depression

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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Monday morning, wearing down

Well, it’s Monday again.  Time keeps marching on without respite, as it is apparently wont to do, “progressing” in the direction of increasing entropy, whether time is a fundamental aspect of the universe or an emergent phenomenon.  In either case, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of time stream or time vortex like in Doctor Who, but rather a process that simply is a linear dimension with some “entanglement” (not to be confused with quantum entanglement) with the dimensions of space, such that motion and acceleration in space changes one’s “motion” in time, in an updated version of the Pythagorean Theorem.

For those of you who like to share the joke about “Yet another day when I didn’t use a2 + b2 = c2” you’re really depriving yourself of a deep understanding of something that turns up in and governs a ridiculous number of the things and processes in the physical reality in which you live.  Consciousness—despite clever but tortured sophistry (in my opinion) by some prominent philosophers of mind—in no way appears fundamental to the universe*.  On the other hand, the Pythagorean Theorem, which was neither invented nor discovered by Pythagoras, applies in all levels of dimensions, however many you might conjure, and with the modification to make it reflect velocities, it applies to spacetime as well.

There can be no readily conceivable brains** in two spatial dimensions, but Pythagoras nevertheless applies.  In one dimension, it doesn’t really apply, but in one dimension there are no triangles of any kind, so it doesn’t make much difference.  It’s difficult to imagine how consciousness could possibly occur in one dimension (notwithstanding the seemingly one-dimensional paucity of ideas held by so many people, especially in politics).

Anyway, enough of this nonsense.  Well, it’s not nonsense, but it is rather pointless meandering of random thoughts that interest no one but me, and will probably lose me readers.  Weirdly enough, people seem to come and read more often when I write about my depression and self-hatred and anxiety and ASD and how there’s absolutely nothing going on in my life that makes it worth living.

Well, rest assured, all those things are still present and active and driving me toward an early grave, which in some senses will be a release, or at least an escape of sorts.

I keep trying to think of things to engage myself and my interests, but so far to no avail.  I think about asking my boss to give me back my black Strat to play at the office, or I consider bringing in another guitar, or maybe even getting a portable keyboard or something, but when I think of any of them, I cannot even imagine doing anything but sort of staring at them as if I don’t even know what their purpose is.  I don’t play my guitars or my keyboard at the house, either.

It’s likewise with even fiction, other than silly Japanese light novels that take a day or so to read (not continuous time).  I think I like them mainly because of the social interactions of the characters, many of the main ones of whom are somewhat socially awkward.  It can feel, however briefly, that I have a social group of some sort, as I read the stories.  Of course, that means that once I’m done reading there is a comparative let down, which sometimes makes me feel worse than I did before.

I tried to read some of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, but I lost interest almost immediately, though he was a brilliant and engaging teacher.  I also tried to read some of Anthony Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, which is also very good and fun; if you’re interested in who he is, you can check out the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols, and sometimes Numberphile.  He shows up in both places fairly often.  But in any case, though I like his book (I’ve read it before) it has not been able to grip me.

I’ve also tried to start reading Stephen King’s novella The Life of Chuck, since it’s now a movie and is getting positive reviews.  At least Stephen King is almost always an engaging read.  But I’m not sure I’m getting into the story.  Quite a while ago, I started the first story in If It Bleeds, the collection in which the above novella appears, but I couldn’t get into it at all.  When I can’t even get into reading Stephen King***, things are looking bleak.

I did watch the rest of the latest series of Doctor Who, and it was pretty good, and quite surprising at the end, but Batman only knows when the next series is going to happen, and there will only be a handful of episodes if it keeps up as it has been.  That’s too little too late for me to use as motivation for continued existence.

I don’t know what to do.  I really don’t know.  I feel very lost and, more importantly, very much without any internal impetus.  I can’t even listen to songs I like, let alone try to sing along (or play) without feeling like I’m going to cry, though I don’t understand why.  I’m at the end of my rope (I have two, and both are tied into nooses, just for “fun”).

Anyway, that’s enough.  Sorry to bother you with my crap again, but in my mind, you asked for it by complaining about my tedious math and science stuff.  I hope you have a good day.  Unless you’re lucky (or I am) I’m sure to be back again tomorrow with another blog post.

*The only reason I can discern why some people think consciousness is fundamental to the universe is that consciousness is fundamental to human experience—indeed, one could say that it is human experience—and of course, such people seem tacitly or implicitly to think humans are the measure of all things simply because that is what they are.

**The degree of interconnectivity is just too low.  Connections between 2D neurons would be terribly limited, as would room for such things.  I suppose that, since we can always map anything three-dimensional onto some two-dimensional surface, à la Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy and the holographic principle, we could construct a sort of brain in 2D, but that’s a tortuous process, and seems quite unlikely.  Of course, 4D would give us even more available connectivity than 3D—also there are no knots or tangles in 4 spatial dimensions—but there are other issues with 4 (macroscopic) spatial dimensions that would seem to get in the way of life as we know it, such as the nature of gravity (and other forces) and the rate of such forces’ diminishment.  For instance, the force of gravity (and electromagnetism, etc.) in four dimensions would fall off at a rate proportional to r3 rather than r2, and there are apparently no stable orbits in such situations.

