depression

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“Like”, “comment”, and “share” (if you feel like it)

I’m very tired this morning.  By which I mean I’m more tired even than usual.  My head is a bit foggy—more so than usual, again—and I feel like I just belong lying down inert, perhaps in an open-topped coffin.  I’ve occasionally thought that they looked like good places to sleep.  It seems a shame to waste them on people who are already dead.

It’s Wednesday today, and I don’t think I’m going to have anything nearly as thoughtful to say as what I wrote yesterday, which was at least rather “deep” if not particularly useful or helpful or interesting to any of my readers.  I did get an interested comment on my take on one of the reasons mindfulness is useful, and that’s always nice.  I’d love to encourage greater feedback from more of my readers, here on the site in the comments, but I don’t know what to do to encourage them [I decided just to do a little cajoling in the headline, in case that works].

Probably there is just some percentage of people who tend to comment, no matter the situation.  It’s a bit like the long-known “fact” (which may or may not be a true fact) that every advertisement, from flyers/mailings to commercials, actually elicit a response in only about two percent of people who interact with it.  I suspect it’s probably similar with things related to blogging and social media and the like.

One sees it most readily on places like YouTube.  The number of views of a video is almost always something like an order of magnitude greater than the number of likes (and often it’s larger than the number of subscribers), and that’s still larger, though by a ratio that’s not as clear to me, than the number of people who comment (let alone share).

My own YouTube videos (and those of my published songs) are poor examples, or perhaps one might say “poor samples”, not representative of the phenomenon as a whole.  I have a number of “views” on my music videos that is generally a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the number of “likes”, but I know why that is.

Almost all of those views are from me, because I put my songs in my YouTube music playlist, and so I have listened to them often, back when I used to ride my scooter to work and back.  I had a lovely Bluetooth enabled helmet.  I like to listen to songs and sing along in a car, or similar, when I’m on my way places*.  So I’ve listened to my own songs probably orders of magnitude more times than everyone else put together has listened to any of my songs.

It’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?  I’m also the one who has bought more copies of my books—because I gave copies to the people in the office—than everyone else put together, I’m fairly sure.

As for this blog, well, I get a higher number of likes relative to number of readers than I do with anything else, and I even recently have been getting a comment or so most days, which is very nice.  There’s at least some interaction.  It would be nice if I could reach a larger audience, but I’m not terribly good at self-promotion.  I am pretty good at self-denigration, though.  In fact, I’m one of the best there is at it!

Ha ha.

Well, like the song says, it’s all just a drop of water in an endless sea.  Or, it’s all just spit in the ocean** as more people probably say.  My spit may be more purulent than average, but it’s all still just spit.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to discuss today.  I’m very tired and worn out and I’m in ongoing pain that only responds somewhat to all the mitigating things I try to do, at least so far.  I’ve been through a quarter of a century of trying, and I have not been passive nor uncreative nor ignorant in my attempts.  As those reading might notice, I’ve thought about this matter a lot.  You probably would also if you were in chronic pain for nearly half of your life (so far).  It has a way of garnering your attention.  It’s built that way.

It’s interesting to note that shortly after I’m sixty, if I’m still alive***, I will have been in essentially constant pain for half my life.  After that it will become a majority (unless I’m cured at some point along the way, of course).

I occasionally (not often, though, because it’s too disheartening) wonder what my life would be like, what I would be like, if not for my chronic pain.

Things would almost certainly be vastly different.  I cannot be certain that they would be better—there are probably at least a few things that would be worse.  But it seems likely that my life would be much better overall, if only because I wouldn’t have a huge chunk of my will and energy stolen by being in pain all the time.  That constant pain really does make everything else harder.

But no matter the state of the rest of my life, at least one thing would be true (by “definition” in this case), and that is that I would not be in pain every fucking day of my stupid useless life.

