depression

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The blogger, learning, physic, must all follow this, and come to dust.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.

I was inclined to make that the whole post today, just, “Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  TTFN.”

I still don’t think I’m going to make it much longer than that.  I don’t have anything new to say.  Everything I have to say has surely already been said here.

Nothing is any better than yesterday, or the day before, or the year before, or the decade before.  I have no reason to expect that anything will be better tomorrow.  It’ll just be another day gone by, so I’ll be a little more used up and fatigued and probably a little more pessimistic.

I’m waiting for the train now.  I expect today to be pretty much as always.  There is nothing to which I look forward.  Music isn’t interesting, whether playing or listening.  I can’t eat foods that give me any kind of even momentary surge of pleasure, because those foods also tend to give me GI problems (and then apparent metabolic problems).

I don’t really even know the full state of my physical health; I haven’t been to see any kind of doctor for several years, maybe almost 10, not since the time when I went to an urgent care because a respiratory infection I had was persisting longer than expected.  They found that I was desatting* a bit, so they told me to go to the ER, where I was admitted.  While I was there, they did an echocardiogram, and supposedly (I never saw the actual echo myself) there had been a slight…I don’t know, a recurrence, a reopening, a relapse of the ASD** that I had that required open heart surgery when I was 18.

I was supposed to follow up on that recent echo, but after my infection was treated, I felt much better, and I didn’t and don’t have insurance.  Honestly, the thought of going through all that shit with my heart again now, almost 40 years after the first ordeal, is not acceptable.  Besides, honestly, there wasn’t and isn’t any reason for me to try to preserve my life and/or health.  I’m disappointed the thing hasn’t caused me any problems so far.

Many days I wish I would just have a heart attack or something, or get a severe infection.  After my little semi-humorous footnote yesterday, I thought about just trying to inject some shall we say less-than-sterile liquid into myself, and I even ordered some syringes from Amazon for that purpose.  If I do still have any kind of irregularity in my heart, that would provide a good nidus for the beginning of an endocarditis.

I may do that.  It’s simple and straightforward, but it could be a very long process.  It’s probably not a very rewarding option.  It’s too slow and too reversible.

I’m so exhausted.  I’m so tired, mentally, physically, and “spiritually”.  I wish I could just go into a field somewhere and collapse and just lie there not moving until the elements took me.  And I feel so tense and angry so much of the time.

Never mind, this is all stupid.  Sorry, again.  I’m sorry that I’m whining so much.  Yeah, yeah, life is hard, the universe is hard, the world is idiotic and no one is in charge or in control of much of anything, but it’s nothing new.  Humans‒at least some of them‒do have the potential to do great and relatively enduring things, but all the other idiots who want to think of themselves as special and important to some divine creator, but who are, ironically, much more akin to chimpanzees and savages than are those who reject superstition, get in the way almost inevitably.

Anyway, enough of this.  Again, I’m sorry.  You’ve been kind and optimistic to read my daily excretions, so here’s a slight break for you.  I hope I won’t write a post tomorrow, but I probably will.

TTFN

*Short for desaturating:  when the percentage oxygenation in the blood drops below normal, healthy levels.

**Atrial Septal Defect in this case, not Autism Spectrum Disorder.  Apparently it wasn’t much more than a patent foramen ovale at this recent stage, but that still shouldn’t be there.  I mean, my heart surgery was done by the guy who literally wrote the textbook on the procedure.  That was in 1988, of course, so things have surely improved, but still.

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Morose, meandering musings of a misautonomous moron

Every time I write a blog post on a Wednesday morning, I feel the urge to include a reference to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home, as in “Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins…”

There, see, I just did it again.  At least it was self consciously done, not some quote put in as if it were my own words, intended only for those “in the know” to recognize.  I guess that’s a way for me to feel vaguely clever‒and sometimes funny‒while actually just following the often irresistible compulsion to quote shit* at every turn.

In high school, when I was a senior (and maybe when I was a junior?) I was pretty confident in my place as one of the “leaders” of our school orchestra, and I used to go to the orchestra room first thing in the morning before school, usually arriving before the teacher, and then I hung out there (with other orchestra members and friends who arrived a bit later) until time for classes to start.  While there, pretty much every day, I would write a quote from something‒Shakespeare**, Tolkien, Stephen R. Donaldson, Poe, etc.‒on the board.  I even won the “Dusty Cello Award” at our end of the year orchestra party because of it.

I’ve always had that habit of quoting books and movies and plays and shows and so on, and even doing the voices of people when I could.

I think reading fiction in particular was very good for helping me to understand what goes on in other people’s minds, at least in principle.  But I also just liked being able to go to those other worlds and other lives.  It’s better in general than watching TV or movies, though the latter are easier and also easier to enjoy with other people, if you have other people with whom to enjoy them.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.  My past and my thoughts about it are of no moment to anyone but me, and even I find them boring.  It’s just that they’re all I really have.