***What’s worse, I cannot even get into reading Tolkien.  I’ve tried.  When neither Stephen King nor Tolkien, nor even well-written science books, can engage me, something indeed has happened.

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Lost then found thoughts about lost connections

While I was getting ready to go this morning, I thought about writing this blog post.  I thought about my usual starting point of saying something like, “Well, it’s Wednesday morning again,” or some other such inanity.  But then, as I was thinking about that, another, more interesting beginning and an actual, rather interesting, topic occurred to me.

Then, by the time I got ready to start writing—i.e., now—I had completely forgotten what I meant to write.

That’s terribly frustrating, but it is par for the course.

Oh, wait!  Maybe what I was going to write was about my realization regarding the effects of having a very uncomfortable crisis, but one that is inherently finite*.  It’s probably pretty obvious to you that what made me think of this was my recent adventure with a kidney stone.

Of course, while it was happening, it drowned out everything else, especially in the acute stages.  If that had been something without an endpoint, and if there were not sufficient medication to control the pain, then death would have been the only feasible alternative.  Even later, with the stent in place and the literal, constant, burning feeling that I needed to urinate for two weeks, things were pretty harsh.  But though it did not truly drown out my depression, and it was thoroughly exhausting, it did rather overshadow much of my chronic pain.

The day the stent was taken out I felt a fair amount of relief, of course.  But before long my usual existence asserted itself, with all its emptiness, and of course, with all its chronic pain.  And I remembered that, really, I have nothing going on in my life at all, nothing to which I look forward in any kind of long-term sense, and I have no further clue about or hope for my future.

It’s a bit reminiscent, on a shorter time scale, of what happened when I was a “guest” of the Florida Department of Corrections.  Though I was/am innocent of the charges that were created against me, I took a plea bargain for three years (toward which time served applied) because it was tolerably short and I didn’t want to risk the possibility of the much longer sentence with which the prosecution threatened to try to get, risking the outcome on the potential of a jury of my peers to see past my (apparently) not terribly endearing personality and the simple fact that I was a doctor and thus, to those who might be in a typical jury, a generally hated “elite”**.

I think it was the best available choice at the time.  And while I was “up the road” I was able to console myself with looking forward to seeing my children again once I got out—and to see them before they were adults, which would not have been the case otherwise—and that gave me the optimism to write first Mark Red and then The Chasm and the Collision and then Paradox City while I was at FSP West.

But then, of course, once I got out, it turned out that my kids didn’t really want the discombobulation of me having visitation or anything of that sort.  While I was heartbroken, I didn’t feel that I had a right forcibly to disrupt their lives when I had already fucked everything up, first with my personal health problems, then with my misguided attempts to help other people with chronic pain that led me to be arrested.

So, I bit the bullet and kept on writing at least, on my own, though I think my stories grew steadily bleaker and darker over time.  And I learned to play guitar and wrote and recorded a few songs, and did some covers and everything.  But I still didn’t see my kids, and haven’t even communicated with my son other than to receive his email stating that he didn’t really want to have a relationship with me (“right now”).

At least I got to see my youngest when I was visited in the hospital with my kidney stone.  That was a gift that was well worth even that much pain.  But now I’m back to my nosferatu existence, and like Vermithrax***, though I don’t feel pain as severe as the kidney stone, I still feel constant pain.

There may be people who can have chronic pain without getting depressed about it, and indeed, without losing their zest for life, but I fear I’m only left with the squeezed dry pulp of mine.  It seems to be just the way I’m built neurologically.

I suspect that most people who keep their spirits up despite chronic pain and disability do so because they are surrounded by a local support system of some sort****, and they probably do better at connecting with and getting along with other people than I do.

I’ve only ever really been close to specific, core groups of people, and with ones nearby, that I saw nearly every day.  I’ve never been good at connecting over long distances, and I have a hard time even picturing people when they’re far away.  I mean, I can “picture” them in the sense that I know what they look like, and I will be able to interact with them if and when I see them, but I cannot in any intuitive sense “model” their existence elsewhere.  I cannot really get a feel for what they might be doing and certainly not for what they might be thinking.

When even the people I love are far away from me, they really exist more as concepts than as people whose reality I can feel.  They are missing in a bleak and rather horrible way.  I feel terrible about that fact, and I hope it doesn’t come across as insulting—though it has probably hurt the feelings of people about whom I care on more than one occasion—but it seems to be just the way my brain works.  It’s also probably related to the fact that I never have for an instant imagined wanting to be someone other than myself, even though I hate myself; I just cannot even conceive of what that would mean, let alone wish for it.

Oh well, whatever, never mind.  I’m back on the train, yeah, and here I go again, on my own…alone again, naturally.

(I do like to quote things, don’t I?)

