depression

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It might be the pate of a politician, which this blog now o’erreaches

Hello and good morning, o dedicated reader(s).

I honestly don’t feel very much like writing today‒I feel extremely low even for me, very gloomy, very pain-riddled and dysthymic, my mood made worse by the diminishing daytime in the northern hemisphere‒but since I did my little throw-away non-blog last Thursday, I figured I might as well do something today.  I don’t know if anyone truly looks forward to my blogs‒it’s hard to imagine someone’s day being worse because they didn’t get any input from my thoughts‒but just in case someone does, I will write.  Or, rather, I am writing.

I don’t want anyone to think that my depression is unusually bad due to political events, and certainly not for anything parochial, provincial, local in time and space.  Cat forbid!

I’m sure that people throughout history have thought that whatever local politics was happening just then, at that moment, was Earth-shattering and of monumental importance.  But, of course, as Ozymandius reminds us, all the great people and events of the past, all the presidents and emperors and warlords and whatnots, are but headless, trunkless, disintegrating statues in a featureless desert.

Actually, most of them are never even that.  During the Cold War, admittedly, especially the latter part during maximum arms race and belligerence between the US and the USSR, it was possible for politics to engender the destruction of much of civilization (and I truly didn’t think the odds were good that we would avoid thermonuclear war for very long*) but even then the moment-to-moment politics was almost incidental.

The Cold War and its existential dangers lasted through numerous presidents and premiers, the former of various political parties‒Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Nixon (R), Ford (R), Carter (D), Reagan (R), all the way up to George H. W. Bush (R).  And, of course, on the other side, we had Stalin (C), Khrushchev (C), Brezhnev (C), Chernenko et al (C), and Gorbachev (C).  One might imagine that Bush, Sr. and Gorbachev would be truly celebrated historical figures, given their leadership positions at the end of the Cold War, but I don’t see a lot of evidence thereof.

Now, political stupidity** has, of course, caused havoc locally on many an occasion.  More people were killed thanks to the ideological idiocy of Stalin and Mao, for instance, than were killed in wars in the 20th century, despite the immensity of those wars.

But, of course, nearly all the people who died in and around the first world war at least (and most of those alive during the second) would have been dead by now, anyway.  And certainly, everyone who died unnecessarily during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars would definitely be dead by now, whatever might have happened.  And all the people slaughtered by the hordes of Genghis Khan would be dead now, no matter what.  And certainly anyone killed due to the mismanagement of even the worst of the Caesars would be dead now‒as dead as Julius Caesar, as they say.  And the people of Greece and Macedon and “Asia Minor” and Egypt and Persia and all those other areas would be dead now whether Alexander the Great had conquered his known world or not.

I recall a column that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (back when it used to be worthy of his writing) called “Remember the 6 billion” (roughly the population of the world at that time).  His point was that, within the following 120 years at most, every single person then alive would die…and for the most part it would go entirely unnoticed, because new people are constantly sporulating to take the place of the ones that fall by the wayside.

The “Great Men” (and women) of history are mostly just names and caricatures; they have no effect on the long term structure of civilization.  We recall that Alexander was a brilliant military leader‒an artist in that realm, perhaps‒but his contributions to that field have no major bearing on modern life.

The ideas of Archimedes, for instance, have had much more durable effects, but that’s because they are discoveries about the nature of the universe, of reality and its underlying rules or tendencies, and so they are, in a sense, universal and universally discoverable by any intelligent civilization anywhere in the cosmos.  Ditto for Galileo and Newton, for Maxwell and Einstein and Schrodinger and Planck and their compatriots.

Not that we should not celebrate those achievements and discoveries, but they are in some senses nonspecific to any individual.  Even the work of Darwin, which may seem both specific (har!) and provincial, since it refers to life on Earth, is probably at least as universal as the work of Newton or Dirac or even Emmy Noether.  Natural selection applies to numerous things even within the higher orders of civilization‒languages, political systems, forms of transportation, the durability and character of bureaucracies, etc.  A form of it may apply to the formation of planetary systems and the potential origin of life therein, and even to the possible bubble universes of the hypothetical inflationary multiverse (or more specifically in Lee Smolin’s speculative notion of universe natural selection through black hole related cosmogenesis).

But politics‒well, it’s provincial in pretty much every way.  Can you imagine any truly alien race caring who got elected president or which party ran the poorer campaign, why one did better or the other worse?  Go canvas the dolphins for their opinions, or the octopuses, or the corvids, or ask a beehive or a termite mound or an ant colony.  Try to get them to give flying fuck at a tiny little that’s ass*** about the minutiae of human politics.

No, my depression, like my pain, is endogenous, or at least it is not trivially reactive.  It is always with me, a truly dark passenger (who often takes the wheel).  It’s probably a product of my atypical, alien neurology, but of course, I’m not anything like as alien as a cephalopod or hymenopteran or a cetacean.  I’m just humanlike enough to exist in the uncanny valley:  weird enough to be unsettling, but not weird enough to be interesting or cute or “beautiful” because of it.

So go ahead, catastrophize or hyper-celebrate about the latest political farce, not recognizing that a lot of what went wrong on all sides was that very tendency to demonize, to catastrophize, to overreact and to be self-righteous.

There is a saying that came into prominence sometime in my teens to twenties (I don’t recall the first time I heard it).  I initially found it irritating just because it was such a “new thing”, but I think its message has endured and even grown in value:  get over yourself.

Everyone needs to take this admonition to heart.  We are all just virtual particles, not-quite-really-real bosons that can carry some degree of information or “force” when there are enough of us around, but which all ultimately pop back out of existence before our presence can even really be noticed by any outside observer.

That’s okay.  It had better be okay, because it’s not optional****.  And if that state of the world, that nature of reality, is unnerving to you, don’t mind it too much.  It won’t trouble you for very long.  No one here gets out alive.