Surely that must be worth something.  It would not be worth not having my children exist, but almost everything else would be worth trading.  I sometimes think of it as parallel to a line from Me and Bobby McGee:  “I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”  It’s nice poetry, albeit a bit weird to think about temporally.  But in my case, I think of it as basically saying I would gladly give up some significant fraction of what would otherwise have been my future if I could be out of pain.

But, of course, my future is less valuable to me now at least partly because I am in pain.  If I were not in pain, ironically, the future would be much more valuable, since it would be at least somewhat less uncomfortable.  If I could be free of depression, and the tendency thereto, that would make things better still.  That might even constitute a future worth having.

Yeah, yeah, I know, wishes, horses, manure, beggars riding, dogs and cats living together, watermelon, cantaloupe, rutabaga, yada, yada, yada.  I’m wasting my time and yours.  And I’m writing too much, because I’m using the lapcom, and I’m not saying or doing (or being) anything at all worth saying or doing or being.  This is all just stupid.

I hope you all at least have a good day.  I would not mind if this were my last one.

*I can’t do it anymore because I don’t ride or drive anywhere anymore, so I am not “alone” when commuting anymore.  I’m also not alone at the house.  It’s really quite disappointing.  I like to sing.

**This is a bit amusing:  I made a typo when I first wrote that phrase, and it was rendered as “spit is the ocean”, which seems almost like some vaguely deep thought about how oceans are lived in, swum in, excreted in, and bled in by numerous living creatures.

***Right now that seems a horrifying prospect.

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Pain, pain, go away…and don’t come back some other day

I’m writing this post on my smartphone today, because I decided not to bring the lapcom back with me on Saturday.  I was very tired and sore and worn down from the week and felt that even that small extra weight was more than I cared to carry.

I got at least a bit of physical rest yesterday, but my mental rest was poor, and was somewhat disrupted by a few seemingly minor things that happened.  Worse, though, is the fact that I tried to sedate myself on Saturday night somewhat, but still woke up by two in the morning, after maybe four hours’ sleep.

It’s quite frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I suppose it’s better than being one of those people who never seems to be able to wake up on time or to get places on time.  I don’t know how such people would have survived in the ancestral environment.  I suppose it’s just as well for them that they don’t live in such an environment.

So, anyway, I was both rather stressed out and unrested on my “day off” and now I’m no better rested, because I slept even less last night.  Also, my pain, which doesn’t like to become too boring (except in describing the character of the pain), has shifted its focus, and now it is my entire lower half (umbilicus down) that is achy and sore and doesn’t want to move.  Neither side is worse, but neither side is better*.  Although my left middle back and side are way more tight and sore than the right, and my left shoulder still has that weird, seemingly neurological, stiffness and pain.

It would be nice to be able to walk to the train this morning; the weather is not bad for it, and it would be a slight money-saver, though a time loser (but my time is mostly wasted time, anyway).  Unfortunately, I don’t know that I am physically up to the task, and I fear it might exacerbate my pain.  That’s never a good thing.

I wish I still had a scooter, or one of those electric scooters or bikes‒or better yet, that I could ride the bike(s) I have without having to fix their tires and such.  Maintenance of such things is really difficult for me, though; it’s not difficult to do as it were, i.e., the tasks are not in themselves particularly challenging physically or with respect to knowledge or dexterity.

It’s a matter of will in a sense.  Also, these kinds of tasks seem to do something akin to or analogous to creating an allergic reaction:  they make my mind itch horribly, and itching is, of course, a kind of pain, and my mind only has the reserves to deal with so much pain at any given time.

I seem able to regenerate less and less of that reserve each day‒either that or just my reserves are constantly being depleted at a rate faster than they can recover and so there are no “reserves”, just a base rate process that is in the net negative on average every day, and which will eventually run out and that will be that.

I don’t know what will happen then.  I’m honestly surprised that it hasn’t happened already.  Maybe it has.  Maybe this is me without any actual capacity to deal with anything other than those things which are more painful for me not to do.  Hmm.  That’s a vaguely interesting thought.

