, ultimately.  So, I know a lot about both chronic pain and insomnia since in addition to my education and my curiosity, I actually am afflicted with the two things.

Don’t get me started on depression.

Actually, it’s a bit too late for that.  I am feeling the gravity well dip of worsening dysthymia that seems to be heading toward a full depressive episode, though predicting these things is unreliable.  But this morning, I felt I didn’t even want to sit up in bed (well, in futon) let alone get up and do anything at all.

That’s unusual for me.  Usually even when I’m in a bad way, the stress‒the anxiety, I guess‒associated with possibly not doing what I’m “supposed” to do, of letting people down, is too strong to let me just lie around, even though I am frequently exhausted (in the figurative sense, at least).  But today, even that almost didn’t show up, not enough to do what it usually does.  It was only really my sense of routine, of habit, that gave me the energy to get moving.

It helped that I wanted to feed the cats, but I know that they can handle themselves, at least for a few hours.  Still, it’s a positive.  I even did five pull-ups, which is not as many as I usually do, but at least I didn’t just not do them at all.

I often wish I could hibernate, or perhaps more precisely, to have a long sleep such as what some bears do during cold months.  I don’t want to go into true suspended animation, because that really doesn’t do anything for you except to let you skip forward in time.  Any period of true oblivion, however long it is, feels instantaneous from the inside.

If you pause a game, for instance, you can (in principle) come back a year later and pick it back up, and for the character, no time has passed at all.  If you were to experience things from their point of view, you would experience an uninterrupted flow of time.

What if you pause the game but never restart it?  Then the character’s experience just stops.  It’s a kind of death, of course, but it’s not a death caused by anything within that game universe.  It’s just, in a sense, that universe coming to an end.  No wailing, no moaning, no gnashing of teeth.

If you stop playing a Blu-ray in the middle of a movie, and then you break the Blu-ray disc, the characters don’t “die”, but for the purposes of that iteration of that movie, they might as well have died.  They certainly cannot continue to perform their parts.

It’s a bit like what it would be like for our universe to undergo vacuum collapse.  The wavefront of collapse would progress at essentially the speed of light.  Everything you know‒everything you are‒would cease to be at all, and it would happen far too quickly for you to experience the process.  The stuff with which you experience things would be deleted before it could begin to experience its own erasure.

It doesn’t seem like a bad way for an individual to die, but it seems a shame to lose everything in a whole universe.  Also, it’s just kind of daunting to think that everything in existence would get wiped out and turned into a hot soup of elementary fields and their “particles”, much like what happened near the beginning of “our” universe when the inflaton field (if inflation happened) collapsed.  It feels worse in some ways than other manners of death because there is literally nothing you can do to avoid it or to flee it or even to know that it’s happening.

It’s deucedly unlikely, though, so don’t fret about it.  And, anyway, if it happens, there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

That’s enough for now.  I won’t get into the news of me falling out of my seat yesterday afternoon (really, it sort of rolled out from under me as I was trying to sit down, but I ended up on the floor on my back no matter how one characterizes it) except to say that it happened, and that I have worsened stiffness today at least partly because of it.

I hope you all have good days.

TTFN

by

What should I title this post?

Well.  Wednesday.  Okay.  What in the world should I write today?

I don’t know.  I have very little energy at the moment; I feel quite exhausted.  That’s not terribly atypical for me, but it feels worse than usual.  However, since I don’t have any kind of objective, consistent gauge of precisely how exhausted I am (or feel) and certainly have no records of the past gauge readings to which to compare things, I don’t know for sure how my current state compares to my typical state.

 Nor do I know what the distribution of such states is.  Is it a smooth “bell” curve, a Gaussian distribution?  Is it bimodal?  Is it trimodal?  Is it some more weirdly shaped curve, like a function in several different exponential orders of a variable or in more than one variable?  That last one seems most likely.