I hope you have a good day.

*Of course, as far as we can tell, pretty much everything is inherently finite, but some things are much more constrained and contained in time than others.

**This is based on what my attorney, and my attorney’s supervisor, said to me.  I don’t think they were trying to be unkind, and though their judgement was and is fallible, it was likely better than mine would have been.

***I know, I’m mixing fantasy metaphors and similes.  That’s okay; I like them.

****And most of them are probably not “ex-cons”.

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Missing AC units and one man’s lack of mental health

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and that’s better than it still being Monday evening, which wasn’t so fun.  I got the notice that my AC unit had been delivered yesterday afternoon, but when I got back to the house, it was nowhere to be seen, and my housemates had not seen it let alone brought it in out of the rain.

It was raining, in case I hadn’t told you.  It still is.

Anyway, I looked around the nearby houses and then I checked with Amazon, and I called FedEx, who said that their info was that it was delivered.  I went to the website with them and saw the delivery picture‒which was not of the house where I live.

I got pretty frustrated, because it was raining a fair amount, but I looked at the picture and thought it might be the neighbor’s house.  But it had not been there when I’d looked around.

I was already wet, so I went to their house and knocked on the door, so irritated by the whole process that I was willing to interact with other people.  It turned out they had brought it inside because of the rain.  They graciously (and with some difficulty, since it was both heavy and awkward) brought it out for me.

Then I had to lug this 50 pound box, with no real handles, back to the house.  I’m feeling the effects of that in my back quite a bit, and I hold FedEx responsible.

In the end, at least I got it set up and started using it last night.  I won’t say it was miraculous, but I was able to use a blanket part of the night last night for the first time in a long while.

I guess it can’t expect it to make a life-changing difference, but it’s better to be at least a little cooler than I was.  It can’t be a bad thing‒or, well, it’s always possible in principle for it to be a bad thing, but I would give that quite a low likelihood.

As for everything else, well…I’m still at a loss.  I don’t know what to do, and I feel no why to do anything.  I guess it’s appropriate that June is (among other things) Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, though it might better be called Men’s Mental Lack of Health Awareness Month.

Apparently, according to the statistics I have recently seen (this was on social media, so the precision and accuracy must be considered at least potentially lacking) men die from suicide three times as often as women.  And, of course, people with autism spectrum disorder die from suicide a similar multiple compared with those who do not have it (and the proportion may be as high as 25 times that in non-autistic people, but I’ll stick with 3 times for the moment).

So, if those variables are independent, which they probably are not completely, then I would be nine times as likely to die from suicide as a neurotypical woman.

That sounds alarming, doesn’t it?  Nine times the risk?  Like corduroy pillows, that’s the sort of thing that makes headlines.  But if you think about it, those statistics and probability ratios give you almost no information.  Before you can decide to act on that risk multiplier, you need to understand the baseline risk/rate of occurrence.

If 10% of neurotypical women die from suicide (an absurdly large and entirely imaginary percentage) then with my relative risk of 9 x the baseline, it would seem that I would have a 90% risk of suicide.  If the women’s rate were a bit higher, my risk might even seem to be more than 100%, which is a mathematical absurdity.

On the other hand, if neurotypical women committed suicide at a rate of .000001, or one in a million, then my risk would seem to be .000009, or just shy of one in a hundred thousand*.  That wouldn’t be too terrible.

This is why you should not get alarmed if you hear some statistic such as “people with red hair have a hundred times the chance to spontaneously combust as non redheads”.  You need to know what the baseline chance is to know if there’s anything worth worrying about**.

As for my personal risk of suicide, well, that’s not vanishingly small.  I have numerous risk factors, including the single biggest predictive risk factor.  As a rough estimate, I would say that, despite the fact that I’m a 55 year old white male with some pertinent family history, I think my risk of death by suicide is significantly higher than my risk of death due to heart attack; it’s probably bigger than my chance of having a heart attack, even a relatively minor one.  That’s not a fixed number, of course.  Many things can change all these relative risks.

Unfortunately, I don’t honestly expect my own risk of suicide to go down significantly, or even at all, as time goes on.  My internal life seems to be steadily growing slightly bleaker, and even blanker, every day, and none of the things that used to bring me comfort or at least engage me seem to be of any interest.  If anything, I feel my likelihood is increasing over time, though maybe it’s staying the same but each day is a new roll of the dice, so over time, the likelihood increases.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?  I don’t have the wherewithal to change the situation myself; if I did, I wouldn’t be in this situation.  I’ve already tried a great many things.

Anyway, I hope the weather is more pleasant wherever you are, and that you have a very good day.

*The actual rates, while apparently difficult to tease out with great precision, are quite a bit more alarming than my second scenario.  In the UK, for instance, it seems that about 1% of people are autistic, but 11% of suicides are by autistic people.  The rate of suicidal ideation among people with ASD is way higher than that in the general population, starting in childhood (which I can confirm in my case), when the rates of ideation and attempt are reported as high as 25 times that of the general population.  Also, overall, the expected lifespan of autistic people has been measured at about 54 years.  Even given typical statistical variance, I’m about due.

