despair

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And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale blog of thought

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again—the first Thursday of the new year, the first Thursday of the month, and the second day of 2025 (AD or CE depending upon your preference).

I’m heading in to the office already this morning.  It’s not the first day back to work in the new year, though; we worked yesterday, as well, and it was quite a longish day.  We also worked on New Year’s Eve, though we got out an hour earlier than we would have because I shook my head and expressed some outrage (I was in an even more foul mood than usual) that we were not getting off early.  I didn’t have any celebration to attend nor anyone waiting for me, but I thought others might want to get to something of the sort, and anyway, I just really wanted to escape the noise.

It was ridiculous that we worked yesterday (though unfortunately it turned out to be a successful business day).  In the plaza in which our office sits, we were the only business open, and this is a full-scale strip mall with dozens of shops and restaurants and offices.  The people at work who wanted vapes or to get something from the bakery or from the nearby restaurant were all out of luck.  The only places open were gas stations and our office.

Oh, and also my coworker, the one with whom I share various duties, was out sick Tuesday and left early yesterday.  This is not his fault, obviously, unless you mean it’s a design fault, but that fault is true of everyone, and my coworker certainly didn’t design himself.  But it meant that, especially on Tuesday, when I had to do payroll in addition to the other stuff, I was particularly frazzled.

It didn’t help that I knew, quite painfully, that I was not going to be “celebrating” the new year.  Why would I celebrate it when I had wished or yearned throughout the year for 2024 to be my last year?

In fact, on Tuesday—that was New Year’s Eve, in case you didn’t put that together and/or you’re reading this well after it was written—when I was feeling more horrible and stressed out and angry and sad than even I have felt in a long time, I developed a plan, if it merits that term.  I was not hungry during the day, and so I did not eat anything at all.  It occurred to me that I had a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at the house and about half a bottle of vodka as well.  They have both been there for quite some time, since I rarely drink.

My thought was this:  I’ve been on a relatively low carb diet for a few weeks, so I have relatively little stored glycogen relative to the usual amount; what glucose was in my system was probably largely the product of gluconeogenesis, which is the creation of sugar from various amino acids, mainly by the liver.  I figured on stopping at a gas station near the train station when I was heading back to the house and picking up some bottles of Diet Coke (which also has no sugar, of course) and then that evening drinking vodka and Diet Coke and Jack and Diet Coke, all on an empty stomach.  This would have not only the obvious effects of alcohol in disinhibiting behavior, but ethanol also suppresses gluconeogenesis—this fact is responsible for at least some of the typical effects of a hangover.

My thought process, if it merits those words, was basically to hope to get drunk enough and hypoglycemic enough either maybe to have a seizure (unlikely) or just to loosen my inhibitions enough that I would have the courage to use one of the means of suicide that I keep always nearby nowadays*.

When I thought about my plan, though, as the day went on and I finally headed back to the house, it seemed like a pain to stop in the gas station.  I was already exhausted.  I figured, okay, well, I can just drink liquor straight.  Once you get started, once the alcohol begins to take effect, drinking it becomes easier.  However, the thought of being drunk felt very unpleasant, and more importantly, I knew that if I did not work up the strength to go through with my “plan”, drinking the alcohol, especially with no food, would probably lead to a severe exacerbation of my chronic pain.

So, instead, I watched some stupid videos, feeling regretful but not willing to risk worse pain in an attempt to do an end run around the bastard urge for self-preservation and escape my constant physical and psychical pain.  I took something to help me go to sleep (which I don’t usually do on work nights), and I puttered around listening to the sound of all the amateur fireworks going off, feeling annoyed by them, for several hours, and I did not die—not even of natural causes.  And despite my attempts, I slept less than usual, largely because of the noise, but also partly due to my (very inner and apparently unrecognizable to others) turmoil.

And here I am, writing the first blog post of the new year.  I’m alive, and I’m not happy.  I have no friends, my family is far away, and I certainly have no capacity to try to upend and alter where I am, anyway, not on my own—the very prospect of trying to change my life, to move, to go somewhere else, these things are horribly stressful inherently, and I have no strong reason to think any of them would make any difference for me.  I am fundamentally alone, and I probably have always been so, despite past temporary delusions to the contrary.

Of course, so is everyone else, I guess, depending on how you mean it.

Anyway, here we are.  I’m working this Saturday, so I guess I’ll probably write a post then, too.  How lucky for you and for me, right?

yippee.

Well, my train’s about to arrive.  I hope you enjoyed this little, shitty blog post, and that you’re having just a wonderful new year already.  Yeah, right.