I guess the specifics don’t really matter, though it would be at least interesting to have an objective, graphical measure of things.

Anyway, I’m tired, my pain continues (as always) and the present “flare” has not significantly died down.  And, unfortunately, there’s nothing in my life to provide any counterbalance to the horrible stuff.

Well, okay, that’s not entirely true, and I should try to avoid being overdramatic.  There are clearly some good things in my life, and particularly, some very good people.  But they are few and far between (in time and space) and/or far away.  I sometimes interacted with some of them through Facebook or Instagram, but I’ve been kicked off those platforms, as you know, for no particular reason I can discern.

Well, it’s their platform, they own it, and I wasn’t paying, so I guess they have the right to do as they please.  But I do hope they all crash and burn and suffer and then cease to exist (I mean Meta/Fuckerberg* and his cronies, not the people with whom I had nominal, distant connections).

I’ve been fairly grumpy lately, as you can probably tell.  Nearly everyone and everything pisses me off at least a little (and I don’t exclude myself from that “everyone”).  This is one of the things that can happen when you’re in pain a lot.  If you also have social difficulties and insomnia and the like, they can contribute, too.  Anxiety really doesn’t help, though its outcome depends upon how one experiences anxiety and how one reacts to it.

This is one of the things that gets me irritated at Yoda™ and the fact that people think his character is very wise, when he really isn’t.  I feel that fact should be called out more often than it is, lest the impressionable populace, particularly young people, get exposed to his trite homilies and think them words by which to live.

For instance, the whole stupid “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering” shit he pulled on the child Anakin in Episode 1 pissed me off and continues to do so.  He seems to imply that fear => anger => hate => suffering as a mathematical theorem, some kind of Jedi syllogism**, which is not necessarily true in any simplistic kind of sense.

It would have been much more useful for him to say “Fear can lead to anger, anger can lead to hate.  Hate itself is a form of suffering, and it’s a contagious one with many potential side effects, so you should learn, not to repress your fear or to deny it, nor to be ashamed of it, but to recognize it, to understand it, and to use it when it is useful rather than allow it to rule you, as it does if you merely give in to it but also if you refuse to let yourself feel it.”

If the Jedi had a sensible approach to such things, I think Anakin would never have fallen to “the dark side”.  That term itself‒the dark side‒betrays bigotry and judgmentalism and arrogance and narrow-mindedness.  Anytime someone defines their side as the light side and their opponents’ as the dark side, you’re in the presence of people who may well be capable of committing self-righteous atrocities, on whatever scale they think serves the “light”, the “good”.

Ironically (perhaps), the attitude toward fear held by the League of Shadows in Batman Begins is healthier than that of the Jedi in at least the prequels of Star Wars***.  They encourage you to embrace your fear, to become it.  They recognize its power, and try to harness it rather than flee from it in the rather ironic fear of fear that the Jedi have.

They have a lot of stupid ideas in the League, of course, including their simple-minded and illogical notions of justice.  And even their ideas about fear are not ideal, just in case you think I endorse them.

But fear, along with pain, boredom, dissatisfaction, and so on, are things that exist and persist because they are useful (at least enough to make them evolutionarily stable).  But they are only so in specific times, places, and situations.  If you have a good reason to be afraid, then you want that fear****, believe me, and you want to listen to it.  And if you feel new-onset pain in your right lower abdominal quadrant, and it doesn’t go away, you want to look into it; something life threatening may be going on.

But when such states‒pain, fear, boredom, dissatisfaction, etc.‒pull free of specific reactive causality and become self-sustaining, free-floating, bootstrap-levitated things that exist merely because they exist, then there is a problem.

I am such a problem.  And as with the majority of even slightly complex problems in (for instance) mathematics, we don’t know how to solve it (or even if there is a possible solution).

Sometimes, eventually, there’s not much to do but to wipe the chalkboard clean.

*Actually, I think their company would be better named Dukha than Meta.  Get it?