I’ve tried to interact with people to some degree online, but that just gets me weird feedback, like getting almost 3,000 “likes” in less than 24 hours for pointing out in a comment that the biblical Jesus would not approve of a particular, supposedly religion-based, exclusion reported in a thread about a shopkeeper toward a trans woman (ironic for a nonbeliever to be pointing out Jesus’s very clear attitudes, but I am one who remembers characters and quotes).

On the other hand, when I noted yesterday on the same site that the office where I work was 3.4 miles from the nearest “beach” (and a fishing pier) and I thought it might be good to walk down to the shore, kick off my shoes and socks, and just start swimming east into the Atlantic and not come back (pointing out that it would leave no need for cleanup, and it wouldn’t mess up anyone’s day, or anything of that sort) I got 3 likes (after quite a while) and only one comment by a person saying she doesn’t like to dwell on such thoughts.

This is, supposedly, Mental Health Awareness month, but I don’t know what good such a thing does, especially if such is the response to someone expressing suicidal ideation.  I’m aware of mental health in general, but it’s been a long time since I had any personal experience of mental health (if I ever have).  It’s been at least 13 years since I’ve had even moments of mental pseudo-health.  That was the last time I saw my kids in person, for one afternoon.

I’ve only recently realized that it’s now been a longer time since I saw my children than how old they were when I last saw them.  So, I’ve missed more than half of their lives now, and that fraction is only going to get bigger.

What would I possibly know about mental health?

Physical health is not my biggest attribute either (not many people had open-heart surgery at age 18).  But I know it gets very boring for people to hear about‒for instance‒the fact that I feel right now as if my entire right side from the lower ribs on down to the ball of my foot feels as though it’s filled with molten lead, which is quite painful, in case you were wondering.  But that’s always the way it is, for much longer than 13 years (more than 20, actually) and though it waxes and wanes and shifts locations, pain never fully goes away while I’m conscious (and probably contributes to the worsening of my insomnia).

Anyway, I know, Waah, waah, waah, shut the fuck up, Robert, no one wants to hear all this shit*** over and over again!  It’s tiresome to face nothing but complaints.  I’m sorry.  I’m very, very sorry.  I really am.  To everybody.

I really should just try that swim.  There isn’t much to prevent it.  I’m not particularly afraid of drowning (other than in an instinctive sense) though I do have misgivings about sharks and other sea creatures.  That’s probably silly, since, even in shark infested waters, statistically people are far more likely to drown than to be attacked by a shark.

I have to do something, or at least to have something done to me.  I don’t have the will or the wherewithal to take action to save myself in any way (and wouldn’t know where to start if I could) but I don’t have the strength to keep living, not for much longer.  And I don’t have any good reason to keep living.

But that same problem with “executive function” or whatever it is makes it hard for me to take action to kill myself.  So, for the moment, I just hurt myself to try to distract myself from other pain and to punish myself for being such a lame and shitty person, but weirdly, I have a hard time making such things hurt very much anymore.  Maybe I’ve always got too much pain medication in me, but I just don’t realize it because it doesn’t do all that much for my back and joint pains.  It’s weird.

Then again, I’m weird, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  Like the song says, “I’m a creep.  I’m a weirdo.  What the hell am I doing here?  I don’t belong here.”

I don’t belong here.

*This is the nonjudgmental version of the word “shit”.  It’s more or less synonymous with “stuff” but it flows better (so to speak).  I don’t mean to imply that the song to which I refer is in any way shit.  It’s one of the most beautiful songs I know.

**Yes, I loved Shakespeare even back then.

***Here, the use of “shit” is much more in the derogatory, excrement-related vein.  Though if someone had excrement in their veins, they would be in big trouble, because that excrement would be carried to the lungs and then heart and could cause horrible endocarditis and pneumonias and so on.

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No songs or pictures, just pathetic words of despite and destruction and despair

Well, it’s Tuesday.  I think my stunt (or whatever you might call it) yesterday has failed miserably.  I don’t know why I’m surprised, let alone disappointed.  I’m either just not good at that sort of thing, or I’m just not worthy of that sort of thing.

I don’t know if that quite made sense just now.  I’m apparently very bad at getting my feelings across, on top of the fact that, a lot of the time, I’m not quite sure specifically what I’m feeling.  They’re just a bunch of swirling, overpowering sensations that don’t ever seem to show on my face or in my voice.

Anyway, I have no subject on which to speak (so to speak) today, and it doesn’t really matter, because I seem incapable of conveying anything important to anyone for whom it could possibly matter.  It’s fine.  As Thomas Covenant said (before he ever went to the Land) this is what people are like:  futile.  He would change his point of view on that after many grueling and heartbreaking yet inspiring experiences, but I think he was onto something.