**Since there is not a single confirmed case of spontaneous human combustion, despite what you may have heard, even a multiplier of a hundred may leave one so close to a zero probability that being hit by an asteroid might be a more realistic concern.

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“Ain’t no big surprise”

Well, guess what?  Yep, you got it in one:  I am working today, so I’m writing a blog post.  Not only am I working today, but my coworker, who shares some of my duties, is moving to a new apartment this weekend, so he won’t be in.  We are also supposed to be having people from the “other” office come and work with us, so there will be more to do, but less help, and I’m still just wiped out.

Oh, yeah, and the room air conditioner that I ordered did not arrive on time.  Now, depending on which automatic message one believes, it will arrive sometime today, or it will arrive by June 5th…and if it doesn’t arrive by then, I can then ask for a refund.

As if a refund would be useful!  If I had wanted the money more than I wanted the air conditioner, I wouldn’t have ordered the air conditioner.  I ordered it based on the delivery time range that they posted, which was barely soon enough, and if there had been a similar unit that could be delivered sooner, I would have ordered that.

It’s so frustrating.  This has been a really long couple of weeks, and as with most of what I do, so much of it has gone wrong‒not least of which, of course, was the fact of the kidney stone, which was probably helped along by my attempts to exercise despite the heat and humidity.

I’ve also had a bit of a persistent headache on the left side of my head for the last few days, which doesn’t help improve my mood.  It seems to be sinus related; there’s no clear sign of infection, but my nose is stuffy on that side despite decongestants.  It may also be related to the fact that I tend to clench my teeth fiercely a lot of the time, though I don’t mean to do so.

Because of the short time frame, it’s quite unlikely to be a brain tumor or a growing aneurysm, more’s the pity.

I’ve been following several depression support and suicide awareness accounts on Instagram, in addition to the usual jokey accounts (today is apparently the last day of “Mental Health Awareness Month”).  It’s a bit funny how often they post things that say something like, “Someone is glad that you’re still around.”  I’m never entirely sure that’s true.  I suspect that, if I were not making audible noises (so to speak) most such people would have all but forgotten that I ever existed.

I mean, I’m sure that there are people who are glad that I’m not dead, some in more of an implicit sense, others in a very specific sense.  And that’s very nice, of course, and I would not for a second want to criticize such people.

But what good does that do me*?  They cannot give me a portion of the gladness they have to boost my spirits, and unfortunately, the person who most needs to be glad that I am around is not glad (that’s me by the way).  I am not glad to be alive.  Why would I be?  All I do is spoil the party for others, so to speak, like in the Beatles song.  “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”

Anyway, sorry, I know this is boring as shit and as pathetic as pathetic can be.  I apologize.  I really wish I had something insightful and/or edifying and/or entertaining and/or at least interesting to say.  But look not for positivity from me.  To paraphrase the ghost of Jacob Marley**, it comes from other regions and is conveyed by other writers to other kinds of readers.

That’s not to imply that, like Scrooge, you who read this are somehow culpable for the fact that I am such a downer and write only gloomy and depressing shit.  That would not merely be unjust, it would be inexcusably rude.  I truly appreciate you, my readers, though I often wonder at your patience and interest.  But to me, like most things I do, my blog feels as though it is a net negative for the world.  Everything about me, except for my children, feels like a net negative for the world.  Just by existing, I make everything around me at least a little bit worse.

Okay, that’s more than enough of that for today.  I’m sorry.  I hope I didn’t make anyone have a bad start to their day or anything.  Please accept my sincere thanks for reading and my strong wishes for you to be healthy and joyful.  And have a good weekend if you can.

*I am deeply sorry if that seems churlish and dismissive or even contemptuous.  It’s not meant to be any of those things.  I respect and appreciate the positive feelings and intentions of those who express such sentiments, and I think those people are truly wonderful.  I merely wish to say that while it’s “nice” to have people out there who are glad you’re alive, that doesn’t actually translate into you, yourself being glad to be alive, that’s all.

**In A Christmas Carol.

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That small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our blogs

Hello and good morning.

Well, I forgot to bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me last night, so I am writing this post on my smartphone.  At least that should tend to keep the post brief, I guess.

It feels a bit weird not to be discussing my kidney stone, doesn’t it?  Oh, wait, I guess I just brought it up, so to speak, didn’t I?  Although, you don’t want to bring up a kidney stone in any literal way, of course.  But it does seem that mine must have passed, since the symptoms are almost completely resolved.  It feels weird, in a way, to be able to go a long time between trips to the restroom!

There’s still pretty much nothing else going on in my personal news.  No creative endeavors are underway at all.  I thought about asking my boss if he could bring my black Strat back, but I haven’t felt much other than chagrin at the thought.  I imagine it sitting idle by my desk, mocking me with my apparent inability to do anything at all engaging or creative.