**This despite the comically self-contradictory and stupid (and thus out of character) line that Obi-Wan says in episode 3:  “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”.  Obi-Wan!  Are you listening to yourself?  Do you know what an “own goal” is?  You literally just spoke an absolute.  And, oddly enough, though the Jedi love throwing such statements around, I don’t recall any Sith character making such an “absolute” statement.

***Actually, in Episode 5, despite his long exile and his recognized failure due to his arrogance, Yoda© still says some stupid shit to Luke, especially the whole “Do or do not, there is no ‘try’” bullshit.  No, Yoda®, the “do or do not” is only determined by trying.

****To no reasonable surprise, the attitude of the 12th Doctor toward fear, or at least the one he wants to have, is much more logical, and was expressed best in series 8, episode 4 of Doctor Who:  Listen.

by

When pigs fly and so do fried eggs, things are weird

Well, I did something rather unusual (for me) yesterday, and I’m doing something rather unusual (for me) now.  I bought tickets for the Powerball lottery yesterday.  And this morning I’m composing at least part of this blog post by using voice to text on my phone.

Apparently, when using voice to text. just saying the word “paragraph” doesn’t cause the text to begin a new paragraph.  This is in contrast to what happens when you use the names of ordinary punctuation, and the voice to text turns it into that punctuation, which is actually reasonably impressive.

Okay, well apparently you have to say “new paragraph” to get it to do a new paragraph, but that makes it challenging to describe in writing what you have to say to make it do that.

As for the Powerball ticket thing, well, yesterday we had a customer who didn’t seem to understand how their credit card worked, and we had difficulty getting their purchase to go through.  When they had spoken with their credit card company (supposedly) and told us that it should be clear (for the second time), as I was proceeding to run the card, I said aloud “if this goes through I’m going to buy a lottery ticket”.  It went through.

Then, later in the day, a similar thing happened, and one of my co-workers heard me say what I had said earlier. He said that he would be happy to go in with me on lottery tickets.  I said I don’t know how you even buy them*, but I want to get one of the big ones, the Powerball ticket.  So we said he would chip in $10 and I would chip in $10 and we would buy $20 worth of Powerball picks.

Then, as I was heading out, the boss asked what we were doing.  I told him, and he said he wanted to chip in 10.  So, I bought $30 worth of quick pick Powerball tickets for the drawing that apparently happened last night.  I did not bring them with me to the house, they are waiting at the office.  I do not by any stretch of the imagination expect to win.

Okay, well, to say by any stretch of the imagination is a bit of an exaggeration.  However, as I said to my co-worker, I am probably more likely to survive jumping off the Empire State building than I am to have one of these lottery tickets win.  As he replied, it’s not impossible, though.  He knew he was being silly, but it definitely was a “you go first” moment.

This was a one time thing, done both out of a sense of ennui and a sense of pointlessness; it was just a silly, frivolous thing to do.

Okay, enough with the voice to text stuff.  It’s irritating.  I won’t say that it doesn’t have its charms, but they are limited.  I also don’t like the way it auto-punctuates.  It also doesn’t even seem to know the word “ennui”, if you can stomach that fact (and even if you cannot).

In other news, or “olds” as the case may be, I continue to try to mitigate my chronic pain, with erratic (at best) results.  But I’m still trying.  It’s a profoundly unsatisfying thing to which to have to dedicate a substantial portion of one’s mind and life, but it’s very difficult to ignore or to take in stride.  Even Mr. Spock couldn’t just ignore his pain after he got infested by that flying fried egg thing.

Of course, that makes sense.  Biologically, as I’ve said possibly hundreds of times, it does not make sense for an organism to be able to ignore pain.  Oh, sure, it can be suppressed briefly in emergency situations, and we know that happens.  You can also squelch alarms of various kinds in the industrial world, as you can silence alarms on heart monitors (temporarily) when you know why it’s going off or you know that it’s an artifact.