TTFN

*We still haven’t avoided it for very long.  It’s only been a danger for about, what, 70 years?  Really, it’s a little less than that since we’ve had truly civilization-ending amounts of sufficiently powerful nuclear weapons.  So, since I’m just now 55 years old, the threat of global thermonuclear war is only about a decade-ish older than I am.  It could almost be thought of as my eldest sibling.

**Redundant?

***I would not put it past dolphins to try such a thing.

****It’s a bit like free will:  You either have it or you don’t, but you don’t have any choice in the matter.

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Sleep that knits up the ravell’d blog of care

Hello and good morning.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I’ve been ill for almost two weeks now.  I can’t say that I’m fully recovered yet, but‒unfortunately‒I am getting better.  In the early stages of the illness, when I stayed at the house for two of the days of last week, I was at least able to get a bit of extra sleep, thanks to that tendency of the body’s response to illness.  Since then, though, I seem to have rebounded into worse than usual insomnia.  I feel truly horrible, and I also have a persistent cough that’s irritating.

I wonder if there’s anyone out there from my past who truly hates me.  If so, I hope they stumble across this blog, or have already done so, so that they can at least experience a bit of schadenfreude.  It would be nice to think that my pathetic discomfort and self-hatred were at least bringing some joy to the world.  It might be spiteful joy, but I’ll take what I can get.  It’s not as though I’m very good at bringing joy to people I care about and who care about me for very long, at least when they are in regular, close proximity.

My subconscious mind gave me a slight birthday present on Sunday, in that I woke up with a little tune in my head that I’d heard in a dream.  I wasn’t sure if it was something I’ve heard before, but I didn’t and don’t think so.  Anyway, I felt compelled to work out the tune and then put chords to it on Sunday.  Then, Monday morning, I very quickly worked out the guitar melody and chords and did a quick little production of that.  It’s only 16 bars long, so that was easy enough.

I posted the audio here on Monday.  I also made a weird little video with it on my phone; I’ve tried to play with Instagram lately, just because I have a default account since I have a Facebook account.  I posted the combined video there and on YouTube (see below).

I think it was too much of a distraction making my strange introduction and then adding the weird effects.  That was me just playing around with the Clip Champ app from Microsoft, just to see what I could do with it.  But my intro is longer than the song, and I don’t think it adds much.

Anyway, if anyone recognizes the tune from somewhere, please let me know.  If not, I guess this was my personal Yesterday* kind of moment, though my tune is much more banal than Sir Paul’s.  There’s no real shame in that, though.  The vast majority of all songs ever written are not as good as Yesterday.

On a whim, I worked out the tune of another (pre-existing) song on an online keyboard yesterday‒I don’t even recall what song‒but it was interesting that I ended up “singing” it in my head in C Major/A minor.  It wasn’t deliberate, and I only realized it as I finished working out the whole melody.

This was striking because that was the key signature that the above, dream-based song came out in, and in which it is played, above.  However, I know that is not the key in which I originally dreamed it, because as soon as I woke up with it in my head on Sunday, I opened my phone’s voice recorder and tried to sort of hum the tune into it.  I’ll put that recording right here, as evidence (or whatever).

As I knew my voice was hoarse, and I wasn’t sure how well it would come across later (even to me) it wasn’t long before I opened up the online virtual keyboard (it was too early to use the real one) and worked out and wrote down the tune.

Anyway, the point is, between the time I had hummed the tune directly after my dream, which I’m pretty sure was in the key in which I dreamed it, and when I worked it out on the virtual keyboard, I’d taken it from G-sharp major/F minor (which I think is roughly the key in which I hummed it) to C major/A minor.  I don’t know why this happened, but it does make nearly all the black key notes go away.  C major is the simplest, most basic key‒in a sense, anyway‒whereas G-sharp major has its root on a black key.

I’d like to imagine that my subconscious mind corrected it to an easier key signature for me, and that’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.  I’ve been playing piano since I was nine (not continuously) and cello since I was ten (ditto), if only at a very flippant and superficial level, never developing any real skill with either instrument (and I do not have perfect pitch in the sense of being able to tell you what note is being played when I hear it, but I can certainly tell if something it out of tune with itself and otherwise deal with relative pitch).  Still, my subconscious might very well have enough imprinted memory of notes and scales to steer me toward easier keys when I’m writing something or sounding out something by ear.

All of this, though, is just a meandering distraction.  I’m not likely to do anything more with my dream-based tune, even if I become more firmly convinced that it’s mine.  I’ve occasionally found myself humming some impromptu lyrics to it in my head, but they are horrifyingly bad and stupid.  Compared to them, McCartney’s first lyrics to Yesterday‒“scambled eggs…dah dah dah dah dah, I love your legs”‒are worthy of Shakespeare or Milton.

So I’m not going to tell anyone what those are.  Anyway, sixteen bars do not a song make, as Yoda might say, so if I were going to turn it into something, I’d need to extrapolate.  That’s not hard to do once you’ve got a basic melody, but it requires you to have the drive to make a song.

I have no such drive for anything, really.  I can barely write this blog, and I am only doing it because I am a creature of habit and routine.  I am thoroughly exhausted by my worsening sleep, and I feel as though I’m experiencing the world through a multi-dimensional haze.  I’m also very depressed and I miss my kids and all the various other people for whom I’ve been too unpleasant for them to want to stay around anymore.

From day to day, and for a very long time, I have been thoroughly alone, and I fear that serves the greater good of the people who matter to me.  Even this week at work, since I’ve been here every day, has been far less successful than the days when I was out of the office.  Everything tends to be better when I’m not around.