I don’t know what to do with what’s left of my life, if anything.  Why would I try to achieve anything of consequence when humans are, overall, so stupidly unable to recognize almost anything sensible about the world and their place in it, such as it is?  They are so small and provincial and tribal‒though perhaps it’s hypocritical of me to characterize them as such when I am expressing general misanthrope toward them, which is a sort of tribalism/xenophobia/prejudice in and of itself.

Still, I wouldn’t say that all human beings are any one thing other than human beings, and that’s just a tautology.  I don’t like to generalize about 8+ billion beings, except in the obvious, trivial ways.  Though humans are, overall, far more alike than they are unalike, there is nevertheless tremendous variation in their specifics*.  No two humans who have ever lived have been exactly the same; even identical twins have different development and local environments that make them diverge, at first subtly, but with growing potential difference, rather like the progression of a chaotic system.

Two first-degree relatives can diverge more, of course, or at least they are more prone to do so.  And two “unrelated”** humans can diverge still more.  Nevertheless, the phase space through which their trajectories may wander, while functionally limitless in certain dimensions, is nevertheless a tiny sliver of the phase space of all mammals, or of all vertebrates, or of all animals, or of all eukaryotes, or of all terrestrial life.  And we don’t even know what other possibilities may be available.

I guess my overall point is that I do not feel like a part of this species, or even of this biosphere.  I feel other.  I do not feel a sense of connection to the people or creatures around me, not in any deep and persistent way.  Maybe I used to feel that; I can’t recall right now.  Maybe I’ve just degenerated over time.

Oh, well.  I guess for the moment I will go through the motions as I have been and try to see if it gets easier.  I don’t expect it will, but I guess it’s technically possible.

TTFN

*Not in the biological sense of the word, though that ends up being a nice coincidence.

**I put the “scare” quotes around the word because of course all humans are related, and not in some absurd, Adam and Eve mythological way.  Indeed, all life on Earth is related‒yes, even octopuses.  It’s very unlikely that a life form that didn’t arise on Earth would be able to digest any form of sustenance here, because biological material, and the enzymes that break it down, are highly specific in their characteristics and interactions***.

***That’s why I currently inhabit this cumbersome, irritating body, despite all its failings****.

****I don’t really think that I’m an extraterrestrial consciousness trapped in a human body, of course.  That’s just a metaphorical way to express how I feel*****.

*****Or is it?

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What shall we do now?

Well, it’s Wednesday now, and since I have no appointments for X-rays or anything similar, I am heading on in to the office.  It’s continued to be a hectic time, and today is supposed to be the day on which we finally begin to do business in the new office, though many things have been moved during the day over the last few days.  I would have thought that the uprooting and shifting would have made working more difficult, but we’ve had very big days, especially yesterday.

It’s good I guess, but it’s annoying, because it means I’m very stressed out by more than one thing.

I’m still quite beat, by which I mean I’m so very tired and worn down and exhausted.  I told the boss yesterday that this last week plus had been one of the top five hardest weeks of my life‒and I pointed out the various other horrible weeks I’ve had so I could try to put it in perspective for him‒but I really don’t think he quite got the point.

I think my inability to convey how I feel, or the tendency for it not to show, as well as my own inherent tendency toward a kind of nihilistic stoicism, means that people don’t really know or at least don’t understand when I’m feeling truly horrible.  I’ve said before that this is why the line from Pink Floyd’s Brain Damage resonates with me so much:  “And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear, you shout and no one seems to hear…”

I don’t even feel I’m at some breaking point anymore; I think I’m already broken, but I’m hobbling along because of inertia, holding the remnants of me together with paperclips and twine and baling wire.

Anyway, I’m exhausted.  I wish I could get back into writing or drawing or creating songs and doing music or studying more science and math, but though I have had passion for all those things at various times, there is only so much one can do to produce creative things in a vacuum, with nearly no feedback or appreciation, before one gives up.

Van Gogh had a similar situation, I guess (not that I am comparing my ability with his) in that he produced many brilliant works of art, but only one was bought by anyone in his lifetime and no one but his sibling appreciated his ability.  And, of course, finally, he shot himself in the torso and died from the wound not long after.  I can sympathize very much, even with his choice to shoot himself in a way that would not be immediately lethal.  It’s both a fear thing‒a lethal shot is scary to do‒and a form of self-punishment and self-hatred‒one doesn’t feel that one deserves an easy death.

I don’t know what I, myself, am going to do.  I’m just too exhausted from my current situation, and from the feeling that I need to use the bathroom 24 hours a day.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I’m very tired, as I said, and it’s only early morning.  But, of course, my sleep is even worse than usual because of the whole bathroom urgency and flank pain thing.  Ah, whataya gonna do?

I hop that what you will do is have a good day.

***

Addendum:  Well, I’m at the office, and even though the Wi-Fi was supposed to be still active this morning in the office, it seems the movers, such as they are, took the router over with them.  My phone’s mobile hotspot function doesn’t get good enough reception here, and so far the public Xfinity Wi-Fi doesn’t seem to have any ability to do adequate data, so I cannot get anything done at the office.