But important alarms do not bear complete silencing or disconnection‒not without creating significant danger.  That is, unless the alarm is a holdover, a remnant of something that used to be relevant but no longer is so.

Imagine a carbon monoxide alarm, put into a house in the days when they had gas heat and cooking and so on.  This was a reasonable precaution.  But then imagine that it started going off because it detected CO, and in response, the homeowner replaced the gas heat and gas cooking with electric alternatives.  Now there are not even any connections to the gas supply, and as an extra precaution, the owner bought an electric car, so no danger exists of CO poisoning other than some deliberate chemical attack.

And yet…the carbon monoxide alarm keeps going off.  And it doesn’t just do so intermittently; it is constant, though the volume varies a bit.  And by design, it is intrinsic to the very structure and function of all else in the house, so to remove it is either impossible or would disable numerous other, still important systems and still relevant alarms.

That’s a bit like what chronic pain entails.  It ruins some things and taints all things.  After a while, it’s hard to remember what it was like not to be in pain.  And after it has helped drive away everyone important to one‒for no one wants to spend much time around a lost cause‒it can be very difficult to maintain even any semblance of optimism.  You just want to shut that bloody alarm off, even if you have to blow up the house to do it.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Maybe if I have won the lottery, I’ll be able to find some newer answers.  I’ll look into that right after I catch the flying pig back from my celebratory skiing trip in Hell.

If I were to win the lottery, I don’t think I would stop working, at least not immediately, and I certainly would not reveal it here‒again, at least not immediately.  Possibly there would be ways to tell, but don’t spend too much effort thinking about them; the chances of winning are almost nanoscopic.

Actually, the chances are much higher of me choosing to jump off the Empire State Building than of winning the lottery.  And the chances of me choosing to jump from a much nearer tall building are higher still.  I even have a building chosen for the purpose, just in case.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I don’t matter, certainly not in any larger sense, and barely even to myself.

You all matter to me more than that, though, so I hope you do well and have a good day today and a consistently improving set of days hereafter.

*It turns out to be quite easy, of course.  When you’re trying to encourage people to give you their money for nothing, you don’t want to make the process too difficult.

by

Had I but pens enough, and time…

Here we go again, again.  It’s Monday‒the last one in April this year‒and I’m writing another effing blog post.

I keep trying weird little things in the hope that they engender or otherwise encourage something positive in my life.  For instance, after briefly using a blue Bic® Round Stic™ pen on Friday, I realized that I had on some level missed writing with them.

I wrote Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision, and the “short story” Paradox City all with blue and/or black medium Bic™ Round Stic® pens.  These were the only ones available through commissary up at FSP.  After a while, the guys who did tattoos would just give me new ones to use as long as I gave them back when empty/traded an empty one for the new one, so they could use them to make tattoo guns, and I went through such pens pretty quickly.

I thought to myself (since I have trouble thinking to anyone else*) that maybe if I started using these pens regularly again, I might help give myself the energy to start doing some new fiction writing.  So, I ordered a box of them, which is at least quite inexpensive, and I have one in my pocket now.

It’s a fairly childish notion, perhaps, but just because something is childish does not mean it’s wrong or bad.  Adults get rid of too many childish things‒sometimes on the advice of effing Saul of Tarsus of all the pathetic losers to whom to listen‒and adopt too many “adultish” things that are no more sensible, not as rewarding, and are reliably productive of negative outcomes.

Of course, some childish things do need to be left behind.  Ideally, one does not want to keep believing in Santa Claus or monsters in the closet or that stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back any longer than one must.  Wetting the bed is also worth stopping as early as one can.

But it can be good for one to keep asking questions about how things work and what they are and what they do and how they got to be the way they are, and being delighted in seeing and learning new things, and enjoying simple games and going outside and stuff like that.

Anyway, I doubt this particular choice of pens will actually get me to write any fiction again, but maybe it will at least feel good to use them again for a while.

