depression

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Another holi day.  I’m so tired of all of this.

L’Shana Tova, first of all.  That’s the traditional greeting for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is today.  It’s interesting that it comes right after the Autumnal Equinox, but it changes from year to year, since the Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar, not a solar one.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, until yesterday during the work day, I didn’t even realize that today was going to be Rosh Hashanah.  Then again, it’s not as though I have any event or get-together to attend for the holiday, nor am I in any form of dialogue with the local Jewish community‒nor with any other community, actually.

I really ought not to be going to work today, but it’s not as though I’ve been observant in any way, so I feel it would be hypocritical to use the holiday as an excuse to take the day off.  I suppose it wouldn’t be too horrible in the scheme of things.  After all, how many nominal Christians who celebrate Christmas and Easter and the like are otherwise observant folk who regularly go to church and whatnot?

How many of even the seemingly devout Christians in the US who claim the identity like a badge of superiority and special privilege are actually aware of, let alone observant of, the ideals presented in their Bible, especially the “gospels”?

Certainly the so-called Christian Nationalists have no apparent familiarity with the ideas and ideals behind Christianity or the United States Constitution.  They seem merely to be a collection of deeply insecure, terrified, woefully and willfully undereducated troglodytes.  This is not my presumption; this is my provisional conclusion based upon the ones I see and hear in the news and on “social” media.  They really are pathetic and pitiable.

But because of their very insecurity and fear and ignorance, they are dangerous, like underage and untrained pre-teens who have somehow stolen an armed and armored military vehicle and are taking it on a joy ride.  Ideally, one should try to stop the vehicle and them and get them out of it and give them a stern lecture to try to educate them.  But above all, it’s important to try to keep them from doing too much damage to the numerous innocent people through whose lives they are driving their foolishly commandeered vehicle.

The preceding was a fairly ham-handed metaphor I know.  But the ham-handedness doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I won’t get too far into the apparent claim by someone somewhere that today was going to be the day of  the “rapture”.  That’s frankly just the latest in a string of such absurd claims that goes back probably through most of the last two millennia.  It would be amusing if it were not so very sad.

There’s so much real wonder available, so much about the actual, verifiable world that is remarkable and astonishing and inspiring, yet so many waste their time with fairy tales so uninspired and unoriginal that, if someone presented them as ideas for children’s books to a publisher, the publisher would quickly see them to the door.

I suppose the charitable thing to do would be to shrug sadly and say that one should let people believe what they will, as long as they are uninterested in trying to test and improve their beliefs and their understanding.  Indeed, that is my inclination.  Unfortunately, many such people wish to impose their beliefs upon others, and not just by persuasion but by force.

It can sometimes be positively motivated*; if one believes, for whatever reason, that one’s ideology is the only way to guarantee the long-term wellbeing of everyone, both in life and after death, and that the alternative is potentially eternal suffering, then I can understand (in principle) someone trying to spread their faith out of a true sense of beneficence.

However, when one observes the behavior and personalities and choices of such people, they do not come across as ones who are doing what they do out of a sense of kindness and benevolence.  They seem, rather, to be grasping, vindictive, petulant, and defensive–terribly insecure and easily made to feel unsafe.  They seem so fragile and yet so spiteful.

I strongly suspect that there are forces quite different from a true desire to rescue and protect innocent and endangered souls behind almost every action taken by such people.  I suspect most of that stuff is just excuses and pretexts, not any honest beatitude.

I could be wrong, of course.  But such are my provisional conclusions.

How did I get on that unpleasant subject?  I’m not sure.  Still, most subjects and experiences are unpleasant for me anymore, so I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I guess the fact of yet another day that’s supposed to be one of celebration arouses a bit of reactive spite in me, since I don’t exactly have much to celebrate on any kind of sensible basis, nor anyone with whom to do the celebrating (nor the ability to find such a person or people).

To be fair, I never said that I wasn’t pathetic and pitiable and driven by darker thoughts and feelings.  I also don’t claim to have any moral superiority or to be the bringer of any kind of important moral message.

In closing, I’ll say:  it’s worth it to avoid being dominated by people who claim to have some superior insight.  Paternalism is never a safe notion, because‒unfortunately‒all the people who would put themselves in the paternalistic positions are just flesh and blood, ordinary humans like all the people they desire to control, with no greater wisdom, no greater insight, and certainly no greater ability than anyone else.

Beware the sheep that would be a shepherd.  It may well have developed a proclivity for cannibalism.

Happy New Year.

*Though we know where the road paved with good intentions leads.  Good intentions are just the beginning of doing good, and they are barely even that.

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“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime…?”

First of all, Happy Birthday to Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, who shared the same birthday (albeit 78 years apart) in Tolkien’s world, September 22nd by Shire reckoning.  I’m not absolutely sure that Shire reckoning would align its dates exactly with ours, but it’s not really necessary to nitpick.