Whatever the best description is, I am very worn out.  More and more‒or so it seems right now‒I have no sense of any future for me.  I can’t even readily imagine my own future; I can’t see how a future can possibly happen that entails anything but quietly catastrophic dissolution.  And, of course, my pain doesn’t help my mood disorder(s) and my mood disorder doesn’t help it.  It’s another one of those cycles that has a vicious streak a mile wide.

Whenever I mention a vicious cycle, part of me nearly always thinks of the words “viscous cycle”, and I think vaguely about what might constitute a viscous cycle.  If any of you have any amusing thoughts about that, I would be delighted to hear them.  I could use a bit of a laugh today.

I’m really worn out, and it’s only Monday.  I don’t know why I bother.  I mean, I could give causal explanations, of course‒all things that happen in the ordinary world have causes‒and my descriptions would probably be fairly accurate and correct, though probably incomplete.  But as for reasons, that’s another matter.  Coming up with those is more difficult, and some of them are quite tortured.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the author and psychologist Viktor Frankl points out the notion, not original to him but poignantly and painfully rediscovered by him in a profoundly visceral way in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, that a person can endure nearly anything if they have a purpose, a reason, a meaning.  But such meaning is not always there to be found, and I don’t want to try to embrace a false one; and though it is possible for people to make meaning for themselves, my knack for that has worsened over time.

Again, the pain wears away so many things, as it has also stripped away so many people and so much property and so many accomplishments in my life.  I think I would be quite a different person, or at least there would be a real difference in balance in my personality, if I could be free of anything but more ordinary pain.

I wouldn’t even complain about being “comfortably numb”.  I know pain is biologically important, of course, but mine has gone well into the region of diminishing marginal returns, then rounded into negative marginal returns, and its net value crossed the x-axis downward a long time ago.  It might be nice to experience at least a brief period of having pathologically too little pain.  Even if it would make me vulnerable to injury and illness, I wouldn’t mind much.  It’s not as though I don’t crash up against illness and injury (in some sense) every day anyway.

Oh, what’s the point?  I’m sorry to bore you all with this nonsense.  I really should just call it quits, because this is at least as pointless as anything else I do, and that’s saying a lot.  It almost certainly does not do the world any net good, and I’m not sure whether it does me any good.

I guess I’ll keep doing it until it becomes more painful to do it than not to do it.  Or until I die, I guess.

*I sometimes like to indulge a clever paradoxical descriptive trick I picked up from Piers Anthony by saying something like “each leg hurt worse than the other one”.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, you filthy animals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[Insert blog post headline here]

I really feel horrible today.  That’s not intended to mean that I feel that I am horrible today, though it doesn’t preclude that, either.  I more often than not think that I am horrible.  But today, in addition to that, I feel rotten.

And that word I mean almost literally.  If someone told me‒with at least a colorable claim to knowledge‒that the pain I have is because parts of my body are decomposing while I am still alive, I would not immediately dismiss the possibility (though I consider it quite unlikely).

We had a bad (and weird) day at the office on Saturday, then I had some things I had to do afterwards that required a great deal of walking.  It was a bright day but still cool out, though, so that was not so bad; it reminded me of walking places with my friends when I was young, though I have no such friends now.

Anyway, I had to do something Sunday morning that required a bit of walking, too‒not as much, but significant.  I was feeling okay up until that point.

Well, I don’t know for sure what happened, but by early afternoon, it all hit me, and the entire lower half of my body, and to some degree my left shoulder and arm, were in increasing pain.  My left hand was also cold, which demonstrates some autonomic aspect to the pain, which is not too surprising.  I have tried to medicate it with the resources I have available, while trying to avoid permanent liver and/or kidney and/or stomach damage.  Alas, my success has been limited.  Because of my pain, among other things, I hardly slept at all last night; it was a bad sleep even for me.

Sorry.  I’m sure this is all hideously boring.  Believe me*, it’s even more boring to be the one describing it.  I don’t really know what I’m going to do about it, though.