As you know, I have at least a few stories, such as Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado that I have started that I’d like to finish, and I have some other stories on the back burner that I’d like to start and write.  If I could just find a patron to support me while I write, so I didn’t have to do anything else, I could probably do it.  But despite its name, even Patreon doesn’t really work that way.

People who support “creators” on Patreon pay regular, specified amounts and expect regular, piecemeal output (like daily blogs, for instance, though being the intellectually stunted populace that we are, people more often seem to want video stuff).  If I put up a Patreon, or a “Go fund me” thing (whatever the proper term for that is) I doubt that I would get a lot of people supporting me and just waiting while I work on a long form writing project.

If anyone wants to do that, and is able to do it, let me know.  Just remember, I’m slightly paranoid, so I will probably suspect some scam at first if you approach me‒unless I already know you, of course.

All of this is really just fantasizing, obviously.  I might as well request that the person who wants to be my patron for writing fiction is also a beautiful woman who is just my type (whatever that might be) and who wants to be in a long-term relationship with me.  Oh, and also, she owns a dragon, as well as an FTL spaceship.  Hey, maybe she’s a Time Lord and has her own TARDIS!

Actually, if I had the use of a TARDIS, it would probably distract me completely from writing fiction.  But I probably wouldn’t spend as much time (har) just traveling and having adventures as most of, for instance, the Doctor’s companions do.  I would want to learn how this technology works!

I don’t understand why none of the people who enter the TARDIS and gape at the whole “bigger on the inside” thing don’t right then and there ask how it works!  (Occasionally some do so, rather halfheartedly).

And when the trite little, dismissive answers such as Nardole gives are offered, they should say, “No, no, I mean how does it actually work?  What is the science and technology involved, how is it carried out and maintained?  What is the physics underlying it, how was it discovered, how was it harnessed?  Do you have any primers on that, any online courses, any textbooks, even any ‘how does it work’ for kids books?  And for that matter, how does the time stream and everything work, how is it traversed, what is the physics behind the functioning of the TARDIS?  We’ll get to the biology of regeneration in due time, but I want to understand all this.  To Hell with going and fighting Daleks or whatever, you can literally do that whenever you feel like, because you have a time machine!”

I guess it wouldn’t be a very fun show, just to watch someone studying Time Lord science and technology, but in real life, if I had access, I like to think that’s how I would spend a lot of my time.  And I think I think correctly.

All right, that’s enough stupid fantasizing for today, wouldn’t you say?  None of those or any other good things are likely to happen to me (some are far more probable than others, but none are worth betting on).

I am much more likely to keep developing new and harder to control pain and more frequently recurring and persistent pain and greater and greater frustration and despondency and depression until finally, at long last, it kills me.  Then, at least, everyone in the universe overall will be just a little bit happier.  On average, anyway.

*Though in a certain sense, this blog is an instance of me thinking to other people.  But that requires the other people to be active participants, and it certainly cannot be done all day every day or any such thing. 

by

“I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of…”

In case anyone feels bereft, I apologize for not doing a blog post yesterday.

Of course, the odds of someone feeling seriously let down by the fact that I didn’t write a post for one day seem vanishingly small.  Nevertheless, it is a physical possibility, so presumably, depending on to what degree the various multiverses exist and to what degree possible things all happen “somewhere”, I’ll act as if someone in some bizarre verse would give a shit whether I am even alive or dead, let alone whether I miss a blog post for a day.

Oh, by the way, the reason I didn’t do a blog post yesterday was because my chronic pain has been so severe and worsening this week‒with relatively atypical symptoms, too‒that on Wednesday night I had a truly hideous night, despite doing all that I could to assuage my pain, and so yesterday I did not go to work.  Therefore, I did not write a blog post.

Honestly, my pain is not much better today, if at all, but I did at least lie around most of the time yesterday, so there was a modicum of physical rest.