Also, it is the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the beginning of Fall/Autumn in the northern hemisphere (and Spring in the southern hemisphere, but I don’t think they call it the Vernal Equinox down there).   From now until the next equinox, the nights will be longer than the days (in the northern hemisphere‒in the southern hemisphere the days will dominate).

It’s also the beginning of a new work week, which ought to be auspicious given that it’s the beginning of Autumn, but honestly, there’s nothing to which to look forward, whether in the short term or the long term.  It’s just the persistence of pointlessness and futility, like every day has been for the last 12 years (at least!) for me.

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, by the way.  This was not a surprise or a mistake this time; I deliberately did not bring the lapcom back to the house with me on Friday.  I didn’t have the energy.

It was a sloppy, crappy weekend, weather-wise.  It felt very much like a tropical rainforest down by me, and not in a good way.  It’s been a pretty lame hurricane season around here so far this year, and hitherto we’ve had much less rain than usual, but it seems to be trying to make up for lost time now these past few weeks.

Perhaps climate change has led to a slight shifting of the weather patterns, making the rainy season come slightly later here than usual.  In any case, it’s muggy and hot and wet and fairly disgusting in Florida…and that’s just the politics!!

Ha ha.  I’m kidding.  It’s not just the politics that’s disgusting here.  Still, if it weren’t for the fact that my youngest was born here in Florida, I would be inclined to say that, overall, Florida has been a worse than worthless place for me to live, and I wish I had never moved here.

For all I know, being in Florida could have been the trigger for my chronic pain problem.  I doubt it‒it was a physical, structural, fairly severe injury in my L5-S1 disk that started the problem, and it’s not too easy to conjure a Florida-specific explanation for that.  But I’m nearly certain that I wouldn’t have foolishly gotten into the medical practice that led to my legal troubles in New York, say.  They take better care of both patients and doctors in New York.  Indeed, in most states‒certainly in the ones in which I’ve lived‒they seem to have better healthcare systems than Florida.

That’s not a very high bar to clear, of course.  Just look at the corrupt politics and the sorts of disgusting worms we’ve sent to the Senate and the House, and to the Governor’s mansion, for that matter.  I don’t know why Florida is so fertile for self-serving shit-heads on a scale that dwarfs even the overrepresented shit-heads involved in politics in most states.  But it surely must be telling that Donna Tramp’s main house is down here.  Florida is America’s syphilitic penis, and the Palm Beach Cheeto is a genital wart on its upper surface.  If only Florida had embraced the HPV vaccine early enough…

I came to Florida because my then-wife was tired of living in cold climates.  She is uniquely susceptible to the cold for unclear reasons; her body does not seem to hold in heat but instead radiates it away.  She always kept the thermostat set at something like 78 Fahrenheit, even in the summer.

I wish she’d wanted to go to Arizona or something along those lines, but I guess politically it has its issues, too.  New Mexico might’ve been better‒the Santa Fe Institute is there, at least.  It might have been nice to be able to be near that, and to perhaps even take in a lecture or two from time to time.  Florida is certainly not a hotspot for cutting edge science and philosophy, despite Cape Canaveral.  We barely even have a space program anymore; we need Russia or Elon Musk to get us into low Earth orbit nowadays.  Look how the mighty have fallen.

Once I got done with work release, I could’ve lived with my parents and my sister; my father invited me to stay when I went to visit upon my release, making it clear he was happy with me working on my writing there.  I elected to come back here, though, because my children live here, and I was hoping to be able to see them on the regular and be a real part of their life again before I had missed the rest of their childhoods entirely.

Boy was that a miscalculation.  What a joke.  I might as well have hoped to capture a wild panther with my bare hands.

Well, one cannot change what has already happened.  And one cannot change what will happen or what is happening once it is happening.  One can only try to surf on the chaos as best one can.  But it loses its charm, that chaos surfing, over time, at least when there are very few good moments involved, and no positive outcomes to which to look forward, and nothing productive or creative to do anymore that grabs one’s attention.

I can’t seem to motivate myself to write fiction or to write music or to draw or to work on honing my physics and math skills and knowledge.  Being in chronic pain and having ASD level 2, but without actually having any social or other supports of significance*, really takes the wind out of one’s sails, more so every day.  I need something‒a break, an escape, rescue, relief, or just for everything to be over.

What else is new, right?  And on top of everything else, my train is running late.  It’s par for the crookedly run course down here.

It doesn’t matter, I guess.  Nothing does.  So, you might as well have a good first day of Autumn.  And, of course, enjoy celebrating Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthdays.

*I don’t mean to be dismissive about my sister or my youngest child; they are wonderful and I love them and appreciate my connection with them.  But I am referring to regular, daily, local, literal support, of which I have none.  I don’t even have any friends (other than “work friends”) within a thousand miles.

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“…the mystery which binds me still…”

I’m using the “lapcom” to write this today, so I clearly remembered to bring it back to the house with me yesterday.  It’s definitely better overall for typing upon than the smartphone is.