I’m not living; I’m just waiting to die.  It’s taking a long frikking time, though, and I’m running out of patience and energy.  But I still can’t seem to sleep.  As the Ramones sang, “I wanna be sedated”.  I wonder if Michael Jackson’s old doctor is making house calls**.

TTFN

*Every Breath You Take had a similar origin.

**Is it too soon to be joking about him?  I have long been personally affronted by the fact that he spent less time in prison than I did.  Then again, he wasn’t in Florida.

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Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night and, for the day, confin’d to blog in fires

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so I am writing my traditional Thursday morning blog post.  This is my first post this week—which feels odd, I have to admit—and should also be my last post for the week, barring (as I always say) the unforeseen.

It’s the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere (the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere), and so it is the “longest” (“shortest”) day of the year.  It’s also the official beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere (winter in the south), though nature doesn’t give a flying f*ck at a tiny little rat’s ass about how humans label the days.

Speaking of labeling the days, the Tri-rail system is making a repeated, official announcement that on July 4th it will be operating on a weekend/holiday schedule, which is not a surprise.  What is irritating—to me, though probably not to anyone else—is the fact that they have set it up to say that this schedule will occur on “the 4th of July, July 4th”, which they repeat in Spanish and Creole.

It’s irritating because, if they’re going to name the holiday and then give the date, why don’t they refer to it as “Independence Day”, which is after all the original name and point of the holiday?  I mean, it’s worth recalling the ideas included in the Declaration of Independence, aspirational though many have always been and not yet quite fully instantiated.  You know, the whole right to life, “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the fact that all (people)* are created equal, and the fact that governments only legitimately exist in order to secure the rights of the people, “deriving their just power from the consent of the governed”, and that when government fails to perform its fundamental duty, it is the right of the people to change it, with the caveat that one should not change governments lightly or frivolously.

It’s absurd to say that the 4th of July is on July 4th, because it’s redundant, quite apart from failing to acknowledge the point of the holiday.  It’s a bit like making an announcement, “El tren funcionará según el horario de los domingos el Cinco de Mayo, el quinto día de mayo.”  The fact that the announcement is in the form it takes is further evidence that humans don’t think either about the significance of the day nor the logic and concision of the language they use to convey information.

It sometimes gets to the point where one doesn’t bother trying to determine why a particular person is a misanthrope but rather one wonders why anyone is not a misanthrope.  I’m not a bigot, though; I don’t just hate humans.  I don’t think the other animals are any better that humans are (and I’m no great admirer of fungi, plants, protozoa, and prokaryotes).  They’re just less competent (in the broad sense of the word), and so their blind self-interest and response to entirely “local”** influences tends to cause less damage and create fewer absurdities and stupidities.

That’s enough of me griping about train announcements.  In other news, I have been writing this week (though I did not work on Saturday after all, because the office was closed, so I didn’t write any on that day).  Since last post, I’ve written a total of 3,731 words on Extra Body.  It would have been more—it probably should have been more—but I’ve really been writing only a page a day, and I’ve had to force myself to do that.

I’m incredibly exhausted.  My sleep has been consistently poor, even for me, and if anything it seems to be deteriorating steadily.  I can’t even rest when I have down time; I’m extremely tired but I don’t feel sleepy.

To quote John at the bar in the song Piano Man, “I believe this is killing me”.  I’m not speaking metaphorically.  Every day I feel vague and separate, like a very faintly received and poorly rendered analog television signal, dominated by static.  My dysthymia/depression is very bad, my tinnitus is just awful, making my sensory sensitivity to sound (or “SSS” for short) all the worse.  I can’t even tell if I’m writing coherently, or if I’m speaking coherently at any given day or time.  Thankfully—I guess—I speak to nearly no one, other than a few people at work, and that’s pretty limited, because I feel like I have nothing to say that isn’t inane or repetitive.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Sunday was Father’s Day, which is at best a bittersweet holiday for me; I haven’t physically been in the presence of my children since about 2013, and though I’ve exchanged emails, texts, and a few phone calls with my daughter (and she sent me a cool gift for Father’s Day), I’ve had all of one e-mail exchange with my son since 2013 (unless I’m forgetting something).  Clearly, I’m unsatisfactory and/or unpleasant even to the people I love most in the world.  You can just imagine how irritating I am to people who hate me (of which group I am the chief member).

And, of course, two Saturdays from now, June 29th would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary.  Thirty-three is, of course, the age at which hobbits “come of age”, and was Frodo’s age at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, though it was seventeen years later that he left the Shire to begin his great journey.

Okay, well, I’m rambling now.  I’ve probably been rambling all along, but it’s becoming impossible not to see it at this point, even for me.  I’ll try to get a little more done on Extra Body this week if I can.  It really is almost finished, but that’s a rather nebulous status.  I could conceivably finish the first draft by next Thursday, but I would not recommend placing any bets on it.  I also wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on me living to see it published, let alone to writing and finishing HELIOS, or anything else, for that matter.

I’m just too damn tired and discouraged, and whatever my species actually is, they seem to have forgotten about me, if they ever realized that they left me here***.  I’ve been investigating high, open parking garages in the area—they’re not as common as I would wish in this part of Florida—and experimenting with replacing the psyllium with other substances in these generic Metamucil capsules I have, just to try to figure out promising techniques or ideas.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, of course.  But I’m damn near sure that there will be no epiphany or miraculous rescue.  As far as I can tell, that’s just not how my life works.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good week, and a good beginning of summer, though of course the heat in the American east and northeast is supposedly pretty bad.  It’s rough down here, too, but that’s not anything new.

TTFN

destroyer

*Even Star Trek only fixed their androcentric version of things with the start of The Next Generation in the eighties, so we shouldn’t be too hard on Jefferson et al for unthinking sexism (they had other moral errors that were at least as egregious).  Even in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, women only got the right to vote in 1952, so the US had them beat by over 30 years.  And, of course, there are plenty of countries throughout the world where women still do not have equal rights…or often any rights.