It’s terribly frustrating.  I do many things to try to moderate and improve or even resolve my chronic pain, and sometimes it seems to be improving thanks to certain attempted interventions‒this was the case recently, for a very short time‒and then BAM, it comes crashing back into my temporary optimism, sometimes making things worse than before.  For instance, recently, in addition to my usual pain, I’ve felt as though I have electricity running through the entire lower half of my body.

It’s not electricity such that one twitches and spasms‒not often or much, anyway‒but more like a globalized version of the feeling you get in your tongue if you place both poles of a nine volt battery against it, but less pleasant.

So, yeah, that’s not been fun.  And, of course, it still feels as though my upper and lower halves are nearly severed, held together merely by a thread (or perhaps a cable) made of broken bits of bone, frayed connective tissue, and above all, lots and lots of nerves (heavy on the nociceptors, not so good on the proprioceptors and the motor control units).

That sucks, obviously.  It’s also very discouraging, and it really doesn’t help my depression and my urge for self-obliteration.  If I could use my pain somehow to connect to and obtain power through, for instance, the dark side of the Force, as Darth Vader supposedly did in the Star Wars universe, that might at least entail some compensation.  It might even make the process worthwhile, depending on whether the dark side can actually be used to accomplish beneficial things*.

Alas, this real world does not seem to have such characteristics, and based upon our understanding of how that world works, at the deepest levels and at its many intermediate levels, we would not reasonably expect it to have them.  In the real world, pain is useful in and of itself in that it serves as an alarm signal.  But the purpose of an alarm is, in part, to encourage action that makes the alarm cease.

One does not imagine that having a fire alarm in one’s kitchen or living room or bedroom (or all of them) that is stuck on and wails constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, etc., would make a house better to occupy or improve its resale value.  Indeed, one might be inclined simply to move out of that house, even if it is not sold, if nothing can be done to stop the alarm.

I want to move out of this house a lot of the time, especially at frustrating and rotten times like this one.  I don’t have any other house waiting for me, as far as I know.  That’s not really a problem, though.  I just want, as the song says, no alarms and no surprises.  Please.

 

So, that’s about it for the last 36 hours or so.  I’ve been trying to rest my body and do interventions to decrease my pain, but there has been only very limited success.

I also haven’t been playing or singing any music recently, and even my reading has been falling off.  It gets ever harder and harder for me to distract myself, and many of such distractions seem not to be distracting anymore.

I’m so tired of all of this.  It hurts.

Anyway, I’m supposed to be working tomorrow, so I guess I’ll write another post then.  I’ll try to do a better job of hiding my feelings and darkness and whatnot, as I’ve been doing for the most part, lately (I think you can agree that I’ve succeeded to at least some degree).

It doesn’t change my own experience, but at least it can make yours better than it might have been otherwise.  The cliché says that misery loves company, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with me.  I find it much better if at least other people are doing okay, and if I can contribute to that, that’s a good thing.

Honestly, it’s hard for me to see myself doing any good for anyone in the world anymore, but I suppose I used to do so.  I think those days are long gone, though.

I hope you all have a good day.

*And why should it not?  The “good” and “evil” of power is dependent upon what is done with it, after all.  So, unless that power inevitably makes one want to do wholly destructive things, which doesn’t seem quite to be the case in the Star Wars universe, then the dark side is just one means of using the Force.  And we know that light side users can do bad things.

by

Shall you this fond pageant see?

It’s Monday again.  It is as I write this, anyway.  Maybe it’s not Monday when you’re reading it.  Who knows, maybe you’re living at some point in the relatively far future in which the human race‒or their computer overlords‒has abolished Mondays because they are too unpleasant.

Of course, then you’d just move the problem to the next day, leading it to be the unpleasant beginning of the week, because it’s not what day it is that presents a problem, it is the function of the day, if you will.  In this case, that means the day serving as the beginning of the “work week”.  Still, even future humans might be foolish enough not to recognize that fact, based on my experience with past and present humans.