At this stage of my life, all I wanted and expected was to be able to come home after work or on the weekends and just be with my family‒my wife and kids and such.  But largely due to my chronic pain, that is all a long-vanished fantasy.  Nobody wants me to come home to them, and no one certainly wants to come home to me.  I don’t even want to come home to me.

In some ways I don’t have to come home to me, since I don’t consider where I live now to be home.  It’s just a shit-hole in which I exist when I’m not at work or en route to or from work or going to the store or the bank or whatever.  I haven’t felt like I was home anywhere for at least the last 13 years, and probably really for some years before that.

And I’m not very good at taking care of myself, so my life tends to be a mess when I’m left to my own devices, and that tends to get worse over time‒it’s like my very own, personal, bespoke version of the second law of thermodynamics.

So, yeah, I’m not feeling well at all, but there’s not a whole hell of a lot that I can do about it.  And my depression and the other mental/neurodivergent shit doesn’t help.  It’s not like there are any programs or anything available near me.  I couldn’t afford one if there were, and I have no insurance, and as far as I know I have no secret inheritance anywhere.

I mean, come on, who’s going to leave an inheritance to me?  I tend to drive away anyone I care about (not deliberately).  I think you can grasp why that might be just from reading the smattering of my thoughts that I share here.  Believe it or not, I do not share the worst, most self-hating (or world-hating**) thoughts that go through my mind.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I will go to work because there’s really nothing better for me to do; I was at the house all day yesterday and it has not made me feel better, so I don’t see why another day there would improve things.

I hope this is the start of a good week for you, at least.

*Or don’t if you don’t want to, I don’t really give a flying fuck at a rat’s ass whether you believe me.

**To be fair to the world‒which probably deserves better than my judgment‒one of the main things I hate about it is that I am in it.  I suspect I would find it much more pleasant if this were not so***.

***Well, okay, I wouldn’t find it better if I were not in it, since I wouldn’t be there to find it better.  But my projection of my perception into the world as it would be without me in it certainly seems no worse than the world as it is now, and it would have the relative benefit of my absence.  I think my conclusion is therefore reasonable.

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An angry and probably unpleasant rant

It’s Friday.  yay.

Today’s date (February 6, 2026 CE or AD) has a mildly amusing coincidence/repetition of digits, 2-6-26 in the shortened American version of the date layout.  In the European system, the date would be almost palindromic (6-2-26) but that’s leaving out the zeroes in front of the day and month digits and ignoring the number of the millennium.  So it’s not quite as cool as it could be.

Some might say that such numbers and the arrangements and the noticing thereof can never be “cool”, but such people are troglodytic idiots.  They live in a world full of and shaped by complex ideas, by innovation and technology they could not have invented themselves, and which they don’t bother to try to understand because other people take care of and do all that stuff.

I’ve said before, many times (with sadness and regret and yes, quite a lot of anger) that if it were up to most people, we would all still be living in caves (the few who remain alive, at least).  That’s metaphorical, mind you; very few humans actually ever lived in caves as far as we can tell.  It’s just that the remains of those who died in caves (and their artifacts) are much more likely to endure to be discovered than the tools and remains of those who lived on the savannahs and such.

Anyway, the troglodytes have a quite common attribute, one that might explain a good deal about them:  even though they may have the capacity to read, even though they may have been taught to read, they don’t choose to do it.  It’s both sad and quietly horrifying.

Even those who claim to read just one book (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, etc.) don’t even really read those books.  You can tell, because they clearly don’t live their lives respecting all the precepts of those books.

This fact can sometimes be bad, but more often than that, it’s just as well.  Those books are horrific (and often just horrible, aesthetically).  They also tend to be rather stupid by modern standards, but it’s hard to hold them too much to task for that.  They were, after all, written from depths of profound ignorance about the universe.  One cannot know a truth before it has been discovered.

Of course, if those books really had been written, or at least inspired, by an omniscient being or beings, they could reasonably be expected to be very smart books by any standards.  Alas, they are not.  Trust me, I’ve read many of them, as well as many other books that don’t claim to be the products of omniscience, but which would be far more convincing* if they did than those ancient compilations of legend and myth and mental illness that are the so-called holy books.