I’ve always had a bit of sympathy for Lord Foul in those books.  Part of this was just because he was so eloquent‒I’m a bit of a sucker for a good speaker‒but especially after I learned that he was trapped inside the arch of time, inside the Land, and he literally cannot possibly die or be permanently defeated while trapped there.  He hates everything in the Land and its world not just because it’s his nature to hate, but because he is trapped by and with everything there, potentially forever.  So if he is ever to be free to go anywhere else‒even to die‒he has to destroy the arch of time and thus that world.  It is personal to him, of course‒he’s not called the Despiser for nothing‒but it needn’t be.

Anyway, I am not trapped in the arch of time, or at least I’m not constrained from ever dying within it.  Or maybe my own arch of time is just that span of moments that began at birth (or conception) and will reach its other end at my death.  If that’s the case, I wouldn’t need to destroy the arch, just…complete it.

This is all metaphorical bullshit, I know.  Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t have any misgiving that any of that could be real.  But the stories were good, at least the first two trilogies; I’ve never finished the last 4 books.  There is no denying that The Lord of the Rings is better, and much more inspiring and uplifting.  But the Thomas Covenant books do a better job of capturing the horror and despair and terror of not just fighting evil, but of being evil.

That’s probably why it appealed to me.  My innate tendency is to be, well, perhaps not evil, but destructive.  I feel terribly angry so much, so often, and I just want to break and burn this world, this life, that is so bloody uncomfortable.  But I know that I don’t have any business hurting other people, almost none of whom are ever deliberately hurting me.  So I bottle it up and try to calm it, and I don’t act on it.

But like I said in my reversal of Nebula’s last line to Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, I wasn’t born to be a dad, I was born to be a destroyer.  I’ve just always tried to fight against that, and I have in some small ways succeeded.  I even swung things in the other direction at times, becoming a doctor and a dad.  Of course, I eventually failed miserably at both of those things, as usual, but I did some good in the meantime.

And there is one being I have a proprietary right to destroy.  I just need to quit the foreplay.

Anyway, this has been weird, I suspect, but what else is new?  I hope you all have a good day.

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Six songs to try to express a little bit of how I am doing

I don’t have the energy or will or “spoons” to write much today.  I’m just about ready to tap out.  My “executive function” is so low that I think the only thing I’m capable of executing is myself, and even that is difficult.  I certainly don’t have the capacity to act to save myself.  I keep trying to express just how fucking horrible I am doing, but I don’t think it’s coming across.  I guess it doesn’t matter much.

Anyway, today I figure I’ll embed some songs I’ve recorded myself performing that do something to convey my difficulties.  Some are originals, some are covers.  I don’t know if they will work, either.

It doesn’t really matter.  I don’t have the will to take any action about anything.  I can only do what I do every day, automatically, and I am getting closer and closer to being unable to do even that.  I think I’m pretty nearly completely out of gas, and I am basically only a burden to the world.  It doesn’t help that we’re moving offices this month, which I hate, but that’s just a little insult to add to the injuries that are leading to the end of things.

Anyway, here are the songs.

It’s not a perfect expression or set of expressions, but it’s about all I’m capable of, even after a weekend “off”.  It doesn’t matter.  I’ve basically given up.  I’m so tired already and it’s just Monday morning.

I hope you each have a great day, individually, and that you all have a great day, collectively.

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It’s the end of the month as we know it

It’s the last day of April in 2025, which means tomorrow is the beginning of May.  This is also the last day of the official Autism Awareness Month, and tomorrow begins the official Mental Health Awareness Month.

That last term is a bit odd.  If mental health is the norm, we don’t really need to be aware of it, except perhaps to be thankful if we have it (I certainly don’t).  It’s the lack of mental health‒you know, mental illness or even mental injury‒that we would like to be aware of and make better.  But I guess some people feel that’s too stigmatic or negative or something.

I think that’s silly.  Do we euphemize cancer?  Not really, not when we’re dealing with it seriously.  All the cancer awareness things slap you in the face, and they more or less say, it’s cancer, take it seriously, we want to fight it.  But what does it mean to be aware of mental health?  We don’t want to fight that, we want to fight for it.

I’m aware of mental health as a concept, of course, though even there, things can be a bit nebulous.  I guess health in general is just the notion that things are functioning more or less as they are supposed to function.  But that allows a fair bit of leeway.  It’s also somewhat relative.  If it were “normal” to be as healthy as Captain America, for instance, Usain Bolt might be considered a bit sickly, and most of the rest of us would be functionally disabled.

It’s hard to convince oneself that the average person, in America, at least, is as mentally healthy as one would like them to be.  I suppose that shouldn’t be too surprising.  Mental health (or the relative lack thereof) is measured largely by its interactions with the surrounding civilization, and that has been changing quite rapidly, from any kind of evolutionary standpoint, especially in the last few centuries, and especially in the last few decades.

Small wonder our brains/nervous systems often don’t function optimally in this realm.  The human (and humanoid/replicant/changeling/alien) brain is remarkably adaptable, but it is not a blank slate upon which just anything can be written at will.  There’s plenty of hardware that’s specific to certain kinds of functions, and there are read-only aspects of the operating systems and even the user interface (which we call consciousness when it’s combined with something akin to the Windows task manager).  We can’t rewrite the firmware yet, and we may never be able to do so.  We have trouble even changing current programs or loading new ones.