Actually, based on the nature of current “AI” and how it functions and is grown, I wouldn’t be much more surprised if they made the same mistake.  Careful, logical reasoning is not necessarily in the nature of so-called deep neural networks and the like.  Indeed, the ability to reason abstractly may have arisen in humans precisely because they needed to be able to convince their tribemates of various things, and also to avoid being taken in by a tribemate trying to convince them of something that was not in their best interests.  As with so many attributes of life, even the ability to reason was probably born of a kind of arms race.

Heavy sigh.  Ah, well, great things can arise even from inauspicious beginnings.

I started my post a little late this morning because I’ve been moving slowly, both mentally and physically.  I’m kind of wiped out, and I have been all weekend; I could hardly get anything done.  I guess this is one of those times when I ought to be grateful that there’s no one to nag me (or cajole me, or encourage me, or what have you).  Honestly though, having such a person around is underrated, I think.

I had a stretch starting about two weeks ago or so in which my back and joint pain seemed to have calmed down a lot, and mere moving didn’t even hurt.  As a consequence, my mood and optimism improved a bit, and I even started to feel like I might be able to like myself to some degree.

Ha ha ha!  Lord, what a fool this mortal be.

Starting when I got sick, which I think I have mentioned more than once, I got a re-flare of my pain, and it has come back with a vengeance.  During the course of the latter part of this last work week, I took a fair amount of extra pain medicine of various (legal) types (I don’t even know how one locates “street fentanyl” or the like, let alone how one could feel confident that it is what it claims to be) and maybe that’s what’s taking the wind out of my sails.  Certainly my kidneys and stomach and probably my liver are not terribly chuffed about the work they have to do dealing with lots of NSAIDs and Tylenol and CBD and topical lidocaine and menthol and all that stuff.

Listless shrug.  It is what it is.  My flare is tapering a bit at this point, at least.  I don’t like to anticipate it getting better (nor it getting worse) but I try to be optimistic, at least for me.  It is simply true that my pain could get better and stay relatively good for a while (and it could go the other way), and I will only find out as it happens.

Whether or not all of you will find out depends very much on the degree to which I share it here.  Of course, no one who sees things only on any of the Meta-owned social media will find out, because (obviously enough) I’m not able to share anything there anymore.  Maybe the occasional (very) odd person might find my stuff via Bluesky and Substack and TWFKAT, but if so, it’s hard to tell.

Whatever the case with respect to those matters, I am still just kind of tired and mentally enervated, so I’m not feeling too enthusiastic here.  I don’t really have anything good or interesting to report.  Nothing is happening in my life other than the steady cranking of the entropy machine, doing what it does.

Sorry.  The pain is very discouraging.  When it ebbs, I can even start to feel like my old self again, the “me” from thirty or more years ago.  But though I keep trying new things and approaches, and sometimes I even get some good results, it doesn’t seem prone to ebb* for very long at a time.

Okay, well, let’s wrap this up.  I hope you all had a good holiday (or are having a good holiday) and that you and those you love are doing well.  Unless I’m lucky, I expect I’ll write a post tomorrow.

*The more often I say “ebb” the more it feels as though I’m saying the name of some character‒perhaps some mountain man‒from The Dukes of Hazzard or The Andy Griffith Show.

by

The painful truth – the truthful pain

Please forgive me if I behave or speak as though today were Tuesday.  I know that it is in fact Wednesday as I write this‒it’s anyone’s guess on what day of the week you might be reading it (though I suspect that, for the most part, if one doesn’t read my blog on the day it’s posted, one is unlikely ever to read it)‒but I didn’t write a post yesterday (Tuesday) so I may be a bit thrown off.

I didn’t write a post yesterday because I didn’t go to work yesterday.  And I didn’t go to work yesterday because of pain.  I had already been having a bad pain day on Monday, one in a long string of worse-than-average pain days.  Then, in the evening on Monday, while trying to reach for something in my room, I took a bad step on the tile floor and slipped and nearly fell.