Ironically, the Tao te Ching is much wiser than the aforementioned holy books, and it was never said to be written by anything other than a man.  It’s not perfect, of course, but it doesn’t really claim to be so.  Perhaps some of its adherents think it’s somehow “perfect”, but that doesn’t really matter.  After all, there are probably those who “think” Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are perfect.

Weirdly enough, some of these people would probably also say the Bible is perfect [Disappointed shrug and heavy sigh].  People are stupid.  And there are none so stupid as those who refuse to think.

Sorry, I don’t even know how I got to dealing with this set of subjects today.  It certainly was not planned.  Then again, nothing here was planned, other than that I would write a blog post as usual, which is not surprising.

It’s not as though I have anything better to do with my life‒that is, nothing better other than to shut it off, I suppose.  But so far, I am too much of a coward to do that.

I know, I know, there are those who (with truly very good intentions) will call continuing to be alive a “brave” choice, but though I appreciate such people’s kindness, that “choice” is very much the default.  In a similar vein, it’s not brave to hunt, or to fish, or to farm, if hunting or fishing or farming  is what you must do to survive.  It’s just pragmatic.

I am not brave for still being alive.  This is not to say that it would be brave for me to kill myself, either.  But it also would not necessarily be cowardly.

Bravery in the usual sense is overrated, anyway.  We can (and should) all be glad, of course, that there are people like firefighters, as well as honorable soldiers and honorable police officers.  But if one stops to think about it, one can see that we should all very much wish to live in a world in which bravery was not required, a world where heroes are not merely not needed but are not useful.

It’s likewise with so-called leaders.  If a society were functioning well, it would not need (or want) heroes or leaders, at least not in the traditional sense.  In a well-functioning civilization, people would see their elected officials as their employees, as the public servants that they are.  They are not, and should not be thought of as, leaders.  That’s just a troglodytic way of thinking.

Alas, we are far from such a well-functioning civilization yet.  Who knows if we ever shall achieve it?

I do know, however, that I will probably be working tomorrow, which means I will write a blog post, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  Until then, I hope you each and all have a very good day by any reasonable criteria.

*Especially modern science books.

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My way of life is blogg’d into the sere, the yellow leaf

Hello and good morning.

TTFN

Ha.  Ha.  Sorry about that.  Just, honestly, I don’t really feel much like writing right now.  There are no other twos here today (at least, I’m not going to be talking about them, except to the extent that saying that I’m not talking about them constitutes talking about them).

Actually, wait.  I will make a relatively fun note that includes the number two, since it just occurred to me that today is the fifth:  If you add (or if anyone else adds) the first two prime numbers together, they give you the third one.  2 + 3 = 5.

This is the only place in all the infinite realm of the prime numbers in which you will be able to add two consecutive primes to get the next prime, because all prime numbers except two are odd, and if you add (or anyone else adds) two odd numbers together, you (or they or he or she) will get an even number.  And the only even prime is two.

Actually, it’s worth noting that one can add two primes that are not consecutive to get a third prime.  If one takes any of the first member of a set of twin primes* and adds two (that solitary even prime) to it, one will get the second of the pair of twin primes.  This may be able to be done in an infinite number of cases; it’s thought that there are an infinite number of twin primes, i.e., that there is no largest twin primes set.

However, this has not been proven yet (as far as I know) though work has been done on it and progress has been made.  I won’t get much more into it than this, except to say that apparently a lot of the work has been done by large, decentralized groups of mathematicians (professionals and amateurs) through a site called “polymath”, if my memory is correct.

Now that is an excellent name for a collaborative mathematics website.

Oy, there I go again, talking about trivia about prime numbers and so on.  Maybe it would make sense for me to get into these things if I were truly involved, but I’m a spectator of mathematics (apart from my truly useless invention of the gleeb**, a number which, when multiplied by 0 gives you 1).  So my interest is entirely esoteric and reflected.  I apologize to those of you who find it tiring.  To those of you who like it, I’ll say “You’re welcome”.