I wish it had backlit keys; you don’t see that very often on mini-lapcoms, unfortunately, and it does mean that the smartphone has an advantage over this computer in truly dark conditions, since its entire working surface is lit.   With the lapcom, only the screen is lit, which makes it slightly harder to see the keys, since the eyes adjust to the light level from the screen.  Still, I don’t really need to see the keyboard to be able to type; I’ve been doing it for a really long time.

By the way, in case anyone is curious and in case I think I haven’t explained it before—I think I might have, but I’m far from certain—it may seem odd that I say things like “bring it back to the house with me” instead of, for instance, “bring it back home with me”.  The reason is that I don’t consider the place where I live to be home.

I certainly don’t consider the previous place I lived to be home, nor the one before that.  In fact, ever since I’ve stopped living in any dwelling where my kids ever stayed, I consider myself homeless.  For a certain amount of that time, I was literally homeless.  I survived (obviously) but there have been quite a few unpleasant years since I last saw my children regularly; it’s been about 13 years since I’ve seen or spoken with my son.  I guess I really am difficult to endure.

I don’t try to be, of course.  Honestly, I don’t, especially not for the people I love.  You could even say that I try not to be difficult.  But I guess I am atypical to enough of a degree that I’m hard to endure for too long at a stretch.  According to my autism evaluation, I have ASD level 2, which means I have “moderate support needs” (as opposed to level 1, minimal support needs, and level 3, significant support needs).  So I’m not just “entry level” but pretty advanced, as it were.

My evaluator gave me the level 2 assessment because though I have a full-time job, it is clear that I am not thriving nor keeping up with many typical requirements of living (there’s more to it than just that, but that’s a summation).  I guess that probably means that sooner or later, my ad hoc, slipshod edifice will crumble.  But this is no surprise to me.  I’ve been crumbling for a long time.

I’m one of those houses built on sand, so to speak, without a foundation, and so it is fundamentally unstable and prone to breakage.  I don’t really have the wherewithal to repair it myself, though.  I’ve never been very good at taking care of myself.  I can take care of other people quite well, or at least I can take care of other people in certain ways.  But I’m not very good for me.

This poor self-care is not something I can correct with just an attitude or perspective adjustment; believe me, I’ve tried for decades in a great number of ways.  It appears just to be part of how my mind works.

So, don’t be surprised if, at some point, I just completely fall apart and implode or explode and am gone.  I know that I don’t have it in me to save myself; if I did, I would have done so long ago.  I’m smart and capable and have many abilities, but I do not have much of a capacity to bring them to bear on practical matters—or, well, on certain kinds of practical matters.  There are some such things I’m quite good at, but other important things have no hold in my mind.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  Maybe I should start playing the Powerball™ or whatever it is.  I have never done so other than on occasion in the distant past as part of a group purchase of a ticket or some such.  I’ve always known that the math is such that there is essentially zero chance of any person winning the lottery, at least the big ones.

I used to tell my patients, if you’re in the store anyway, and you’ve got a couple of bucks that you might otherwise spent on candy or chips, then sure, go ahead, play the lottery.  It’s a bit of fun, and supposedly the proceeds or profits go to educational purposes (I have my doubts, but never mind).  But I always said to them that they should never take a special trip driving to the store to get a lottery ticket, because they were more likely to die in a car crash on the trip to get their ticket than they were to win.

Of course, if dying is a kind of winning for you, that may not be too much of a disincentive.  Anyway, I don’t have a vehicle of any kind, so I’m unlikely to get in a car crash on such a trip; I’m more likely to twist my ankle.

I’m sorry, I know there’s been no real reason or rhyme to this blog post.  I’m just allowing randomly firing neurons to express themselves.  I don’t know for sure if this is even intelligible to anyone but me (though I would give high credence that it is, based on past experience and as objective an assessment of my writing as I can make).  Thanks for reading, in any case.  I hope you have a good day.

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“I have seen the writing on the wall…”

It’s Monday again, unfortunately, and‒also unfortunately, certainly for you‒I am writing another blog post.  I thought that I had brought the mini lapcom back to the house with me on Friday, but apparently I didn’t do that.  I remember thinking about bringing it, but evidently that’s as far as I got.  I guess it’s not too important except for the fact that writing on the smartphone really seems to be exacerbating the arthropathy in my thumbs.

As far as I know, no one can tell any difference between my writing on the phone versus the computer anyway.  Maybe that shit’s all in my head, like all the rest of the shit of which my head is full.  Still, if I want my thumbs to recover, I should probably give myself a break from writing on the smartphone.

Of course, what I probably should do is stop wasting everyone’s time with this stupid blog.  I’m quite sure that some if not all of the people who read my posts do so out of politeness.  If I stop writing them, there will probably be a few people who will feel at least a small‒perhaps unnoticed but nevertheless real‒sense of relief.  I know that many of the things we all regularly do are pretty much pointless and are pursued out of a sense of duty or just politeness.