Well, that was an unplanned digression…which may be a redundant term.  Are planned digressions even truly digressions?

I was mostly just thinking this morning about what such a pair of months might mean to me.  Both of them are pertinent, since I have issues relating to both “awareness” subjects.  But so many of the things I see shared, particularly about “mental health”, are things I already know, but which have obviously not been adequate to improve my mental health.

Heck, I remember paying real attention in high school in our psychology lessons, reading all the abnormal psychology stuff, knowing that there was something off about me, but not seeing any good answers.  Of course, this was in the 80s, in a public high school, so the material was pretty simplistic and out of date even for the time.

I also used to own books about psychology, self-hypnotism, self help, lots of related stuff.  I didn’t know what it was with me, but I knew that I was strange.  I was pretty good at pretending to be “normal” in a sense, but a lot of even that was just me owning and sometimes exaggerating my odd habits as if they were normal things.

It helped that I was known to be smart, and also that I was raised to be polite and not to be mean or cruel or condescending to people.  That was pretty easy; while I was good at some things, there were many things with which I had difficulty, and I knew that only too well.  I still don’t feel very comfortable riding a bike, for instance, and many athletic pursuits requiring agility have always been hard*.  I also was truly abysmal at dealing with girls/relationships.  I had no idea how really to interact in any kind of would-be romantic way, nor to recognize if someone liked me, nor to let anyone know that I liked them.  I’ve not grown out of that problem.

Anyway, so I’ve been dealing with issues of mental health for as long as I can remember, including a time when I was really quite young and I almost made myself unable to talk after getting upset about some interaction and telling myself that I just wouldn’t talk anymore.  When I finally (after several hours) decided to talk again…I almost couldn’t do it!  I really had to force myself, and almost panicked before I finally was able to squeeze out some words.  That was frightening.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that to anyone before.

So, anyway, I’ve been weird my whole life, and I’m no less weird now, but now I am alone, and I have lost pretty much everything I worked very hard to get or be or create as well as nearly everyone I care about most**.  I recognize that it’s not impossible that good things will happen for me in the future.  But I can see pretty clearly that it’s really unlikely.  What could lead me to think otherwise?  Only some profound delusions could do that, and though I cannot rule out delusions in myself, if I have them, they are not of the optimistic variety.

Geez Louise, this is such a pointless post‒just like my pointless life.  I need to wrap it up and be done already.  I hope you have a good day.

*It turns out at least some of this was related to my congenital heart defect, which was discovered when I was 18, and for which I had open heart surgery in the summer after my freshman year in college.

**By this I mean they’re not around, and most of them don’t want to be around me, not that they’ve died‒except my parents, of course, but that was basically natural.  Still, there was a long stretch when I didn’t even interact with them.  It wasn’t as long as the time since I last saw my own children, but it was still very painful.

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Step up or STFU

Here I go again, writing another blog post.  It seems like just yesterday that I wrote a previous one‒but of course, it was two days ago, not just one.  Wow, what a spooky difference.

I’m getting ready to be at work, or rather, am in the process of being on my way to work as I begin to write this.  I’m not actually currently moving relative to the surface of the Earth, but that happens a lot during commutes, especially when you don’t have your own vehicle anymore.

I don’t really have “my own” much of anything anymore.  I mean, I have a small amount of stuff, as George Carlin might say, though I’m quite sure I have waaaaaay less stuff than he had when he performed that particular routine.  Not that that’s bad; he certainly earned his stuff.  I mean, he’s still making loads of people laugh and think even after he’s been dead for a while.  I don’t know how long that will go on‒contrary to delusional claims by people who like a cool-sounding expression, online is not forever‒but he will, I suspect, be remembered fondly far longer than most.

The average day, on the other hand, feels like it is forever.  I don’t think I really look forward (in the positive sense) to anything nowadays.  There are two movies in theaters right now that I ought to want to go see, but if you presented me with free tickets, free concessions, and a ride to and from a theater of my choice, I think I’d say, “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”  And that would be true.

Likewise, though I watched the first episode of the latest series of Doctor Who a few weeks ago, two more have come out since then, and I have no desire to watch them, or anything else.  There are no books to which I look forward.  I’ve had to force myself to read at all, and even that’s probably a mistake*.  I occasionally look at my guitars and at the keyboard and they almost feel alien to me.  Like, what is that even used for?  I can’t really even imagine picking one up and playing it (or sitting down and playing, in the case of the keyboard).

I can’t really imagine writing any fiction.  The only thing(s) I anticipate at all anymore is something to eat, and that’s just so, so pathetic.  Thankfully, even my favorite snacks are starting to feel and taste and smell very dull lately.  I don’t know if perhaps I had my sense of smell altered back when I got Covid, or if this is born of the fact that all pleasures have backfired on me at least one time or another, and more so than ever, lately.