TTFN

*I have no fewer than two good lengths of rope, both tied into quite good nooses; a goodly supply of flammable liquids (more than three gallons) with which I could self-immolate; of course I have numerous blades, including very sharp razors and scalpels and box cutters and the like, with which I could open up some arteries; and I have various OTC medications that, especially in combination, could be toxic enough to be lethal.  Also, I’ve been scouting the area for easily accessible high places without closed-in roofs (mainly parking structures) which are high enough that, if I jumped, it would probably be fatal.  I have no guns anymore, alas, but there’s always the nearby Atlantic Ocean, always within sensible walking distance, and then again, there’s always just the long, open road.

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Making blog post headlines out of Shakespearean quotes is boring

Hello and good morning yet again.

It’s now the first full day of Hanukkah, and‒it being the day after Christmas‒it is Boxing Day, at least in the UK and the Commonwealth, and there are possibly other former colonies that recognize the day.

I’ve not found a very good explanation for the name Boxing Day, but I haven’t tried very hard.  It’s not like it matters.  It’s also not very interesting.  For me, at least, it just serves as the basis for a few stupid, tired jokes around the holidays, based on the more common modern meaning of the word “boxing”.

As for other things…

Huh.  I don’t really have any other things going on.  I didn’t do anything yesterday except take a walk to 7-11 and back, which totals a little over three miles.  That’s it.  I got out of work quite a bit later than everybody else on Tuesday, because the final report we needed to do the payroll didn’t arrive until quite a bit later than hoped, and its contents required a lot of work and adjustments.  At least it was quieter once the others in the office left at lunch to do whatever they were going to do with friends and family and/or loved ones.

Sorry.  That’s all very boring, I know, and not really worth writing about.  Trust me, I find it boring as well.  Pretty much everything about me and my life is boring.  And, not to be insulting, but pretty much everything about everyone else’s life is boring to me.  Even seemingly momentous events in the world are boring, and all the celebrities and politicians and billionaires and artists and other prominent people are supremely boring.  Even war and disaster and all those kinds of things are boring, and they also often have the added detriment of being profoundly stupid.

Even science and scientists and science communicators are boring.  The usual science and math YouTube channels I tend to watch would need to throw in some manner of long distance back massage for me to want to watch them most of the time nowadays.  Ditto for podcasts.  Even my favorite science books have been drained to the dregs.

Music, whether listening to it or playing it, is boring.

And, of course, this blog is a waste of time.  Not just this post, but all of it, from the beginning.  It didn’t end up promoting my books, which was my original reason for doing it.  Most of the copies of my books that have been purchased were purchased by me, given to people I know, or people with whom I work and so on, so what money I made from them was money I had spent.

It also clearly hasn’t helped my mental health, or if it has, it didn’t do it very much.  If anything, such help as it has provided has simply prolonged my dreariness.

It’s also not as though it’s worked as a way to reconnect with any old friends, nor really to make new ones‒a few people comment regularly, and that’s nice, but that’s it.  It certainly has failed‒in a very big way‒as a “cry for help”, which is really disappointing, since that was sort of my Princess Leia’s message*.

It’s not surprising, though.  For people to want to help someone, the object of that help has to be worth helping, not to be someone whom helping would actually harm the world.  Who would save Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot if they were drowning and all onlookers knew who the drowners were and what they had done?

Chronic pain is boring‒and not just in the “boring into you like a drill” sense, though both can coincide.  Insomnia is boring.  And unfortunately, work‒I’m working today and tomorrow, but not on Saturday‒is boring and yet often irritating.  I guess it gives me someplace to go and to be, and to have a few interactions with humans, some of whom I actually like.  But I quickly become boring to them if I talk about things in which I’m interested.

Reading pretty much anything is boring, which is tantamount (for me) to saying that breathing is boring.

But breathing is boring.  It’s tedious and irritating and frustrating to have to keep breathing, and to have to keep eating and drinking and excreting.  Life is something the only value of which is self-justifying, circular, and tautological.  It doesn’t have any extrinsic value‒how could it?  Only living things can value things, so of course they’re prone to imagine that life is important, in the same sense that the laws of nature are important, but it’s not.

From the outside, death is boring, too.  From the outside, however, only the living are assessing it.  From the inside, actual death is neither boring nor exciting.  It is nothing and it is nothingness.  It’s not even like a never-ending dial tone or the endless static of an empty TV channel.  It is, rather, whatever is north of the north pole.

In other words, to imagine experiencing the state of being dead is nonsensical.  When a snowflake melts, the water molecules remain, but there is nothing left of the snowflake, no residual touch in those water molecules of anything that retains the specific former pattern.  The molecules may each go on to be part of many future snowflakes or frost patterns or blocks of ice, but there is no more, no deeper connection to the original flake than there is in a stone from Mount Everest that’s now being used as a doorstop in Siberia.