Not that I’m against politeness in general.  I have a few general attitudes toward things that I express as aphorisms, and two of them are:  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization, and courtesy is the lubricant of civilization.  But some things we are trained to think of as courtesy‒like where the utensils go in a place setting, or to greet other people with false* questions about their health and wellbeing‒are just customs, not really ways of avoiding abrasion in one’s interactions.

Anyway, the pointless that I’m making is, I suspect that not only am I doing something here that’s literally futile, it’s probably actually detrimental, as with so many of the things I do when I try to be positive.  I’m chewing up at least a little bit of my readers’ necessarily finite bandwidth, or RAM, or whatever metaphor you prefer, with my personal chaos.  I’m injecting negativity into the worldviews of anyone who reads my stuff seriously, and though I don’t think I’m wrong in my negative outlook, I know there are other perspectives that are more uplifting while nevertheless not being entirely delusional.

How’s that for a left-handed compliment?

Okay, well, what else do I have to say?  Not very much, I fear.  I am quite tempted just to stop doing this‒in case you can’t tell‒but not in order to free up my time or energy to write fiction or do music or art or anything creative.  I just sometimes feel that I ought to go quiet, just shut up and stop inflicting myself upon the world, in however small a way.  It’s often been the case that when I try to do good things, or creative things, in the long term it ends up blowing up in my and everyone else’s face(s).

If I just stop writing this‒if I just stop everything‒I wonder how long it would take for anyone really to notice.  I don’t ever seem to be good at getting attention when I’m hoping to do so.  Would the converse happen if I were to try not to get attention?  Or would it be more of the same?

Or am I, by speculating on such things, recognizing that I am trying to get attention by trying not to get attention, if that makes sense?

Who knows?  Who cares?  Why bother?

Not me.  I don’t know.  And I don’t have any good reason.

I hope you have a good day.

*I say “false” because, when people ask you how you’re doing or what have you, they don’t really want to know if you’re feeling any way but fine or great, and they certainly aren’t interested in hearing about any problems you might have, especially if you could actually use some help.

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“Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be…”

It’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day, which supposedly implies that after this day, the following weekdays become borderline effortless.  Of course, that’s bullshit.  There is no force‒unlike when cresting the top of an actual hill (or hump)‒that would tend to add impetus to the rest of your week.

No, there is only the accumulation of stress and tension and fatigue that continues to accrue.  This is, supposedly, worse for people like me than for NTs as they say, but I’m not sure, at least relatively speaking.  I think it’s wearing for everyone, but some people have more support and shared lives, allowing for sharing a diversity of strengths and the effacement of weaknesses.

That’s my hypothesis for now, anyway.

I’ve been having a bad few days energy-wise and pain-wise, and that’s frustrating, as I’m sure you can well imagine.  I’ve been trying to get into better exercise routines and so on, as you may know, but lately every time I make an attempt, it causes exacerbations of one kind or another in my chronic pain, and that lasts a long time; it’s very discouraging.  I’m also trying to cut back on my eating, so I can try to lose weight, which will almost certainly at least make exercising easier and less painful.

It’s difficult, though.  Food is the one and only reliable source for me of feelings of…well, joy is not quite the right word, and euphoria or eudaemonia are both way off the mark, but it is a positive feeling, neurophysiologically.  For good, sound, biological reasons, eating is one of the most reliable ways of activating the nervous system’s reward circuitry.  Unfortunately, when it’s the only reliable source you have, you tend to overdo it.

Of course, resisting such urges and controlling one’s impulses can be very ego-syntonic, but that’s much more diffuse and delayed.  Also, my ego is shriveled bordering on cachectic, and not in a good, meditational/spiritual way.  My mind is largely my enemy, or the enemy of itself, or at least I’m not my friend.  I certainly do not love myself.  As I’ve said before, I am generally my own least favorite person, and that’s the person with whom I have to spend my time‒24/7 as they say.

It’s not that I’m the person of whom I think least highly.  There are many well-known people of whom I would not hesitate to say that they are far worse people than I am.  But I don’t have to be around those people.  If I did, at least one of us would probably already be dead.

Oh, speaking of that, today is World Suicide Prevention Day, which is in the midst of Suicide Awareness and Prevention Month (or whatever the specific official term is).  So, I guess, if you have the opportunity today, you should prevent a suicide if you can?  On every other day, especially in every other month, I guess you can just let shit happen however it happens.  That’s pretty much what almost everyone does, almost every day, anyway.  Why would that change?

I would offer to provide a listening and supportive ear for anyone who is struggling with such issues; I have tried to be there for people often in the past.  I mean, I was a practicing physician for quite a while, and based on the nearly unanimous feedback from my patients, I was a good doctor*.  However, now I don’t think I could provide sincere arguments to try to convince someone out of suicide.