**I’m using “local” in a relatively technical sense, here.  Obviously in these days of global communication networks of various kinds, one can be influenced by ideas and forces not merely from across the planet but also—given the information from history—from the past.  However, all these influences only come to bear upon individuals when they actually receive the information that influences them, when any incoming influence actually impinges on their nervous systems.  And, of course, no organism can help but respond to the forces that operate directly upon and within it, anymore than one can choose to waive one’s compliance with the laws of physics.  So, local, national, and international news are in this sense nevertheless all local forces.  Even gravity is really a local force in this sense—each portion of the gravitational field responds not literally to distant objects, but rather to the state of the field right next to it.  This is especially obvious in the phenomenon of gravitational waves, but is true of all gravitational effects.  And, of course, like all influences in this, our universe, the transmission of those influences cannot go faster than the fundamental speed of causality, which is the speed of light.  There is some possibility that, at least in some sense, quantum mechanics is a non-local process (or set of processes) but I have my doubts about even that.

***This is metaphorical—well, usually—and I am not literally delusional.  It merely captures how I feel about myself in relation to all the other people in the world.

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By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death will blog the doctor too.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so—as I mentioned yesterday that I would—I’m writing a standard blog post.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber right now, but I’m using my laptop, and that combination is a first for me, I think.  I know that taking Ubers is probably an unjustifiable expense, and I mean to cut back on them, but this week I’ve had very little useful energy*, and anyway, I’m only too happy just to burn through the quite small amount of money that I have, since I have no reason to save for the future.

I was briefly puzzled as I did the initial “save” for this document, since I save my blogs by date and day of the week, when I saw that last year the 23rd of May fell on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday.  Each year generally shifts the day (of the week) of any given date one day later than the previous year, since a standard year is one day longer than a multiple of 7: [52 x 7 = 364].  I think that the official mathematical term is “modulo” when you’re just looking at the remainder.  And I vaguely recall noting, earlier this year, that the dates this year were one day later.

But, of course, this is a leap year, in which we “add” a day to the year, specifically on February 29th.  So it makes sense:  early in the year, this year’s dates are one weekday later than they were last year, but after the end of February, they are two days later.  I suppose that means that next January and February will be two days later than they were this year, but after that things will revert to one day later.

Hold on to your hats, folks!  If the whole blog post is this exciting, goodness knows how you’re going to be able to stand it.

It’s a bit tricky writing in the back seat here, because my laptop computer doesn’t have illuminated keys.  When the bouncing around of the car throws me off too much, I have to re-find my typing location by trial and error.  Once I do, I don’t really need to be able to see; I know my way around the keyboard pretty much by proprioception.  After all, I’ve been typing at least since I was eleven.

Not to say that I don’t make plenty of typos.  My coordination isn’t all that great, and I often get ahead of myself.  But at least with modern word processors, it’s so easy to correct for errors that it’s not a big deal.

Actually, I suspect that if I’d been forced to keep using my grandmother’s typewriter, which is what I used to start my typing career, and on which I needed to use correction film to erase mistakes, I would probably be a better, or at least cleaner, typist than I am now.  Once word processing programs came into play, there was no longer as much of a price to pay for minor errors, and so there was less pressure to be more accurate.  As I’ve noted many times, everything responds to local pressures and incentives and disincentives.

I warned you that this might be exciting, didn’t I?

I almost didn’t go in to work today.  That was why I let myself get the Uber:  to help me to clear that activation energy barrier.  I am not particularly physically sick, though I feel a bit of a tickle in the back of my throat.  I just didn’t want to go in.  Yesterday, all day, I was extremely tense and stressed out, and the noise was particularly irksome, and I had payroll to do, and I was always just sliding along what felt like the razor edge of a true breakdown or explosion.  Yet no one seems to have noticed.

I banged my head on the wall quite hard at one point, and did several other things to cause myself pain throughout the day.  I don’t want to go into specifics too much; I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo or something.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Anyway, I’ve actually just arrived at the office.  I hope my hands and thumbs won’t feel too sore, today.  Yesterday, my thumb bases were painfully tight, and most of the rest of my finger joints were sore and stiff, albeit to a lesser degree than the thumbs.  It made it quite difficult to try to play guitar, so I didn’t do much of that.

Actually, because of the trouble with my hands, and my shoulders, and of course, the ongoing issues with my back and hips and knees and ankles—especially with my back—I decided to buy a huge bottle of Ibuprofen, and I’ve taken some of them starting yesterday afternoon.

I have been “off” Ibuprofen for quite some time, now, though it was my go-to anti-inflammatory for many years.  I started to avoid it when its use was associated on two or three occasions—possibly just by coincidence—with a relatively high occurrence of what I presume were premature atrial contractions, with associated palpitations.  It was nothing terribly severe, of course, but at the time, I wanted to live, so I switched mainly to naproxen.

I also use some aspirin, as well as acetaminophen for headaches and other things that don’t benefit from any suppression of cyclooxygenase.  But, despite its longer action, naproxen has never worked quite as well as ibuprofen seemed to work, though perhaps that’s been confounded by other variables.  It’s hard to do a double-blind test on oneself.

In any case, at this point, I don’t much care if I get palpitations, although if they happen, maybe I’ll find them unpleasant enough that I’ll change my mind.  Frankly, I don’t mind if I have a full-fledged arrhythmia.  Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation, for instance, is probably one of the best ways to die.  You basically just faint, since your brain is no longer getting blood flow, and that’s that.  If no one defibrillates you, and if the arrhythmia doesn’t spontaneously resolve, you’re done.