I really think I’m just about done.  I should’ve been done already.  I should’ve been done a long time ago.  But we’re always told to hold on, to stay alive, that we’re wanted and needed here on this stupid planet.  It’s a bit of a similar situation to what happens with “pro-life” people:  They don’t want there to be abortions, they want all those potential people born, but they aren’t helping to take care of them, and they don’t even want there to be public services available for them or for education or what have you.

So it is with the people who don’t want other people to commit suicide.  They don’t want you to kill yourself, but they’re not offering to help you be alive, not in any meaningful sense of helping.  And so, of course, when people do reach the end of their rope (sorry, no pun intended, but the expression is doubly appropriate so I’m leaving it) they have to choose the analogue of “back alley abortions”, killing themselves (or trying to do so) in messy, unreliable, disruptive ways that often don’t succeed but can lead to permanent damage and social opprobrium.

In some civilized countries, it’s possible for people to go to places like Dignitas and get physician-supervised ways to end their lives with minimal pain and with some peace.  Of course, even in such places, the service seems to be available mainly for people with terminal cancer and similar incurable illnesses.  But depression is often a terminal illness, and it is certainly incurable as far as I can see.  And, of course, ASD is not a disease, it’s a neurodevelopmental difference, so there’s no curing that, short of a brain transplant (which would really be a body transplant for the donor brain).

But if no one is going to give serious help to a person who has severe difficulty even wanting to live, and who has no capacity to lift himself out of the whirlpool of self-loathing and chronic pain, then why is there all the verbiage about how “depression is a liar” and other bullshit like that.  As if optimism weren’t a liar.  As if all the ideals and isms and dogmae and “good” things weren’t lies or liars or both.

So, fuck that noise.  Don’t tell a woman not to have an abortion if you’re not going to care for her and the child, and don’t cajole and guilt-trip a suicidal person about not killing themselves if you’re not gonna come in and help them in some real, tangible, serious way, God damn it.  A person on the verge of suicide is already admitting that they don’t think they can survive under their own steam.  They can’t swim anywhere, but you want them to keep treading water, or at least floating‒indefinitely‒just so you don’t have to be aware of the fact that they drowned while you were out boating.

All right, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day.  Autism Awareness Month ends this week and Mental Health Awareness Month begins.  Fat lot of good they’ve done or do.

*Interesting aside:  I accidentally typed “provably” when I tried to write “probably” right there.  The words are, so I understand, etymologically** related‒probe, prove, proof, probable, etc.

**Etymology and entomology are however (apart from the “ology” bit) unrelated.

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“Everything is…broken”

Hi, everybody.

(Hi, Dr. Nick!)

I am writing this blog post on my mini laptop computer this morning, because I’ve been getting sick and tired of writing on the “smartphone”.  I’m also getting sick of writing blog posts to some degree, so it’s best to make it relatively easy on myself when I can, and when I have the gumption, or the will, or the “spoons”, whatever you want to call it.

We have some new people at the office this week, so depending on how many of them would be able to show up, I may be working tomorrow.  If I do, I suppose I’ll probably write a blog post tomorrow morning.  So, I guess you’ll all know whether or not I’m working based on whether or not there’s a blog post.

Of course, if I don’t work tomorrow, there will be no blog post (or at least it’s very unlikely).  And, definitely, if I die (or become gravely or catastrophically ill or injured) before tomorrow, there will of course be no blog post.

As for everything else, well—to a good first approximation, everything else sucks.  Although the universe as a whole may actually be doing the opposite of sucking, since the cosmologic constant, or Dark Energy, or whatever, appears to be leading to the universe’s accelerated expansion.  But metaphorically, at least, the universe could still suck even while it expands (you could even say it blows).

None of my problems are resolving, nor are any improving, to be honest.  I can’t even accept telephone calls from people I know, nor can I seem to find the energy to play any music, nor to write any fiction.  I am more or less all out of “spoons”*, or nearly so.  And I don’t seem to be getting as many of them replaced when I do get them.  It’s as though my subscription has been downgraded.

That’s all metaphorical, of course.  When I say spoons, I’m referring to all members of the dairy professions.

(That was a Life of Brian reference.)

I’m sorry that I keep pausing while writing; I hope it’s not too boring for you while I do (ha ha).  I’m having some difficulty concentrating.  This is at least partly because my left eyelashes seem to be getting tangled and poking at parts of my eyelids in the wrong way, and I have not yet been able to locate and remove the offending lash(es).  This used to happen only to my right eye, but apparently things are changing themselves up—equal opportunity offenses, I guess.  Sometimes I feel like I want just to pull my whole eyelid off, it’s so irritating; it’s hard to ignore something that’s basically poking you in the eye.

My back and legs are already flaring this morning well above their baseline, and I feel like I got even worse sleep than usual.  I’m not as overtly angry as I was yesterday, not because the causes are any different, but because I’m just steadily more exhausted all the time.  I don’t have the energy to do anything much.  I can barely conjure the will to do this.