I veer toward pro-mortalism a lot of the time, though that’s not as much a considered philosophical stance as it is an emotional proclivity.  It’s part of my overall dysthymia I suppose.  Though you have to be careful when you suppose‒sometimes you make a supp out of o and se.

I know that last bit doesn’t make any sense, but it’s my way of making fun of the old ass/u/me cliché.  I also like to use a slight variation of the traditional one, saying, “When you presume, you make a pres out of u and me.”  Nowadays, given the current “pres”, that’s almost certainly something most people would like to avoid.

I don’t know what to do about my state of mind and my state of body (and my state of residence, with which I’m getting steadily more disgusted).  Maybe I should fast for a bit, and potentially address more than one bird with one stone.  Yom Kippur is coming up in about three weeks, and I often fast on that day anyway, but I don’t think I want to wait until then.  Of course, if I could fast from now until then, I’m sure I would see remarkable results, and I might feel them as well.  But I’m far from sure that I have the willpower to do that.

Oh, well‒as the man sang‒whatever, never mind.

Now, there was a suicide that I wish could have been prevented.  I wonder what music we would have if not for that terrible event.  Then again, I wish even more that Mark David Chapman had offed himself sometime before December of 1980.  Imagine** what music we might have had in that case!

Such speculations are only disheartening, though, and I certainly don’t need that, and I doubt that you all do, either.  So, please, try to have a good day, and if you do have dark and even suicidal thoughts, try to get help if you can.  It’s much harder to do than people might think, but hopefully, for most people, it’s worth the effort.  I can’t speak for myself in that, but I’m not objective about me.  I’m living inside the acidic, toxic cloud, so I can’t see out of it and certainly can’t clearly see myself from within it.

That’s probably just as well.

*I’m still a doctor, of course, and I always will be, since I earned my degree fair and square.  But since I’m not in practice anymore, it’s hard to think of myself as a “good” doctor.

**That was not meant to be a joke, and I was tempted to change the word, since I am not able to take the murder of John Lennon lightly.  But I figured, this is in the spirit of his music, so I’ll let it be***.

***That was a deliberate joke, because of course, Let It Be was Paul’s song, inspired by a reassuring dream of his dead mother.

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“With your feet on the air and your head on the ground…”

TBIF*!

Unusually for me, I am looking forward to this weekend, even though I don’t have any wonderful outings with my youngest in the offing.  I just need to rest, because in case you can’t tell, I’ve really been all over the place mentally this week.  I guess that’s not so unusual for me, at least not from outside (but it’s been atypically bad from the inside).  I’m sure it’s quite tedious and repetitive and depressing for you to keep reading about it.  Honestly, why in the world are you wasting your time with this bullshit?!?!?

I’m being a bit facetious just now‒or, rather, I was being a bit facetious.  I don’t really want you all to stop “wasting your time” with my blog.  No, indeed, I would rather you not only read all of my posts but also all of my books, and to spread the word and “like” and “share” them with everyone you know (and even those you don’t) on social media and elsewhere.

Speaking of liking and sharing, hey, why not share all of my songs and shit?  Put ‘em on your Spotify playlist or your iTunes or YouTubeMusic or Pandora or whatnot.  They’re there on all of those, supposedly.  Actually, I know they’re on YouTube and I know they’re on Spotify.  I have them on my own playlists, and I even occasionally sneak them into the background music playlist at work, though it’s slightly embarrassing.

Actually, come to think of it, the hold music for our office VOIP phones is a slightly edited version of Like and Share with a shorter intro.  We’ve even received compliments from people about it from time to time, and these are people who were on hold during discussions with salespeople!

All that bouncing around above of things I would want to promote can serve to highlight one of the big problems I have with myself:  I have too many “special interests”.

If I only had one focus, or just one main focus, I think I could become really good at it and maybe even contribute significant things.  If I were a full-time musician, for instance, I think I would become very good at that.  If I were able to focus on physics/mathematics I think I could really learn a lot of it quite deeply, and maybe even make contributions to science.

And we know that, when I committed to writing just for an hour or so a day, I wrote a lot of stories over the course of a few years, even while in stir.

Unfortunately, after focusing on one thing or mostly one thing for a while, I start missing the other stuff, or I just get distracted by the other stuff.  Every minute is an opportunity cost.  Of course, that’s true for everyone‒we all have to choose one path, and in choosing it, we must therefore not choose others, and that chosen path will determine future options that might have been otherwise.

I think maybe I just dwell on such facts more than most people do.  I suppose that’s one side-effect of having difficulty socializing:  I spend a lot of time with my own thoughts (or reading the thoughts of others, of course).

I also have a tendency to move back and forth between many books at one time.  Back when I was married, it used to irritate my (now ex) wife because I’d have seven or eight books at a time on my bedside table, many with more than one bookmark stuck in them.  To be fair to her, she was never very critical of it; she was (and still is, presumably) a very avid reader herself.  Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I do.