It’s probably not quite as quick a death as being at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion, and it’s certainly not as quick as being obliterated when the vacuum energy of the universe quantum tunnels down to a lower level**, since that process would spread throughout the cosmos at the speed of light, and no information within spacetime can exceed the speed of light, so it’s fundamentally impossible to know such an event is happening before it arrives.  It’s also impossible to know about it once it arrives, since everything currently existing in our universe, right down to fundamental particles, would by obliterated by the vacuum state decay—again, at the speed of light, which is far faster than the rate at which the nervous system can experience anything.

Unfortunately, even more than the thermonuclear explosion possibility, vacuum decay would involve taking other, “innocent” people along with me, at least some of whom both wish and deserve to continue living.  That seems a bit unethical—or at least rude, which I sometimes think is worse—and anyway, it’s not as though anyone knows how to make it happen.

It’s better to keep things confined to my person.

I guess even a hemorrhagic stroke wouldn’t be too bad, to be honest, and given my tendency to bang my head against the wall when I get too frazzled and stressed, it seems immensely more likely than vacuum state collapse.  I suppose I could even tolerate death by bleeding ulcer, though I really don’t like nausea***.

Probably, though, in the end, I’m going to have to take a more active and deliberate hand in things.  I suppose we’ll see.  It’s hard to work up the courage to face the discomfort and even frank pain associated with most such interventions, but practice makes better, and I already have a fair amount of experience deliberately causing myself pain, as noted above.

That’s enough blog post for now.  I’ve already droned on and on.  My tentative plan is to do some fiction writing tomorrow morning, and if I do (or even if I don’t) I plan to leave a little report about it here.  I am off work this weekend, so I won’t be writing anything on Saturday (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I truly, honestly, and fervently hope that each and every one of you feels better than I do right now, and I mean substantially better.  You probably do; it seems likely that, in the phase space of physical and emotional states, there are many more possibilities in that direction than in the other.  But I could be wrong.

TTFN

Addendum:  While editing, I found that MS Word had underlined a sentence in the draft above, in which I wrote, “I think that the official mathematical term is….”  The editor gave the comment that “expressing opinions with certainty adds formality”.  I don’t think I could possibly disagree more than I do with that sentence. 

Bad advice in editor marked up

 PLEASE DON’T DO THAT, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  Opinions are opinions.  Expressing them with certainty when you are not certain is tantamount to outright lying, and is a huge problem with human discourse!  I’m ashamed of MS Word for making that suggestion.  What a horrible, horrible recommendation!  What a nightmarish thing to say!

*And yet, my level of tension has been exceptionally high.  That’s a frustrating bit of irony, as I probably don’t need to tell you.

**This is purely a hypothetical possibility.  The vacuum energy of the universe may well be at its lowest/ground state, though it is patently not quite zero.  If it were, cosmic expansion would not be accelerating.  Indeed, I often say that cosmic inflation is happening now, based on all the data we have.  That’s what “dark energy” is doing, albeit at a slower rate than what is proposed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago.

***Weird, right?  I don’t like nausea?  How unusual!

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The great blog itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and even though I’ve been writing blog posts nearly all this week so far—since I haven’t been writing fiction—this is now my more “traditional” blog post for the week.

I apologize for not writing fiction yesterday and the day before.  I’ve been feeling terrible and horrible and no good and very bad and all that other stuff.  My coworker is still out, though he’ll probably be back sometime today, or possibly tomorrow at the latest, and anyway, that’s not the main problem.  The main problem is that I have been just terribly tense and anxious and have had terrible nights’ sleep even for me, despite trying to sedate myself and optimize my bedtime habits and so on.

Last night I got almost six hours of sleep, which for me is quite good, though it doesn’t feel close to enough.  It would be one thing if I slept six hours and awoke feeling refreshed and healthy; then I would know that I had gotten enough sleep, that six hours was just how much sleep my body needed.

Alas, things are not that simple.  My body’s optimal sleep time is probably pretty typical at around eight hours, but that particular “pressure” in the system is countered by whatever the various sources are of tension and stress and pain and depression.  When the sleep need gets too strong, it overpowers those other vectors, but as soon as it dips below some threshold, those other vectors dominate enough to push me into unpleasant wakefulness again.

I can literally remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep; I’ve probably mentioned it here, before.  I don’t know the specific date, but it was in the mid-1990s*.  (I’m being completely serious about this—as serious as a bloodcurdling scream for help.)

Last night, I walked about three-fifths of the way back from the train station in the evening—about three miles.  It was quite warm out, certainly in the high 80s, so I think I sweated a lot.  At least that meant I didn’t need to wake up to use the bathroom!  Also, I was physically fatigued enough to rest, and I’d been careful to try to balance my walking so that my left knee wasn’t acting up, which seems to have worked reasonably well for the time being.

I know that’s all very boring.  I just don’t have anyone else to whom to talk about these things, so I share them with all of you.  Aren’t you lucky?  I guess you can always just skim over the boring stuff.  I’m not sure how it is that we can tell what’s going to be boring before we literally read it, but people do seem able to do that, and it works.  I’ve done it myself.

I apologize for not writing any fiction since Monday morning.  I don’t know if any of you were angry at me for that, but I feel that I owe an apology.  I guess I really owe an apology for being a big annoyance and a downer, but I don’t know what to do to change those things.

I don’t want to be a blind optimist, of course.  I want to understand the world as clearly as I can, as objectively as I can, and as deeply and broadly as I can.  Maybe there’s no way to do that without being tense and depressive.  The universe is, after all, vast beyond intuitive understanding, and the realms at which fundamental physics applies are tiny and intricate, also beyond ready intuitive understanding, and time is old in the past and so much longer in the future than a person with a finite lifespan can truly take on board.