And this post has long since become boring.  My apologies.

TTFN

*As in “Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi.  You’re my only hope.”

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But darkness and the gloomy blog of death environ you…

Hello and good morning.

If you’re a regular reader, you know what day it must be if I’m using that opening phrase.  It’s Thursday, the third one in December of 2024 AD (or CE if you prefer).  There’s only one more week until Boxing Day, so keep your training up!

You should probably take a rest on the day before Boxing Day‒“Boxing Eve”, if you will, though there are other names for the day, I’m led to understand.  In many places, people take Boxing Eve off from work, so it might be a good time to kick back and relax your body, to let it recover from your training.  Get a decent meal with plenty of protein, but abstain from alcoholic beverages* entirely.  And keep the refined carbs to a minimum.

Also, of course, you should not listen to songs like Baker Street, or Careless Whisper, or Turn the Page.  While it’s slightly controversial, many experts agree that one should avoid sax before a fight.  You might even want to avoid Feels So Good, by Chuck Mangione, for though he plays the flugelhorn, not the saxophone, the sound is similar, and science is not entirely certain which aspect of the sax’s sound interferes with boxing ability.

It may simply be that it leaves a person too relaxed and at ease to be at their fiercest.  So, perhaps one should just avoid soothing music altogether, and stick with environments that keep one hostile and alert.  Remember what Palatine said about anger:  “It gives you focus…makes you stronger.”

Fortunately, many people find the traditional Boxing Eve celebrations with family quite stressful and irritating.  You gotta hold on to that fury.

All right, enough of that silliness.

Next week is also the beginning of Hanukkah, the first night of which begins on Boxing Eve (also known as “Christmas”, which is a curious amalgam of Saturnalia and the Nordic Yule grafted onto the celebration of the birth of the founder of an obscure Jewish sect).  None of this stuff is really of any consequence to me, though; I’m not celebrating anything.  What cause would I have to celebrate, and with whom would I do so?  Nothing and no one.

I’m frankly discouraged that it looks like I’m going to be around to see a new year.  Of course, every day is, in principle, the beginning of a new year, just as every second begins a new hour, and every day is the last day of your life so far, for whatever that’s worth.  I wouldn’t think it would be worth very much, but who knows?  Worth is a very subjective thing.  It can be intersubjective, but unless you’re talking about things like food, water, air, and shelter, most values are related to the valuer and the culture such a valuer shares with other valuers.

Stepping farther back, even the seemingly inherent value in things like food, water, air, and shelter is predicated entirely on the needs of living creatures‒subjects, if you will.  Life itself is an entirely subjective value, at least in that sense.

Please note that I’m not saying that reality is subjective!  One’s personal experience of reality is, to some degree, subjective, but reality itself is what it is, not what individual persons believe it to be…unless those persons happen to believe it to be as it is, whether through luck or discerning thought and perception.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  I tend to try to cloak my inner darkness in humor and whimsy for other people’s sake.  This might fool you into thinking you’re seeing someone who’s not really unwell, not really so down, not really doing all that badly.  Similarly, an active accretion disk might make you think a particular astronomical object is inherently bright, staggeringly so even.  But that radiance is merely the conflagration of all the matter spinning and colliding and accelerating and trying to squeeze into limited, rotating spacetime before passing the event horizon.

With the exception of Hawking radiation‒which is smaller and fainter the larger the black hole‒the event horizon is a surface of absolute darkness, at least from the outside.

You might ask why there could not be something even darker than a lack of light, perhaps some form of antilight.  But, no.  Photons are bosons, and bosons are, in a sense, their own antiparticles, so the opposite of light is just light.  Under normal circumstances, bosons don’t self-annihilate, though they can destructively interfere, in a fairly straightforward, wave dynamics kind of way.

This blog post, and the blog itself, is in a sense my accretion disk.  It may be hot and sometimes bright, in an ordinary incandescent way, but so many things burn and flare, hot and bright and fierce and beautiful, even as they fall to ashes, never then to shine again, reduced to a state of maximum local entropy.

And, at the heart of the black hole‒at least in GR, avoiding quantum mechanical concerns**‒lies the singularity.  It’s appropriate.  The center is a singular entity‒like a singular person‒which does not entail anything but an end to time itself, the complete obliteration of anything and everything and everyone that it encounters.

No wonder people stay away from such individuals.

TTFN

*In some cultures, people tend to drink alcoholic beverages on Boxing Eve.