Why did I bother to come in?  Well, of course, that was largely because I couldn’t sleep and there was no air conditioning at the house, but I also like to get a head start on office stuff.  I’ve even finished the last of the series’ of “light novels” with which I was trying to distract myself, so I can’t even count on any reading to help me.

I apparently will not have a closed area in the new office where I will be able to be at least partly cut off from the noise and all.  I wish I had just stayed at the house today, and maybe never left again.  I don’t even have a guitar here anymore, because I gave away my black Strat.  That action was one of those “gesture” things, to be honest, and I was hoping someone would pick up on the point of it, but either they didn’t recognize it, or‒more likely‒they don’t really much care.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  There are very few people for whom it would actually matter if I die.

I’ve finally been able to get the Xfinity thing working a bit, so I should be able to post this.  After that, I don’t know.  There’s just too much for me to deal with right now.  I wish I could just go to sleep and stay that way.  I hate this life.

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It’s Saturday now

And I’m in the office.  I haven’t come to the office this time, of course, I’ve just been here since yesterday, as I noted in my confusing and single-paragraph post yesterday evening.  I slept at the office, on the floor, and it was just as comfortable in many ways as if I had been at the house.  True, I couldn’t shower, but I’ve buzzed my hair down to 1/4 inch after seeing how it looked after I was in the hospital, and so it’s impossible to tell just by looking that I’ve not showered.  I usually have deodorant and other toiletries at the office, but those are already moved to the new office now, so I’m going to need to go over to the convenience store and get some deodorant and mouthwash this morning.

As for the house, well, there’s a reason I don’t refer to it as home.  It’s not a home to me.  I haven’t felt like I have a home since before I went to FSP.  No, it’s just a place I can hide for a while at a time, and not have to interact with anyone, and where it’s just my stuff inside, such as it is.  But I don’t feel at home there, I don’t feel comfortable, it’s just a place I’m existing.  I don’t even have a real chair there, though I have a piano bench and a folding metal chair tucked into a corner.  When I’m at the house, I just recline on a pile of pillows on the futon on the floor.  It’s good for my back in the short term, though after I stay there for a while it tends to backfire*.

Everything in my existence orbits around pain.  I guess it’s no irony that one of the two songs I have had memorized on piano for decades now is the Police’s King of Pain (the other is Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles).  Maybe it’s because I memorized that song that my life took on its current aspect.

I don’t really believe that, of course.  That’s absurd, magical thinking, and there’s no evidence that it’s the way the real world works, except through confirmation bias and the like.

Right now it still hurts to urinate, with spasms up in my right side and flank, which lingers a little even in between.  It’s nothing compared to the acute onset of the issue, but it’s still there.  And my back and hip and leg pains haven’t ceased to exist out of some strange courtesy.

I’m overwhelmed, and not in a good way.  There is too much happening in my head and around me right now, too many stupid little, annoying changes, too many deeply unpleasant surprises, too much chaos and randomness even in the day-to-day routines.  I am overwhelmed.

I used to be a person who could accomplish things, at least partly because I had people around me whom I loved and for whom I wanted to make things good as much as I could.  I cannot do good for myself.  I cannot live for myself.  But I used to be able to do good and make good things and relieve suffering.  I’ve saved people’s lives and even helped ease people’s deaths when it was appropriate.  Some of the most copious thanks I’ve ever received were from the families of patients who had died.  I was told by one family that, before he died, their 96 year old father/grandfather said I was the first doctor he’d had that he felt that he could trust.

Now look at me.  Or rather, don’t look at me.  I’m disgusting to start with, with my teeth that used to be good but have been ravaged by years of pain killers and prison and then just an inability to have the energy to take the very good care of them I used to take.  Also, I’m currently crying, and there’s snot on my face.  I don’t look great at the best of times anymore, and certainly no one is going to want to look at me now.

I’m caught in the pincers of some kind of weird metaphorical tweezer.  I cannot stand the thought of trying to change my situation; the idea of moving, of trying to change jobs, of trying to find something, is literally horrifying–imagine needing to wade through a swimming pool filled with roaches and centipedes and maggots and other larvae, above which soars a nearly-opaque cloud of mosquitoes, all female.

But staying where I am, doing what I’m doing, is just as horrifying, and now there are a bunch of new stressors, not the least of which is my fresh, new pain problem, which hopefully will be temporary, though it isn’t gone yet.  I guess a week is a relatively short time, and maybe I’m expecting too much, but it’s a fucking huge level of discomfort, and I don’t have the mental resources to deal with it, not on top of everything else.  Why I am I continuing to endure my already-existing chronic pain, my anxiety, my depression, all the other things associated with my hitherto undiagnosed ASD, and then now dealing with newly discovered problems?

I’m overwhelmed.  I cannot summon the will to make a change, or even the conviction that I ought to do so, because I cannot really think straight.  I cannot imagine what to do.  I don’t know that there is any way at all to escape, except by dying.  And I am always afraid.