You’re welcome.

See, I told you I would say it.  And then I said it.  I guess that’s one point in my favor.

I’m not sure there are any others.  At least, none of them appear to me to be in my favor.  I am all but completely worn out.  I’m running on fumes, or whatever other metaphor one might want to apply that is applicable (since applying inapplicable ones is stupid) and my incessant pain continues to wear me down, adding to my depression, and eroding what little joy I have left.

I really have wanted so often just to hang it up.  I came relatively close yesterday afternoon and considered leaving a “post” that just said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”  The would be the title and the content.

I didn’t do it, of course, which you can tell by looking, if you are so inclined***.  But I came closer than I’ve come before, at least subjectively speaking.  Last week—I think it was—I posted a similar sentence on most of my social media, just the line “I don’t know if I can do all this much longer.”  I’ll embed a screen shot here:

 

So, fair warning is being given, here and elsewhere.  The fire alarm is giving off little warning beeps.  The readout dial is high in the yellow range, perhaps already inching into the red.  Creaking sounds and little wisps of steel and concrete dust are issuing from the support beams of the bridge.  Small tremors and puffs of escaping steam are increasing in frequency near the hitherto dormant volcano.  There’s a red sky in the morning, today****.

But, I appear not to be able to stop yet.  I’m not yet able to escape.  I’m still pushing the stupid boulder up the stupid hill, like the stupid idiot that I am.  I’m even writing this blog post on my lapcom for the first time in two weeks (well, this is the first time at all that I’m writing this blog post, but hopefully you know what I mean), just because I felt mildly nostalgic.

One of these days, though, I’ll be able to end my blog post with just “TT” instead of “TTFN”, and it won’t be over just for now but finally and for good—not just the blog but everything.  And I don’t know if that will be sad or a relief for anyone out there, but I hardly think it will be a tragedy, nor will it be more than little noted, and it will certainly not be long remembered.

But for now, I must needs sign off with the annoyingly non-climactic

TTFN

*Primes that are two apart from each other, such as 29 and 31, or 137 and 139.

**Seriously, I worked out a lot of the algebra that involves it and everything (for instance, it turns out that a gleeb squared is still a gleeb, and 1 over a gleeb equals 0).  I’m sure I discussed it in a previous blog post.  If I can find which one without much trouble, I’ll leave the link here.

***In principle, you can tell by looking even if you are not so inclined, but you simply will not tell because you won’t look.  Should that count, then, as a “can” situation if it’s not physical impossibility but mental disinterest that leads one never to do a thing?  If it simply will not ever happen, can one not just then say that it cannot happen?  Are “cannot” and “shall not” synonymous here, as when Ian McKellen misspoke his most famous line when facing the balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring?

****This may be true somewhere—it probably is, come to think of it—but it’s not true for me, because it’s still fully dark as I write this; the sun is not even lightening the eastern horizon yet.  I’m just being melodramatic.

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どうも ありがとう Mister ロバあと

It’s Wednesday the 4th of February (02-04-2026 in the US).  The best I can currently think of to say about today’s date is that it is composed entirely of even digits‒twos, zeroes, a four, a six‒which is at least uniform in a sense.  But it’s rather boring, too.

Admittedly, most people probably find any such evaluation of dates with respect to numerical patterns boring.  I would apologize, but it’s not as though anyone is forcing anyone else to read my blog.  If someone were doing so (and I wouldn’t necessarily try to stop them), I’d like to think I would have a far larger circulation than I have.

As it is, my circulation is roughly 5 liters.  Ha ha.  That’s a (lame) joke regarding the volume of blood in a typical adult human body.

While I may not feel as though I am a member of the same species as most humans, I recognize that my gross physiology is basically the same, and so my blood volume should be comparable.  My body just doesn’t seem to work quite as well as that of the average person, at least in some senses.  For instance, my chronic pain has continued to attack me with exceptional aggression over the past several days; yesterday was particularly bad, and today is not shaping up well so far.