And, of course, my depression and my ASD and the related anxiety and all that continue to make life uncomfortable at all moments, and there are very few things that make up for it.  Even food is losing its taste.  Where is Lestat to turn me into a vampire?

Well, I know that isn’t going to happen because that doesn’t actually happen.  It’s called reality.  Google it.

Well, this post is going nowhere, isn’t it?  I guess in that, it’s like everything else, including the universe itself (as far as we can tell).  It’s some measure of how far I’ve sunk that the first draft of this little tidbit of a blog post has taken me over an hour to write, and again, this is on my mini laptop computer.  Given that I can generally type far faster than I can speak, that should give some indication of the degree of my dysfunction.

That’s it, I’m done with this for today, I’m out of here.  I unfortunately did not die yet this morning, so here we go again with the blog post.  Couldn’t I at least be hospitalized?  Heavy sigh.  I guess I’ll finish with a quote from a great artist who took what was probably the sensible course: “Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

*All Out of Spoons was the original title for the old Air Supply song All Out of Love, but they decided that wasn’t catchy enough**.

**That’s a lie, of course.  At least, it is as far as I know.

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*Or as title

It’s another Wednesday morning, and I’m not walking to the train again this morning, because my feet blisters are still quite irritated.  It’s so frustrating; why were they okay on Saturday and Sunday but not on Monday?  Did I overdo it?  Or‒as I suspect‒did my socks influence things?

I wore a different type of sock on Monday than I had on the weekend.  I also wore that preventative ankle brace on my right foot, and that is the foot on which the majority of my blister problems developed.  Is that a coincidence?  Quite possibly, of course.  Don’t let Sherlock and Mycroft tell you otherwise with their apparently clever but illogical and quasi-magical notion that the universe rarely indulges in coincidence.  Except for things that are literally causally related, there is nothing that isn’t coincidence.

Of course, from another point of view, nothing is coincidence.  Everything follows the laws of physics‒or the laws of nature, or however you wish to characterize it‒and can do nothing but what it does when it does it.  That doesn’t mean it has any meaning beyond that, from the human point of view.  For instance, the idea that the universe is “sending you a message” is absurd, unless some specific person, who is of course a part of the universe, literally sends you a message.

I’ve often said that while everything has a cause or causes, many things‒almost everything, as far as I can see‒has nothing that a human would call a reason.  This is the old teleology error that goes at least as far back as Aristotle*.

I had no intention to write about all that today, but often the only way for me to know what I’m going to write at any given time is to start writing.

You might have noticed‒well, I doubt anyone was really paying attention, but now that I’m telling you it’s going to be much easier to catch‒that I have not indented my paragraphs today.  Before, I was trying to see how pleasing it was to indent manually while writing in Google Docs, in case I might decide to try again to write fiction, and to do it on Google Docs.  I’m sorry to say, I’ve felt no urge nor even any real willingness to write fiction.  I’ll probably never write any fiction again.  I’m getting pretty close to the point of not writing anything anymore.

I’m really just exhausted, in more than one sense of the word.  I hurt every fucking day, and have to dose myself with various things to keep it at least under control enough that I can carry out reasonably normal functions (for me, anyway).  I haven’t read for more than about twenty minutes total in the last week or week and a half.  I haven’t played my guitar in weeks, maybe more than a month.  I barely even listen to music**.  In fact, I tried to give my black Strat away, but that wasn’t really workable, and the person to whom I offered it was just confused.

Every little thing feels overwhelming.  The only thing I do in spare time is wander through things like Instagram and Threads, which are already starting to get boring.  Occasionally I will see things that are funny or interesting or frustrating, and sometimes I’ll even make comments that other people find interesting or funny or whatever.  But what’s the point?  I don’t feel a scintilla of any connection there; it’s not even an awkward conversation.  Not that it hasn’t been useful and sometimes enjoyable‒it has.  But I don’t have any friends there.

I also don’t really have any friends anywhere else (except if you count quite old friends, far away, with whom I rarely interact anymore).  I have “work friends” who are really more work acquaintances.  There’s no one with whom I share any time or interests outside of work.  I certainly don’t talk to my neighbors, nor to anyone on the train.

It’s been more than twenty years since I had a day without feeling constant pain (except rare moments of high-medication, which provides its own “fun”) and probably thirty years since I had a good night’s sleep without the use of heavy doses of sleep aids of one kind or another.  I’ve tried to get healthy during this time, don’t get me wrong.  I’m stubborn; I do not give up easily.  That’s probably the only reason I’m still alive, but it has other drawbacks as well.

What I ought to do is give up even trying to be healthy, even trying to get stronger or to thrive or even to survive.  Of course, knowing me, unrestrained self-indulgence in self-destructive practices would probably lead me to become unreasonably healthy and successful.