You might think that after having pain every day for decades and having lost basically everything that ever mattered to you and for which you had worked so hard for so long you wouldn’t have any need to be afraid anymore.  What do you have to lose, after all?  But fear is not a rational thing, it’s not the conclusion of a thought process, it’s an emotion, one in which nature has invested heavily, and having pain after pain for a long time, of various kinds, can cause a “learned-helplessness” reaction related to depression, but even then, fear doesn’t go away.  One is always afraid of yet more pain.  One is afraid of facing another day with the same old pain.  One is a afraid that one is going to live a long, long life and never for one day of the rest of it not be in significant pain.  One is afraid that one will also be alone for the rest of that long life, with no comfort and little joy.

I don’t know what’s going on.  I mean, I’m writing this post, of course, that’s going on.  But I don’t know what else.  I’m falling apart, I think.  I’m breaking down.  Like I said yesterday, I can practically smell the melting plastic and circuitry in my mind.

Whatever.  Nothing I do or say matters, nothing I am matters.  I don’t know what I expect to happen because I’ve written about this.  I feel a bit like Frodo crying out for his friends in “Fog on the Barrow Downs” after they’ve been separated, but the only answer I will probably get will be from some foul undead spirits.  There’s no Tom Bombadil out there to come rescue me.  I wish there were.  And I could really use Elrond’s healing power, or even Aragorn’s.

That’s enough.  Go on, go read something else.  No one wants to feel miserable, and that’s how I tend to make people feel, so you should probably find something comical or at least entertaining to explore, and just try to have a good weekend.

*Honestly, no pun intended.  I didn’t even notice it until the editing process.

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A nameless Friday blog post

It’s hard to believe, but something truly obvious didn’t even occur to me until yesterday afternoon as I was getting ready to leave the office.  I was really worn out and tired and grumpy, and I said to my coworker, who was very kindly giving me a ride to the train station, “If I were a sane person in a civilized world, I wouldn’t even have come to work at all this week.”

That’s when I thought: the people at the hospital probably didn’t expect me to go back to work this week.

Meanwhile, this has been one of our busiest weeks in a very long time at the office, and the office is in the process of moving to our new location, and I had to iron out the details of the records from Monday and Tuesday, which were a bit off, and then I had to do the payroll on Wednesday all while having the busiest day of this very busy week so far.

Yesterday was not quite as hectic as Wednesday for me, but on Wednesday I had kind of maxxed the pain med dose so I could get done what I needed to do.  Not so on Thursday.  I want to make sure not to overuse the meds in the short term, since I don’t know when a really bad spasm might happen.  Of course, I’m not taking my usual aspirin either, per recommendation, nor any other go-to NSAIDS, so things are complicated.

Anyway, the meds situation wasn’t what I wanted to discuss.  I just wanted to note how pathological I must be to have not only come right back to work after being discharged from the hospital, but to have applied pressure to get me discharged Tuesday afternoon.  I can’t believe that I even said I would sign out AMA* if I had to do so.

But I am basically on my own; if I don’t work, I don’t eat, so to speak.  Even that is misleading, though, and is not my real reason, which is that I have to be productive or useful to someone, in a way that I accept, or else there is no point to the fact of my continued existence.

I mean, I know no one wants to be around me or to have me around them for fun and pleasure; the copious evidence for that is glaring and even blinding.  But I am capable of being useful in quite a few different ways; even my misautonomy doesn’t force me to deny that I have gifts that can be productive and useful and even sometimes beautiful.

So, if I can’t be useful, well…what’s the use of me?  If I were not at work, what would I be doing but lying around in my one room (plus bathroom) with a malfunctioning AC unit?  

Meanwhile, I still haven’t made my follow-up appointments or any of that.  My sister has offered to help, and I think I’m going to have to take her up on that, though she’ll have to be doing stuff from long distance and second-hand and I still find the process daunting.  It’s really quite pathetic.

And if not being useful is a feeling like being in an intergalactic void, it’s even more horrible to feel like I’m a burden or even an inconvenience to someone else, especially someone who really matters to me.  That’s a failure worthy of fire.

Also, I am tired of being in pain.  Everything in my life centers around pain.  I suppose it should have been obvious for quite a while, but at least since the time I was sent to be a guest at FSP West, pain has been the central fact, the only consistent thing, about my existence.  Now I’ve just added another color, another flavor, another timbre and type of pain to my usual mix.

I suppose one could almost call it refreshing as a change, or one might if it weren’t just absolutely overwhelming at its peak, and none too pleasant when it’s at a lower level.  And while, if one’s pain is in one’s back and legs, it is possible to rest them to some degree, you can’t really rest your urinary tract when it is where the pain is focused.  If you try to drink less, you’ll only make the primary problem worse, but of course, drinking more (hopefully to get the stone to pass) does mean more of the acute discomfort in the meantime.