Not that this is anything new.  I’ve been in chronic pain every day for a quarter of a century now (though I suppose when it had just begun one would not call it “chronic”), if my memory is accurate, which it usually is.  That’s just a bit longer than my youngest has been alive.  It’s not pleasant (though my youngest is), and at least partly in consequence of my chronic pain, neither am I.

I do think that my outlook and my personality would be much better if I did not have pain every day.  I would probably sleep better, as well.  I almost certainly would not have gotten involved in trying to treat other people’s chronic pain in less than ideal circumstances, and so would have avoided at least some catastrophes that happened because of that (apparently misguided) intention.

Still, I’ve been prone to depression since I was in my early teens, well before the onset of my chronic pain, so maybe I’ve always been unpleasant.  And though I didn’t know it, I’ve had ASD all my life (even after the heart-based ASD I had was corrected through open-heart surgery when I was 18).

That’s a weird coincidence of acronyms, isn’t it, those two kinds of ASDs in one person*?  It can be rather confusing when the same acronym signifies two quite different things.  Still, there are only so many 3-letter acronyms available.  The maximum number in English is 26 to the 3rd power, or 17,576.

You might think that ought to be more than enough for there to be no overlap, but of course, acronyms aren’t merely randomly chosen letters.  They need to signify something specific in order for them to be useful, and far more words start with A or S or D, for instances, than start with X or Z or Q.

It’s a bit like dealing with words in general.  In principle, a word of a particular length (let’s use the variable x to signify that length) in English could be any one of 26 to the xth power possibilities.  But English is not a random cipher, and there are many possible orderings of letters than are not “allowed” in English, because they don’t produce any plausible sound.  English is, of course, a written version of a spoken language.  If a word can’t even be pronounced, it’s not much of a word.

One cannot, for instance, have a word that consists of all consonants (certainly none are coming to my** mind).  One could produce strings of consonants that could be sounded out, I suppose; one could for instance pronounce the string “mrndl” pretty readily, I think.  But that’s just generally unwieldy, and in some languages it cannot be done.

In Japanese, for instance, all but one pair of kana representing sounds/syllables (hiragana for native words, katakana for imported words) are of the “consonant-vowel” sound type (e.g., ha, ke, ni, su, to, etc.) or just vowels (e.g., a, i, u, e, o).  Only the “n” syllable stands alone (sometimes pronounced as almost “m” depending on the context) and it occurs only at the ends of words.  Thus, in the game of shiritori***, if a player says a word that ends with “n”, they lose, because the next person cannot possibly begin a subsequent word.

How did I go from discussing the uninteresting digits of today’s date to the game of shiritori?  I suppose I’ll find out when I do my editing.  It is strange, though, even to me.  I can only imagine how bizarre and confusing it must be for others to read my blog posts.  With that in mind, I’ll cease this particular crime against humanity or against logic or reason or whatever for now.  Please accept my apologies, and hopefully you will have a good day.

[P.S. The above headline would be transliterated as “Doumo arigatou, Mister Robaato”, which can be meant as “Thank you very much, Mister Roboto” (as in the Styx song) or as “Thank you very much, Mister Robert.”  Curious, ne?]

*Actually, there is a higher incidence of cardiac ASDs, as well as several other atypia that I have (such as a cavum septum pellucidum) in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD than in the neurotypical population.  Interesting, isn’t it?

**Wait a moment‒the word “my” is superficially composed of two consonants, isn’t it?  Well, in a sense that’s true, but this is one of those cases we were taught about in elementary school in which the letter “y” acts as a vowel.

***(しりとり)  In this game, one person says a word, and the next person has then to say another word that begins with the same syllable with which the previous word ended.  It goes on until one player cannot think of a word that hasn’t already been used or until someone uses a word ending with “n”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope you have a good day, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dysphoria, dat phoria, de udder phoria, to Hell with it, none of it matters

Well, we’ve reached the just-shy-of-two-thirds point in the month of January, and we’re exactly nine months out from the most important day of the year (Ha ha).  How exciting.