It all means that I do know at least superficially about an awful lot of stuff, and of widely varying genres and contexts and subjects and topics and various other synonyms and near-synonyms**.  Currently, my non-fiction reading is bouncing between Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, a physics book, which I mentioned before, and Cass Sunstein’s new book On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.

In my recent books alone (on Kindle) I have Japanese light novels, a book on political philosophy (see above), two physics books, a book about geometry applied to the real world in surprising ways***, a book about autism, a book about the Beatles and the recording of their songs, a book on a current issue in sociology/psychology, and so on.  This should give you a locally scaled example of how my mind goes all over the place.

For the most part, I cannot complain about having many interests.  It would be nice if I had someone with whom to share at least some of them, as used to be the case, but if wishes were horses we’d all need to carry manure shovels with us everywhere we go (and not just metaphorically, as we already do).

So, anyway, my mind is all over the place, but this week there have been several stretches in which I had no interest in any subject.  When that happens to me, I know I’m really spiraling down deep into the depression thing.  Hopefully, though, if I can truly get some extra mental rest this weekend, it will regress a bit.

I hope you all have as good a weekend as it’s possible for you to have‒and if you’ve been here for a while, you know that my take is that you always have the best weekend you could possibly have, because as soon as things happen, they become inevitable, since you cannot undo events that have already taken place.

This also means you always have the worst weekend possible, of course, by logical necessity.  But that’s not horrible‒after all, if you consider most weekends, you can realize, “Hey, if this really has been the worst my weekend could possibly have been, well that’s pretty cool, because it hasn’t really been that bad.”

I’ll talk to you on Monday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.

*Thank Batman it’s Friday, for those of you who have not yet seen this from me.

**Could you call those “perisynonyms”?  Well, I know you could call them that, but I mean, does anyone think it might catch on, and is the meaning fairly obvious?

***Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape.  I strongly recommend this and his previous book How Not To Be Wrong if you want to kindle (no pun intended) or rekindle a love of mathematics.  He narrates the audiobook versions of his books, and he is an excellent teacher.

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Poor venomous blog, be angry and dispatch.

Hello and good morning.

I think it’s Thursday, so I used my traditional Thursday opening here, but honestly, I had such a bad night’s sleep that I don’t feel confident in my reckoning of days.  I’ve been awake since shortly after midnight, and it’s not as though I fell asleep early.  Also, the internet was down locally for most of the night‒I figured that out pretty quickly once I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep‒so it’s not as though the internet was what kept me awake.

It’s the 4th of September, with only a few weeks until the autumnal equinox.  It’s interesting‒at least to me, though probably not to anyone else‒that though the seasons are opposite in the northern versus the southern hemisphere*, and the solstices are opposites, the equinoxes are all always the same for everybody.

After my blog post about songs and music yesterday, I did play a little guitar and sang.  I didn’t work on any new songs or any of my own old songs, but at least I did a little practicing.

Oh, I also recently watched someone reacting to the Pulse concert version of Wish You Were Here (the song, not the album) and I noted that David Gilmour played a nice, compact acoustic guitar with a somewhat narrow neck that looked like it would be good for me, since I find bigger acoustics too bulky (partly because I myself am too bulky, but that’s a separate issue).

I looked online to try to find which make and model guitar he was using, and I found at least some credible answers, though many of them discussed the 12-string he used on the album, which was definitely not what he used in the concert**.  After I determined the most likely correct candidate, I decided to look up that guitar online to see how much they cost.

The average price was about 5 grand, and many cost more.  So, yeah, I’m not going to be buying one of those any time soon, unless I win the lottery (which is even more unlikely for me than for many other people, since I don’t play it).  It would be wonderful, but if I were going to spend that much money on something, I would rather buy one of those big, CW “cleaning” laser systems, because…well, of course I would.  Talk about fun!

I definitely have even more destruction in my nature than creation.  I sometimes refer to myself with the reverse of Nebula’s kind words to Drax in the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie:  I wasn’t born to be a dad; I was born to be a destroyer***.

Not that I think it makes any real sense to say that anyone was “born to be” anything.  As far as we can tell, the concept of telos doesn’t actually apply to anything outside the human mind (or humanoid minds, as in my case).

Maybe I should really get back into a regular, daily practice of meditation.  I’ve done it before, sometimes for a long time, but though it does calm my tension somewhat and helps decrease my distraction, I’ve noticed that it tends to make me quite a bit more depressed, as though depression and anxiety are my yin and yang‒or my quantum mechanical position and momentum if you will‒and as one shrinks, the other must grow.

Perhaps I should just muscle on through and see if I can come out the other side in some sense.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that the other side is the sooey side (ha ha), but that’s not such a bad thing.  Still, worsening depression along the way is really horrible.  At least I don’t have anyone else around me to make miserable as a side-effect, unless you count coworkers.