Nah, that’s not going to happen.  It would make a funny story, but the universe doesn’t seem particularly predisposed to irony, even if humans seem to love it and “find” it even where it is not.

I’m done for today, I think.  I wonder, if I didn’t ever write another blog post, how many people would notice, and then for how long they would keep wondering if I would return and how long it would be before they forgot about me entirely.  I suspect it would be a very short time.

*Anagrams include “a tit loser” and “tater silo”.  Also, see the top of this post.

**And when I do, it’s usually “reaction” videos to songs I know, because watching these feels almost like sharing a beloved song with a friend.

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Monday morning nonsense

     It’s Monday again; aren’t you all just delighted?  I’m writing this on my smartphone, starting at the train station, after having walked here from the house.

     I did a lot of walking this weekend:  about ten and a half miles on Saturday, then a little over six on Sunday, then just about six so far today.  My new shoes seem to be a good choice so far.  Of course, I have some modest blistering on my right foot (I’m not entirely sure why it’s only on the right, though I have a hypothesis or two) but not enough to cause serious trouble.  The goal is to try just to do more and more of my traveling on foot and to get in better condition‒not just because of the sort of things that filled me with rage on Friday morning, but also just to try to get myself healthier, or at least stronger.

     Of course, the popular wisdom is that regular exercise like walking can help with depression, though I’ve never been completely convinced by the data I’ve seen on that.  Also, to be honest, I had some of my worst trouble with depression in college when I was doing pretty serious exercise.  I was running six plus miles and doing ridiculous numbers of push ups and so on at the time.  Perhaps my episodes of depression had (and still have) more to do with burnout, possibly from masking and related ASD based issues than with more garden-variety depression.  Who knows?

     This was a momentous weekend, holiday-wise.  It was the end of Passover and yesterday was also Easter (they tend to fall around the same time of year and that’s no mere coincidence‒remember that Jesus’s “last supper” was a Passover Seder).  And for those for whom marijuana is a bit of a modern sacrament, yesterday was 4/20, which for some reason is the number related to marijuana use.  I’ve heard some rather dubious explanations for that association, but since I don’t have any convincing reasons to believe any given one, I won’t get into it.

     Yesterday was also a day of very important remembrance for me, and for some modicum of hope related to that remembrance.  But that hope was unfulfilled, which unfortunately comes as no surprise.  I really need to stop with any and all “hope” nonsense.  What’s the line from A Christmas Carol about comfort?  It comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers to other kinds of men.  That about sums up the notion of “hope” when it comes to me.

     I really don’t have any hope for anything good at all in the world, and particularly not for me.  Look at the state of things, and the degree to which reason and ethics seem to have deteriorated.  Is human civilization even worth saving?  I suppose there are many innocent people among the throng of humans, and it would be a shame for them to suffer unnecessarily just because a vocal, moronic minority causes so much trouble.  But good grief, it can be frustrating.

     As for me and my life, well…there’s nothing much to say.  I suppose we’ll see if, after enough time doing it, my walking will help my outlook and my mood.  At the very least, it might help my physical condition.  That’s a positive thing, assuming all other things are equal.

     I’m not going to get into political discussion right now, though I will say that I would rather hear the thoughts of the dead worm in RFK, Jr’s head than whatever nonsense he voices with his own minimally functioning brain.  He’s just pathetic.

     Of course, pathetic is the typical order of things, and I certainly match that adjective, myself…but not in the way he does.

     Anyway, I’m a bit sleepy, probably from the long walk, and I’m on the train now.  I’m going to make this blog post short today; maybe tomorrow I’ll write more and something of greater interest or consequence.  Or, maybe I’ll get hit by a truck while crossing a street or something.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, though it would be a shame to screw up an honest truck driver’s workday.

     In any case, I hope you all had a very good weekend and that you also have a very good week.  Actually, even if you didn’t have a good weekend, I hope you have a good week.  You might as well.  You are readers, and readers are the people who embrace the greatest invention of the human race.  Please do your best to encourage and spread that love.  Written language is still the best thing we have.

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I am a detriment…goo goo ga choob

I’m feeling very grumpy this morning, which isn’t anything new; grumpiness is a common part of chronic depression (AKA dysthymia).

I have known some people who find anger/grumpiness preferable to being simply down and discouraged, but I really don’t like being angry.  I feel wrong and evil and ashamed when I get angry.

My inherent instinct when angry is to want to act on my anger physically; I’m not a big verbal arguer.  At least, if I am arguing verbally, it’s generally not in anger, but entails me trying to explore the truth (or otherwise) of a particular topic and to spread or gain better understanding of it.  But when actually feeling anger, what I want to do is to destroy the object of my anger, literally, so that I don’t ever have to worry about it again, whatever it might be.

I guess I’ll just have to deal.  Or maybe I’ll finally just lose my temper and get into serious and severe trouble.  More likely, I’ll just take my anger out physically on myself, as I usually do.