But I don’t think that must be despair-inducing.  I’m much more stressed out by how little humans seem even to contemplate how small they are, both individually and collectively, than I am by my own smallness.  As I learn more about how the world really works at deep levels, I don’t feel frightened or overwhelmed by it, like some Lovecraft protagonist who goes mad when confronted with the Great Old Ones or whatever.  I feel that I have grown larger—not literally, of course, but the phase space in which my mind exists takes more and more of reality into itself, and it’s really quite cool, if that’s the right word.

I think at least one thing that makes me feel despair is that so few other people seem even to want to understand the greater universe in any depth or breadth.  They would much rather imagine that the universe is very small and brief, as long as they are somewhere near the center of it.

But of course, to paraphrase Gandalf, they can shut themselves into their tiny little world, but they cannot shut the universe out.  And this in turn invokes not merely the old saw that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed (for indeed, one cannot do anything but obey nature).  But I would say, far more strongly, that nature, to be survived—even to have a chance of being survived—must be understood as well as possible.

If you don’t know the rules of chess, you’re unlikely to be able to win a game.  Likewise with any other game, including even simple video games.  But those games have rules that humans invented.  The rules of nature have to be probed and unlocked and discovered, and they are much more fine-grained and large and complex than any human-made game could be.  They must be so, for the entire human world is but a tiny little part of that game, one of the innumerable things it allows to come into being.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?

I guess you’re going to write a blog about it, and in the meantime, try to learn as much about the world as you can, because it is interesting at many levels.  And, of course, you can write a bit of fiction, to which I’ll try to return tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I hope the vast majority of you are getting better rest than I have been getting.  I hope you have a very good day.  And I hope you have friends and family with whom to spend your finite and precious time.

TTFN

*I remember waking up feeling absolutely refreshed, and though I was too young to think about feeling “ten years younger”, I did feel more alive than I had in some time, almost as if I’d gotten superpowers**.  I’ve known people who seem almost addicted to sleep, and if that’s how they tend to feel when they’ve slept, I can hardly blame them.

**Speaking of which, I have a stupid, joke superhero idea that I’ve been too embarrassed to share with anyone in person (I’m sure you’ll understand why):  “Bitten by a radioactive wildebeest, Anthony Edward Lopez finds himself with slightly-greater-than-human powers of strength and speed.  Deciding to use his new powers to fight crime, he becomes:  Gnu-man.”

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An inconsequential blog post

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

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

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

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

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

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

‒

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

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

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The moon may be a harsh mistress, but her eyes are nothing like the sun

I was going to write this post on my laptop computer, since I had brought it with me back from the office on Friday, thinking to write fiction this morning.  However, I am waiting for fares to go down to normal levels for Uber or Lyft this morning, so while I wait, I figured I might as well write this post on my smartphone.  It’s inconvenient to write on the laptop computer while waiting at the house, because to do so I need to set up a TV tray table type thing.  That’s not hard, of course, but it’s still more effort than I mean to put forth for something that will hopefully only entail a few minutes’ delay.

I should just have gotten up when I was awake‒well, okay, not when I was first awake.  There would be no point in going to the office in the literal middle of the night.  But if I had gone to the Tri-Rail station early enough, I might have gotten on the 4:20 train.  Still, who knows?  Maybe Uber rates were twice as high as usual even then.  I don’t know why the ride services are so busy at this hour on a Monday morning.

Whatever it is, I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the eclipse that will be coming today.  That phenomenon is cutting a line from the southwest to the northeast across the country, including up by my sister’s house.  I won’t be seeing it, of course, since I’m down here in south Florida, and there won’t be another opportunity to watch one in my lifetime from anywhere readily accessible to me.

I could have gone; I was invited to visit by my sister.  The people at work thought I should go.  But when I started looking into booking either buses or trains or planes‒even though I did renew my state ID to make things easier‒I felt tension bordering on dread at the prospect of traveling in any of those ways.  So I didn’t go.  And here I am.

***

Ride rates have now dropped to normal, and I’m outside waiting for my Uber.  I was hoping to be able to ride my bike to the train station; I changed up my upper body workout a bit last week, and it felt different enough that I thought I might be able to use the bike without issue.  I rode it a decent distance on Saturday, with minimal trouble, though I felt a bit stiff overnight.  Then I rode it some more yesterday, and while riding I felt fine.  I even felt rather good, if slightly breathless.  But then, overnight, the stiffness and splinting and spasms started up again, so I fear that’s just not going to work.  I also have soreness in my right Achilles tendon and significant pain in my left knee, and my left side feels like it’s been infused with hot metal.

***

I’m at the train station now, still in pain (of course) and seated on the ground because I was too late because of the Uber delays to get a good seat where I prefer to sit.  It’s annoying, but I guess I would have been even later if I had ridden my bicycle.  Then again, at least I would have had the good feeling of having gotten some exercise.

Oh, well.  I don’t know whom I think I’m fooling.  I don’t expect to get back in good shape any time before I die.  Every time I try to exercise (so far) it screws me up with worsening of my chronic pain.  I wish I could just shut the pain off, but biology is not readily amenable to compromises in that area.  Pain, like fear, is too essential.  All things that suppress either of them‒even when the pain and/or fear have become thoroughly dysfunctional‒cause terrible side effects.

I can’t go on much longer like this.  It’s almost too bad that the solar eclipse is not some harbinger of disaster, but of course, it is not.  It’s merely a consequence of the geometry of three bodies whose mutual orbits lie nearly in the same plane.  If the moon’s orbital plane were identical to the Earth’s around the sun, there would be a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse with each orbit of the moon, and predicting such things would have been far less impressive to the native peoples of Hispaniola when Columbus used his knowledge thereof to dupe them into going along with his plans.

Some modern people seem barely less credulous, despite being avid users of the Internet and World Wide Web.  Why, the leading independent candidate for president is full of ideas so absurd that they would have been rejected as plot points in the later seasons of the X-files.  If you caught him at the right time, you could probably convince him that early vaccines had been used to mind-control him and that he had assassinated both his uncle and his father.