It’s still chilly here in south Florida; at least, it’s chilly for south Florida.  I don’t think we’re in any immediate danger of having snow in Miami‒we’re more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit* too warm for that‒but it’s cold if you’ve lived in the subtropical cesspool climate for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s way too long to be in Florida.  Florida is a nice place to visit, but given the overall quality of humans that tend to have influence here‒and we all know one extremely prominent one‒you wouldn’t want to live here.  Or, as a popular local saying goes, “Florida:  come on vacation, leave on probation.”  Even my grandparents on my mother’s side, who had lived in Florida for some years, moved back north for their final years.

I’m not sure what to “talk” about today.  Or, to be my usual unnecessarily strict self regarding such things, I am not sure about what to “talk” today.

Here’s a mildly amusing point:  when I try to construct that last sentence’s last phrase without ending it (not counting the word “today”) in a preposition, or a dangling participle, or whatever the proper term is, the stupid Google Docs word processor tries to suggest that I’m incorrect and recommends the less grammatically correct but more popular way to put things, such as what I wrote in the preceding sentence.  It’s pathetic and disgusting.  Google should be ashamed of themselves, every last one of them, to the point where they commit mass seppuku.

It’s almost as if someone said they wanted to listen to some lovely orchestral music, perhaps something by Rachmaninoff, and the respondent‒perhaps some artificial “intelligence” program‒played “Baby Shark”.

Anyway, so much of nearly everything is so very frustrating in this life.  Nothing is rewarding.  Well, nearly nothing is rewarding, and the few rewarding things are not just few but also very far between.

I see no future for me.  I cannot visualize actually having a remaining life that’s any better than that of a homeless drug addict.

Everything is maddening.  Or maybe it’s just that I am maddened by everything.  It hardly matters which is the more accurate way to put things, since the experience for me is the same:  unhappiness, loneliness, frustration, insomnia, chronic pain, constant tinnitus in both ears, professional and personal disgrace, and who knows how many other things I could list if I had the energy for it.

I don’t think I can do this much more, perhaps not any more.  I’m so frustrated and miserable and stuck.  Supposedly, someone with my level of ASD‒level 2** officially‒needs moderate support, not just “some” support.  I don’t have any.  I am on my own.

That’s not to say I don’t have people who care about me, but they are far away and have their own shit with which to deal.  They certainly don’t need to waste their energy on the added piece of shit that I am.

I don’t know how often I have felt that I really ought to kill myself, that it’s probably the most sensible course of action for me‒socially, biologically, ethically, what have you‒but I have not done so yet.  Each occurrence of such contemplation must carry some certain percentage of risk****, like a more metaphorical version of Russian Roulette (though I literally tried that once).  Eventually, probability suggests that my actual killing of myself would approach a mathematical certainty.

It will never quite reach certainty, of course, even if (when?) I finally kill myself, at least not as a matter of retroactive probability.  Just because someone won the lottery last week doesn’t mean we can retroactively say that their odds of winning were 100%.  One could say such a thing from a certain point of view‒the past being unchangeable and so fixed and deterministic‒but it’s not a useful way to think about probability.

Anyway, enough of this shit for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write a post tomorrow; I mean, it’s always uncertain, but it feels less likely than usual.  If I do, I guess it’ll show up here.

*Let’s see, in centigrade (or Celsius) that’s five ninths as many degrees as in Fahrenheit, so 20 times five is 100, divided by 9 is 11 and one ninth, or 11.1111111…

**Level 2:  Perfume, lingerie, women’s clothing, and jewelry***.  Everybody out of the elevator.

***That stuff would probably actually all be on level 1.  They usually keep things of interest mainly to women on the first floor of department stores, since statistically, those are the things that bring in the most business.

****If you want to call “risk” something that would end my constant dysphoria and also free other people from having to think about me in any other than a sad little, throwaway, “Aw, what a shame” kind of way.