I have excellent “self-denial subroutines” to keep me from hurting other people (though not so much to keep me from hurting myself).  As I’ve said before, I have an instinctive sense that I do not have any right to comfort or satisfaction with pretty much anything.  So, I don’t usually even try, because as often as not, at least when I notice, trying makes things blow up in my face.

This relates, at least tangentially, to an interaction I had yesterday on Threads.  Someone there had posted something along the lines of “my therapist told me she was proud of me today”.  I thought that seemed quite nice, and I answered, honestly but with a bit of self-deprecation, that I didn’t think I had ever had a therapist say they were proud of me.  I added a little ^_^ emoticon to make it clear that I wasn’t moaning about it, just trying to take a light-hearted approach and reinforce the fact that this person’s therapist’s words were positive and nice and unfortunately rare.

Then, a little while later, the original poster replied to my comment, saying she was proud of me that at least I was going.

That’s a little saddening and embarrassing, because I am not currently going to therapy.  I’ve gone to therapy quite a lot in the past; my comment was not a fictional one.  But I haven’t gone in a long while.  The last time I felt desperate enough and tried to do therapy through BetterHelp—which I chose because I could not find a way to go to a therapist’s office and work it into my schedule—I had just gotten started working with a therapist there and feeling relatively comfortable when she had to go on extended maternity leave.

I don’t hold that against her, obviously, but it was frustrating, verging on heartbreaking, if you don’t mind me seeming a bit melodramatic.  I had really needed to force myself to try to go through with that and to start with a therapist*; to have it suddenly vanish was both frustrating and deflating.

It’s a bit similar to my catastrophic interaction with the suicide hotline years ago, when morons from the PBSO came and got me and handcuffed me and took me to a shithole mental health place, where I was for all of twenty-four hours.  At least I got a brief referral through that place, but I didn’t really stick with it, and of course, I ended up going to FSP before too long, anyway.

Since then, I have been particularly nervous about using the hotline, though there have been many times when I’ve looked at it online, and even more times when my search engines have recommended it to me based on some web search I’ve been doing.  I did give up and use it once, a year or two ago, refusing to divulge my location to them.  But even with that, it’s very nerve-racking to seek help in a time of crisis and to have to worry about some Barney Fife type coming and taking you away.

If I wanted to be hospitalized for my mental illness**, I would go to a hospital.  I know how to do that.  I’m not afraid of hospitals.  I just don’t think they would actually do me any good.  I’m not convinced that anything will do me any good.

This is not mere pessimism (though that surely enters into my figuring).  It’s just that the human race has not understood the mind and brain well enough to have reliable treatments for certain things.  It’s a bit analogous to the plague, which is caused by infection with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, if memory serves, and which is easily treatable (nowadays) with simple, common antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin.  But if you got the plague before antibiotics were invented, going to a hospital for treatment would be pointless, useless, and probably counter-productive.

Anyway, I’m going on and on about nothing, and using more words than necessary to do so.  In case you couldn’t tell, I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, so the words flow more easily.  But it’s all just me flailing about like a paranoid, feral cat.  When you can’t know what you can trust or upon what or whom you can rely, the natural reaction can be just to keep your distance from everyone and everything, because some things that seem like they might be helpful will end up hurting you more—and yes, it seems always possible for one to suffer more than one already is.

So, though I’m chagrined to have been told by someone that they were proud of me for doing something I’m no longer doing, I don’t necessarily think I’m wrong not to do it—though I recognize that I may be fooling myself or even that my thinking may be frankly distorted.  Maybe I would do better with therapy now that I know I have ASD (the brain kind, not the heart kind).  I don’t know.

Sorry for this post going nowhere.  I apologize for wasting your time, and for wasting the time of everyone else who’s ever had to interact with me.  I’m sure all my former therapists could have used their time better by seeing someone else during the hours they saw me.

There’s little doubt in my mind that if I had actually killed myself in the past, on one of the occasions on which I almost did so, the world would probably be at least a slightly less miserable place where I currently sit.  And while all possibilities of happiness would have been foreclosed for me, at least I would no longer be lonely and in pain and overflowing with self-loathing.

*I tried to get in touch with the therapist I had seen most recently (before my whole debacle).  Actually, “try” is misleading; I did get in touch with her, but she was no longer seeing patients, and in any case, she didn’t have any offices that would have been reachable from where I now live and work without a car.  I asked for recommendations in the area, which she provided, but that still would have required driving, so I had to resort to online help.

**I hate that people euphemistically refer to psychological/psychiatric troubles as “mental health” as in the rather absurd statement “suffering from or dealing with mental health”.  That’s like saying someone is troubled by physical fitness.  No, I suffer from mental illness.  It’s not mental health.  It’s the opposite of mental health.  I wouldn’t even know what it would mean to suffer from mental health, but it doesn’t matter, because mental health is something with which I am not burdened.  Likewise, I do not bear the burden of physical comfort, I suffer from chronic pain.  These pathetic, touchy-feelie euphemisms seem counter-productive to me.