Sorry.  I’m grumpy.  My apologies.  I’m in a lot of pain‒more so than usual‒and of course my sleep has been horrible, though at least I napped some over the weekend.  I also replaced the shower-head in the bathroom, but that’s not very impressive, and I had the cable people out to replace the modem for the Wi-Fi, but though that was absurdly nerve-wracking, it’s hardly a big accomplishment.

I feel horrible and rotten and disgusting.  I wouldn’t give myself 5 stars even on an Uber or Lyft scale (in which, if someone doesn’t get 5 stars the app asks you what went wrong, but only gives you pre-programmed, simplistic options for explanation, eliminating the whole point of a 5 star rating system‒3 stars should be the average, but instead it’s something like 4.9).  I wouldn’t give myself an A even on the Yale grading scale (in which, it seems, the vast majority of students get As in the vast majority of their classes‒again, destroying the whole point of the grading system and eliminating any incentives to excel).

Maybe I should write a whole post about that issue, how (among other things) grade inflation makes the prestige of elite educational institutions evaporate, since in the real world, business is competitive, and a 4.0 from a school where everyone gets a 4.0 and there is no merit-based admission will gradually (but not necessarily slowly) come to be not worth the virtual paper on which it is written.

Again, I’m sorry.  I really don’t feel well at all, and I don’t feel good at all, either*.  I hope you all feel significantly better than I do, physically, emotionally, morally and otherwise.  I’m sure you all deserve it more than I do, though “deserves” is for the most part a vacuous term.

I hope you all have a very good day.  If you get a chance, and are in its path, observe the eclipse (but don’t do it directly, not with unprotected eyes).  It’s not an especially impressive cosmic phenomenon, but it’s still pretty cool.  It’s particularly cool that the human race understands the universe well enough that these phenomena, which confused our ancestors so mightily, are almost banal to us, and we can predict and plot them out centuries in advance.

It’s particularly uncool that despite how much is known and understood, there are people who live in the modern world and who constantly use devices that rely on quantum field theory and general relativity yet still think a solar eclipse might be some supernatural sign.

Heavy sigh.  What can you do?  The world is tragically comical and comically tragic.  It’s probably not worth the effort.  And I’m darn near sure that I am not.

*Yes, I mean two different things by those two words.

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My poisonous (or poisoned) thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Near-catatonic dysthymia with sensory overload and the difficulty they engender in writing fiction at work – a personal case report

Well…

I tried to write some on HELIOS yesterday‒even just a page would have been nice.  I got my clipboard down, put the title at the top of the first page, and I even worked on a few names for characters and places.  I chose a good name for the school in which some of the action takes place, one that I like (this happened before the workday started), and a couple of tentative names for three main characters.  I’m not sure about sticking with any of those.

As I’ve noted before, I made up the rough idea of HELIOS when I was quite young, as a comic book superhero.  I don’t remember what name I had given to the main character, but knowing me, it was probably some ridiculously simple and probably alliterative name.  For instance, I once made up a completely ripped-off-from-the-Hulk character called “the Cosmonster” (!) and his regular, human name was John Jackson.

To be fair to my past self, I was quite young, and I was influenced by Stan Lee, who made such characters as Bruce Banner, Peter Parker, and Reed Richards.  So, there was precedent.

Still, a decent name for the main character is rather important.  “Doofus Ignoramus” is unlikely to be the secret identity of a memorable hero, though it could be an interesting genus and species name for some newly described creature.

Anyway, as I implied, I got no actual writing done on the book.  It’s just too noisy and chaotic during the day, and it’s almost impossible for me to block it all out, since I have to attentive to work matters.

Also, my dysthymia/depression and probably some other things were in full swing yesterday, and I was all but catatonic through at least two thirds of the work day.  I barely moved when I didn’t need to move, I barely spoke‒even when someone spoke to me, except when necessary‒and I don’t think I showed any facial expression before about 4:30 pm, though it can be hard for me to tell.  I’m trying not to exaggerate here.  I really felt more or less completely empty.

I even did a quick Google search for the official clinical meaning of catatonia, to see if I was close to meeting it, as I felt I might be.  It wasn’t quite the right term, but it wasn’t ridiculously far off, either.  There were times during the day that, if I had somehow caught fire, I probably would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of, “Huh.  I’m on fire.  I should probably put that out.  But is there really any point to doing that?  It’s too noisy in this world, anyway…maybe I should just let myself burn.”

Eventually I thawed slightly as the day went on‒I do fit the typical pattern of depression in that my overt symptoms tend to be worse in the morning.  Weirdly, despite that fact, I find it far easier to get many things done in the morning, when it’s quiet and I’m effectively alone.

I’ve always been that way, or at least as long as it’s been pertinent.  Even in junior high, I used to get up and go to school very early, so I tended to be the first student there and have quiet space and time to feel like the surroundings were just mine before everyone else showed up.  I carried this on through high school.  In my undergrad years, I used to set my watch fifteen minutes ahead and then still make a point to get to class early, by my watch, even though I knew it was set ahead.

That would be harder to do nowadays, since all the effing digital devices display time based on local corrections to UTC, getting updates and adjustments through 5G or Wi-Fi or whatever other connections are there.  This is good around daylight savings time, I guess‒it’s harder for people to make the excuse that they forgot to set their clocks forward in the spring and that’s why they’re late for work the Monday after.  But the whole uniformity of time and whatnot seems overrated‒and it certainly doesn’t seem to stop people from being habitually late in the morning and then keeping other people late at the end of the day.

Not that I am bitter.