I don’t know.  I’m just writing, sampling what comes out of my mind, which I guess means you lot are sampling what comes out of my mind, as well.  Admit it:  this is one sample that does not make you want to buy the product!  Am I right?

I strongly suspect that I am.  Certainly I’ve seen no evidence of interested shoppers.  Those who have actually “bought the product” have all ended up returning it eventually.  Who can blame them?

Okay, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a very good day.

TTFN

*I don’t know what tortured sophistry so-called flat-Earthers use to try to explain such facts, and honestly, I don’t really want to know.  If I had infinite time and patience, it might be worth exploring their notions, if only for the sake of better understanding human psychopathology, but unless and until I become an immortal being with unlimited bandwidth, I won’t waste my limited resources of time and mind.

**Because he plainly was using a 6-string.

***To be clear, Nebula said, “You weren’t born to be a destroyer.  You were born to be a dad.”  It was a beautiful moment.

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This is my title; there are many others like it, but this one is mine

It’s Tuesday now, and we begin to commence the rest of what is now a brace of braces of regular work days.  I guess those of you to whom that applies probably already know it, so I’m giving you no new information, unless you count as information the particular way in which I convey it.  Meanwhile, for those to whom this information does not apply, it’s probably just tedious trivia, if even that.

That’s not my fault; at least it’s not entirely my fault.  Of course, I’m the one who’s writing this drivel, but you’re reading it, and no one’s forcing you to do so.  There are two parts to the freedom of speech:  the freedom to speak (or not to do so) and the freedom to hear and listen (or not to hear/listen).  So there is mutual responsibility—or a lack of mutual responsibility if the notion of responsibility doesn’t apply.

I’m pretty sure that no one is ultimately responsible for anything let alone everything.  That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to hold people accountable when they do bad things, or reward people for good things; it’s good to discourage the negative and encourage the positive, I would think.

But none of us made the world or the universe, and none of us made ourselves, despite the popular notion of the “self-made man” (or woman).  We all happened, like everything else happens, and we didn’t get to pick which universe into which we’re born, if there are choices of such things.  Or, if we were given a choice in some bizarre, pre-conception, pre-birth sorting ceremony, our memories of such things have been erased pretty thoroughly.

I’m pretty convinced that there is no such pre-birth, and I’m nearly as sure that there’s no post-death, either.  My slightly less certain attitude toward the latter is probably just an artifact of self-bias that comes with being a biological organism whose ancestors were selected for (among other thing) a tendency to want to stay alive.  And, of course, it is influenced by the simple inability for anyone to imagine themselves not existing, since the minute you’re imagining anything, you’re very much not modeling a lack of existence.

If you’ve ever been under general anesthesia, such as during major surgery, and if there were no mishaps, such as a failure of the anesthesia, then you could say that whatever you experienced while you were under general anesthesia is the closest living simulacrum to what you’ll experience when you’re dead.  But of course, the point is, you didn’t experience anything.  Anesthesia means “without sensation” or “without feeling”, and it is pretty well named.

A tangent to this notion:  who the hell first came up with the term “lived experience”?  Speaking of punishment to discourage things, if we can find that person, they should be subject to serious public shaming.  Why do we need to add a modifier to the word “experience”?  Speaking of words that convey no information (which I did earlier), this literally is redundant.  One cannot have “non-lived experience” or “dead experience”.  It’s experience.  If you experience it, you’re alive.  Experience is an individual, personal, conscious thing that happens only to living things, almost by definition.

Even if you’re “learning from someone else’s experience”, you’re really learning from your awareness and intake of the information regarding that person’s experience.  That is the experience from which you are learning, and it is your experience, not that of some other person from whom you might be learning a lesson.

There are so many stupid things in the world.  I have no doubt that I am a prominent one of these things.  Still, some things are so stupid that they feel like personal attacks on, not my sanity exactly, but certainly on my equanimity.  Some human habits and words and deeds are like mosquito bites or poison ivy, like itching, burning rashes.  They make me want to snarl and lash out in irritation.

Oh, well.  I guess it’s hard to blame the stupid for being stupid—and we’re all stupid more than we are smart.  I guess all we can do is to try to become a little smarter every day, like the YouTube channel says.

In other news, it turns out that September is suicide prevention month (or some term to that effect).  I’m not sure why this particular month has been chosen for that designation.  Is it because it’s a time when kids go back to school, and so might need such support?  I don’t know; I always liked it when school started up again.  Is it because it’s the month when autumn begins?  Again, I wouldn’t get it, because autumn has always been my favorite season, though here in the sweaty intertriginous regions of south Florida, autumn is indistinguishable from most of the rest of the year.

Anyway, I’m the last person one should seek to try to help prevent suicide in someone else.  If anything, I would be more able to provide arguments in support of self-destruction, though I would not ever try to talk anyone else into taking their own life.

Well…I can think of a few people I might be willing to so encourage, but the people I might be willing to encourage to kill themselves are usually the sorts of people who would never even consider doing such a thing.  They think far too highly of themselves.