I caught myself, as is implied by the “nearly” in that last sentence, but I wrenched my back significantly, and the night and morning and so on were particularly bad, and I hardly slept and I did not have the energy to go to work, or at least to do so and not spend all my time writhing and snapping at people.  So I stayed at the house.

Regarding chronic pain, I’m fond of quoting Ulrich’s description of Vermithrax from Dragonslayer:  “When a dragon gets this old it knows nothing but pain, constant pain.  It grows decrepit.   Crippled.  Pitiful.  Spiteful.”  I had to double-check and fix a few words to get the quote exactly correct, but the most important parts are always remembered correctly.  And the whole thing feels like it describes me pretty well.

I used to be much more pleasant and amiable than I have become since my chronic pain began.  Though I’ve had problems with depression since my teens and anxiety before that and ASD since I was born (in two different senses), I always tried to be polite and amiable and kind as much as I could.  I always figured that was the real position of strength:  not being in competition with other people but just trying to do your best while others do similarly.

But when one is in chronic pain, it is hard not to be grumpy (presumably even if one hasn’t lost almost everything one had worked to achieve through the first thirty plus years of one’s life, though I cannot know for sure).  I think there are people who have only known me since the time of the beginning of my back problem who would be surprised by how pleasant I was back in the day.

Though, there are those who read this blog who did know me in the past, before the aforementioned time, and maybe they would give a different report.  I can only share my own perceptions and perspective, and I could to a certain degree be mistaken about how I came across to other people.

I’ve never been all that good at knowing what other people think of me.  Because of that, I generally try just to take people at their word, and take those words to have their most straightforward meaning.  If someone hopes to hint at something and I don’t get it, that’s on them.  Hints are overrated even when given and received by people who embrace the practice and consider themselves good at it.  There are too many possible variations and points of incomplete information.

Anyone who has saved and transferred a video file and has also saved and transferred word processor files should grasp the difference, at least if they have been paying any attention.  A video only a few moments long can, despite the latest compression algorithms, have a storage size that dwarfs the size of even, for instance, the word file for the unsplit book Unanimity.

Now, Unanimity is about half a million words long.  It’s certainly the longest thing that I have written.  But a video I did on my phone last week for minor fun, which was maybe 20 seconds long, takes up more than 16 meg, while the combined file size for the Kindle versions of both Unanimity: Book 1 and Unanimity: Book 2 is about 3.5 meg*.

That’s a few minutes of stupid and pointless video which will never be shared anywhere versus a work that took more than a year for me to complete, edit, and publish.

At least it’s fair to say that, from a useful information point of view, my book was and is much more efficient.  Though it requires enough shared experience for others to fill in meanings and images of things described, this is not a requirement that isn’t met by nearly every human on the planet.  Perhaps videos would be better for a truly alien species that was hitherto unfamiliar with human civilization.

Okay, well, that was a weird post, I guess.  I mean that in absolute terms, mainly; I don’t know if this post is much weirder or much less weird than my usual posts.  Possibly every potential interlocutor would have different things to say about that.

I guess that’s okay.  It had better be okay, if it’s true, because if it’s true, there’s nothing anyone can do about that, and they’re already living with it.  This is the Litany of Gendlin, as quoted by Eliezer Yudkowsky, of which I have a screenshot from his book Rationality:  From AI to Zombies, below.

Well, I hope you have a good day, whatever the truth is that you and all the rest of us are living.

*This is according to the AI summary of Google’s search for “Robert Elessar Unanimity file size”.  It’s almost certainly correct, because the info is part of the Amazon description of the book.  But it’s humorous to me that it’s easier to do an AI based web search to find the file size of my own novel than it is to look up the file, since I’m using my phone and don’t have direct access to the original at the moment.