Going back to writing:  despite my emptiness and disconnectedness yesterday, and my inability to write any fiction, I decided to order two good spiral bound notebooks, thinking maybe I can at least bring them on the train and write on my way back to the house or something.  If I brought the clipboard with the paper in it, the pages would get all shmushed and mangled in my backpack, and that would be very aesthetically unpleasant.

So, I’ll be getting two of those lovely, sturdy “5-Star” spiral bound notebooks delivered today.  They were quicker to arrive and cheaper than if I had bought them in a stationery store, and I had better choices of colors, though I still had to settle for one green one along with the black one to get a one-day delivery.  That’s okay.  One of the nice things about black is that it goes with every color quite nicely.

I guess I’ll let you know how things go today.  I’m not too optimistic, especially given that work is more sensorially overloading and distressing than is even riding on a commuter train, a fact which at first glance might seem rather contradictory.

It makes a certain amount of sense, though.  On a train‒or a bus, or similar‒one is actually much more alone than one is in an office.  There are other people, but they are each also alone.  You are all mutually alone, and there is no impetus to communicate or interact.  It’s much more pleasant than working where people feel they can just come up and interact with you without warning, whether or not you’re already doing something.  And then, they’re all talking and interacting and there’s overhead music, and there’s stupidity, and you can’t even hear the useful, pertinent information that you’d like to hear.  It’s too chaotic and noisy, certainly for someone with constant tinnitus in one ear and other sensory difficulties.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  The forces that brought the world into existence never bothered to get my input when they did what they did.  The morons.  Things could have been so much better than they are, but they didn’t bother to ask me.  Then they give the poor excuse that I “didn’t exist” at the time.  Whose fault was that, huh?  Not mine!

Maybe it’s not too late for me to fix everything.  But it often seems hardly to be worth the effort, even if it can be done.  For the most part, life in general does not merit help or protection.  Macbeth had its number:  it’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Speaking of tales told by idiots, I’ll let you know tomorrow how it goes today with respect to fiction writing after my notebooks arrive.

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The enemy of my Self is Myself

I mean to try to keep this post relatively short today, and only partly because I’m writing this on my smartphone and don’t want to make my thumbs feel worse.  It’s mainly that I just don’t have much to say or talk about, and certainly nothing uplifting.

I tried to do a few relatively upbeat posts‒for me, anyway‒on Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I don’t think they’re as popular as my depressed and nihilistic posts.  It’s rather ironic; one might imagine that upbeat posts would be the ones people would prefer to read, but I guess that may not be true.  I shouldn’t be surprised that it surprises me, probably; people often make very little sense to me.

Anyway, I’m just tired.  I left work slightly early yesterday with a bad headache and just feeling horribly stressed out and tense and angry.  I don’t know if it was that things were particularly frustrating at the office, or if it was the usual fact that I cannot escape from the person I loathe most in the world:  me.

I often say that I hate the world and I hate my life‒at least, it feels as though I often say it, because I say it in my head a lot.  Maybe I don’t say it aloud or in writing as often as it feels as though I say it.  I haven’t kept track, and I don’t mean to do so.  That would be truly boring.

But of course, the reason (one of them, anyway) I don’t just change my life‒or try to change the world‒is that I cannot escape the common denominator that is the single biggest contributor to the fact that I hate the world and hate my life:  I hate myself.

I wish it were otherwise.  It would be nice to love myself, I guess.  I wouldn’t have to be narcissistic or anything.  It doesn’t require a delusional or overinflated self-worth to love oneself, any more than it need be irrational or delusional to love one’s spouse or one’s children even when one can see and knows their imperfections.  No one is perfect, after all‒I’m not even sure what the term could mean when applied to a person.

One can love another person even when angry at that person.  One can punish one’s children when they misbehave, and one can choose not to indulge all their wishes precisely because one loves them and hopes to guide them toward being the best people they can be.

So love doesn’t have to be stupid or delusional.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean one can simply choose to love someone.  I’ve tried to train myself to love myself, with positive self-reinforcement, with cognitive therapy, with auto-suggestion, with written lists of my positive attributes, and even with self-hypnosis.  Obviously, I have not succeeded.

Even when I’m stressed out and irritated by everything that happens at the office‒by the noise, by the overbearing “music”, by the stupid little rituals, by the personality conflicts, by the frequent interruptions when I’m doing one task and people just come in without preamble and start asking me about something else entirely*, as if I were a machine just waiting for them to give me work‒even when all these things are happening, the thing that bothers me most is that I am with me.

That’s what I feel, and it’s what I’ve been fighting and it’s the fact in spite of which I’ve been trying to be positive, at least in my writing, but that’s not really working.

When I was writing fiction, that seemed to help at least a bit‒and sometimes a lot‒but there’s only so much fiction one can write that almost no one reads before one feels as delusional as if one believed one had magic powers.  But it is true that writing fiction is good therapy, as Stephen King has pointed out on more than one occasion, and if I could do it full time without other commitments, I might again find the energy to do it.  Unfortunately, if I want to stay alive‒which is a rather big “if” a lot of the time‒I have to work, like everyone else, and my mental energy is used up and more than used up.

Anyway, that’s that.  Yesterday I was very stressed out and had a headache and yelled openly at my closest friend in the office and came within a hair’s breadth of breaking my tablet and my back Stratocaster.  I banged my head on the wall a few times to release some of those destructive urges, and that didn’t help my headache.

Yet I didn’t sleep well at all last night, even for me, despite going back to the house somewhat early.  I don’t feel rested; I almost never feel rested.  The very air through which I move feels like viscous, heavy smoke, burning my eyes, poisoning me as I breathe, impeding me as I try to walk, pressing down on me as I try to stand up.  I need to stop.  I need to rest.  I need to sleep.

*This is a bit akin to people who will come up and start talking to one when one is reading, as if someone who is reading must be unoccupied and just waiting to be of service to other people.