Why am I doing any of this?  Why am I continuing?  It’s certainly not out of any sense of my personal value.  I’m just a maggot-ridden turd lying by a dirt path in a humid, stagnant, pollen laden drizzle that doesn’t refresh anything or allow anything but mold and fungi and coprophagic organisms to grow.  I’m so tired.  I have no purpose, and I am so tired.

Anyway, this ought to be it for this week.  I don’t think there’s a plan for the office to be open tomorrow.  If it is, by rights I ought not to come in anyway.  But since the alternative is just lying around by myself, and since I’m stupid, and I don’t live in a civilized world, and I am certainly not sane, if they open the office, I will probably be here.  If so, I’ll probably write a blog post.

Until my next post, whenever it is, I truly and sincerely and urgently hope you all have objectively good days and nights and everything else.  If my words have the power to make anything real, that is what I would want.

*Against medical advice.

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You blogs, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and here I am writing another blog post to prove that yesterday’s was not a fluke nor a false flag nor any other term beginning with “f” other than perhaps “fair play”.

By the way, I may have previously used the Shakespeare-based title above‒it’s just so easy to make, and I’ve always loved that line from Julius Caesar‒but I don’t care.  It’s too perfect for my current circumstances to miss the chance now.  I mean, blogs and stones?  Come on!

I’m on my way to the office, and speaking of stones, I am far from being over the process of having, let alone passing, my kidney stone.  I’m trying not to overuse my pain meds, largely because they tend to have diminishing returns, and I want them to work when I really need them.  Also, they are quite…well, constipating.  Now, it’s true that I didn’t eat all that much over the course of the early part of this week, and of what I did eat, much of it didn’t stay down.  Still, I went Sunday through Wednesday without doing anything but peeing.

I have been doing a lot of that of course, deliberately.  It is not pleasant.  The pain is not like it was Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday, but it still doesn’t let me forget.  And, of course, we’re moving office this week, and that adds extra hecticity*.  

I don’t know how much you all would want to hear (that I haven’t already said) about what went on in the hospital.  I did talk about it a great deal yesterday.  I suppose I’ll play it by ear and just bring up things that occur to me as interesting.

I have not yet made my follow-up appointments, but I need to try to do so today, if I can.  Even writing about it makes me feel very tense and anxious.  I know there’s no good reason for feeling anxiety and resistance toward such things, but at least now I know something of the cause:  It has to do with ASD, with possibly some pathological demand avoidance, but also just with associated, fairly severe, social anxiety.

But I have to try, and I want to try.  I’ve been rather impressed by the hospital and its associated staff and attending physicians and their network and such, and I would like to get myself plugged into their system if I am able to do so.

They seem quite generous and caring as a tendency and policy.  They do everything from providing free meds for when you go home to getting you a Lyft if you don’t have a ride.  I think that’s pretty nice.

It was oddly nostalgic, being in the hospital.  Well, I suppose it’s not so odd.  I spent much of my earlier adult life in and around hospitals, from med school to residency to medical practice, nineteen years in total.  I guess I miss it.  It was nice working with intelligent, disciplined, professional people at all levels and being able to relieve and even prevent suffering, all while getting a good amount of intellectual stimulation in the form of understanding and solving complex problems.

I don’t expect that I will ever do it again, though.  There are ways, I am sure, to fight to try to get my license back and so on, but it’s not the sort of process for which I have any avidity.  When civilization falls apart, as it appears to be about to do, I can perhaps find a time and reason to lend my skills to the survivors, if I am one of them, which seems unlikely.  Otherwise, I don’t feel a lot of enthusiasm for supporting the world as it is.  Humans have revealed themselves over and over‒by and large‒to be inadequate to tasks that require actual cooperation and consideration and compassion and humility.

It’s ironic that humility is so challenging for humans.  Given how profound their limitations and failings are (despite undeniable strengths, as well) you might imagine that humility would be easy.

But somehow, the default setting even of those who try to be humble is to characterize themselves as absolutely worthless‒which from a certain point of view is always true, but which misses the point of real humility.

Humility is not self-hatred or self-contempt or self-destruction (from which, to some, the only rescue is through some imaginary supernatural being); it is a recognition that one is and will always be limited, capable of error, and incapable of being perfectly objective about oneself and the nature of one’s existence.  With such self-knowledge, one will tend to be better able to make good choices about oneself and others.

Maybe I should try meditating again, to try to keep myself calm when possible.  It might help with my serious social anxiety.  It would probably also help me to get less upset over the idiocy of the current administration**.  And perhaps my mind would then be more useful overall.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and try not to get too upset, yourselves.  The world is going to end soon, but that has always been the case‒it’s just a matter of time scales.  On other scales, even a single mayfly’s life is practically eternal.

TTFN

*I think I made that word up, but it seems too good not to use.

**It would be nice to administer a fair amount of current to the members of this US administration, though‒alternating current, with enough voltage and amperage to cause serious discomfort, but not enough to kill them…at least not quickly***.

***See?  Upset.