But hey, as for the rest of you, why not go out there and, if the opportunity occurs, prevent a suicide or something?  Batman knows I spend a lot of my time looking at support sites and information and posts and accounts and reading books and so on that are related to this.  Unfortunately, every argument I’ve encountered hitherto has been just repetition of the same old trite vomitus that people tend to spew about such things, and it often just makes me feel even less like I want to stay alive.

Unfortunately, Hamlet is much more convincing than the cast majority of the people who counsel others not to die.  Is that simply because Shakespeare was such a brilliant writer?  Or is it because he has the best arguments?  I guess it could be a combination—a superposition, if you will—of the two.

Whatever.  Try to have a good day.

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“For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning”

It’s Odin’s day now, so…well, have a good day, Odin, or Wotan, or however you prefer to refer to yourself.

I’m on my way to work, but I did not walk today.  Yesterday was a horrible day, pain-wise*, focused on my left knee, which is still sore, so I’m not going to try to do much walking.  I have knee braces and so on, but they only do so much.  I was wearing them on Monday during my walk, and they probably helped.  Maybe the alternate shoes that avoided bothering my blisters made the stresses and tensions produced by the way I walk different than usual, and that’s why everything was irritated.

Oy, I seem to have a hard time discussing anything interesting, don’t I?  It’s just all boring nonsense.  I suppose some of this is the sort of stuff I might talk about with a spouse or a partner or a close friend if I had one.  I guess that makes the blog behave as a kind of talk therapy.

I actually have intended for it to be thus in the past, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any serious positive results.  Of course, I can’t see what I would have been like if I had not been writing this blog.  Perhaps I would have been much worse  Or maybe I would have been healthier, but no one would ever know, and my thoughts would forever be lost to the world.

What a tragedy.  Ha ha.

It’s a weird thought, but what if putting my thoughts out into the world actually makes me worse, but it makes me someone who will, to however small an extent, be remembered in some way (since I don’t have a family with whom I live or spend time to remember my thoughts and my day-to-day foibles).  It’s a bit like Melkor putting his power into Arda, leaving it suffused with traces of him until its end, though he was weakened thereby, and he was defeated at least partly because he had weakened himself so much.  And, to a lesser extent, it’s like Sauron, putting his will and power and spirit into the One Ring.

None of that has any true bearing on reality, of course, there being no real Melkor or Sauron.  There is also no real spiritual “power” of that nature.  At least, there’s nothing that anyone can demonstrate convincingly in a way that makes it clear that it’s not just the wishful thinking of frightened naked house apes who want to believe that they have power and consequence in what is, after all, a very large universe.  At best it’s smoke and mirrors and placebo effects and the happy coincidence (with applicable confirmation bias) of some real processes that humans can influence, albeit not by mere will and vague thought and heart but by actions, by choices, by real thoughts guiding real deeds.

The current state of the world—or at least of the US—makes it clear how rare real thoughts are among the primates here.  One need only study chimpanzees and orangutans and, for that matter, capuchin monkeys and the like to get a basic grasp on most of human behaviors.  Humans just have other notions cluttering up things, and those can sometimes distract one from recognizing what’s really happening—monkey-work from top to bottom, all but unmitigated.

I guess there’s nothing particularly bad about monkeys.  It’s just that humans think they are somehow fundamentally different than monkeys and other primates and other animals.  They are different in more or less trivial ways, of course, as all species, and indeed all individuals, are different.  But they are not a different fundamental type of being.  They just have more memory and processing power in their brains, and their social hierarchies are able to take place at much higher removes.  Thus they need ideas, stories, that bind them together to get things done.

Ants and termites use pheromones and/or other chemical signals, which they produce and use instinctively.  Humans use stories and songs.  But it’s all just spontaneously self-organizing behavior, with little to no deep thought above or behind the scenes, however people like to delude themselves about their puissance and their importance.

Oh, well.  Let them delude themselves and grope through their shallow pseudo-mysteries.  The universe will deliver whatever it delivers to them, and their most fervent beliefs will not change anything in and of themselves.  And most people will probably never even realize that they were shown to be misguided and even deluded.  They will go to their graves proclaiming desperately that they are not in fact even dying.

As I’m fond of saying, whataya gonna do?  I hope though that, for today at least, you’re gonna have a good day.  As for me, well, I’m sure you can believe that no day that someone spends with me is likely to be a very good day, not anymore anyway, and unfortunately, I have to spend every day with me.  So, at least spare me a little sympathy.

*In that I had a horrible day because I was in pain, not that pain had a horrible day.  I don’t know whether some personification of pain would have had a good day or a bad one.  I might imagine that the personification of pain would dislike chronic pain because it’s not useful.  It’s not helping to protect against any injuries; the injuries are already done.  It has become, instead of a protective process, an erosive one, something that worsens the status of its bearer.

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.