**Which you can’t really do, to be honest; see my point about reality not being subjective.

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The second of the “10th” that is the twelfth

It’s the first Monday of December in 2024‒December 2nd, specifically, meaning that the 1st fell on a Sunday, which means that there will be a Friday the 13th in this month*‒and I thought I would write a brief blog post for the day.  I don’t know if anyone was hoping for that, but it’s happening.

It’s relatively cool down here for south Florida; it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit when I left the house, which is, let’s see…(55-32) * 5/9, so 23 * 5/9, so 115/9, so just under 13 degrees Centigrade/Celsius.  That’s also about 286 Kelvin, but the Kelvin scale is a bit inconvenient for most day-to-day temperature readings.

I could’ve just looked all that up online, but I think it’s good for the mind, and for people in general, to know and remember (and apply) the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, even if only for the mental exercise.  If we turn everything over to apps and computers, then eventually no one (or at least very few people) will even remember what such things mean or where they come from, or why.

Anyway, it’s something with which to keep one’s mind occupied.

There’s not much for me to do or to say, anymore.  I’m just killing time while waiting for time to kill me, so to speak.  That’s all I see myself doing from now on.  I have no goals or hopes or dreams or anything.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids again, or that I’ll ever see any of my other family and/or friends, or that I’ll make any new friends, let alone any kind of “new family”.

I’m not cut out for meeting new people or making new friends on my own.  I never have been.  All my old friends were people I knew from school‒junior high, high school, university, medical school, residency, all that.  I’m basically alone, and I think I will be for the rest of my life‒which hopefully won’t be very long, because it’s really quite pointless and stupid, and I’m pointless and stupid, and so is the world as a whole.

Hopefully, some day soon I’ll be able to say to you all, “this is my last ever blog post”, because it will be one of my last ever anything.  I’m so tired, and I’m stressed, and I’m in pain, and I’m depressed, and I can’t sleep for shit, and above all, I’m alone.  I’m sick of just about everything that I do, and I’m very much sick of myself.

And, frankly, the world as a whole, the universe as a whole, is just irritating and stupid and such a waste of potential.  There’s no point to any of it, and it’s not even headed in any kind of positive direction.

As Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”.  I suspect that’s just the nature of things, since passionate intensity tends to be the habit of those with a dogmatic turn of mind, and those tend to be the people who do the most damage, who commit the most destruction:  precisely the people who believe that they are right, that they know what’s morally right, and that belief gives them carte blanche to do what they claim to think is right and fumigates all their deeds from any possibility of wrongdoing (in their own heads, at least).

Dogmatic thinking tends to be profoundly dangerous and destructive.  “Certainty” kills.  That’s why I say, “Spay and neuter your dogmas.”  We don’t need or want them to spread and reproduce.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, enough for a lifetime, enough for eternity, whatever.  I hope you all have a pretty good week and month and so on, or even better than pretty good, if possible.

*If you stop and think about it, this will almost certainly be obvious, since the 2nd week of such a month will run, Sunday through Saturday on the 8th through the 14th, which means the 13th is a Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

destroyer

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

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

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

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Mishegas from a misanthropic, moribund, misbegotten former Michigander

It’s very early on Tuesday morning, and I’m already at the office.  I’m not going to be writing any fiction today, unless you count any pretense I make at coherence here in this blog post.

I had a very bad sleep last night, despite taking some diphenhydramine*.  I felt relatively optimistic at the beginning of the week (yesterday), with thoughts of reading some science and/or mathematics and/or other books when there was occasional downtime.  But then, of course, people arrived at the office and started talking and making other noise, and then the “music” was started, and I could not concentrate.

And, back at the house, the air conditioning and fan were, perforce, churning, since it’s quite hot and humid around here.  That’s better than the office noise, because at least it’s steady and sort of “white noise”, but it’s still physically irritating in the small, confined space of my room, especially accompanying, as it does, my now-bilateral tinnitus.

“‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’ spake then the apostate angel, ‘this the site, that we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom for that eternal light?'”

Nah, I’ll pass.

I’m trying to be optimistic, or at least to be upbeat.  I’m trying very hard to act as if I’m doing better–playing guitar, writing fiction–in hopes that it will become real.  “Dream that what is dreamed will be.”  I know that I can physically endure, if necessary…but for what purpose, to what end?  It’s just a cycle from dreary to noisy to lonely to turbulent to idiotic to angry to absurd back to dreary and so on, all set against a landscape of chronic pain and self-loathing, accompanied by a constant, high-pitched whine (and no, I don’t mean the fact that I’m whining about it, though I am).

I know, I know:  “Shut up, no one wants to hear about it, everyone has their own issues, just suck it up and walk it off and lather, rinse, repeat.  Everyone suffers, everyone has problems, everybody hurts, yada yada yada.”  This is supposed to, what…make a person want to stick around in the world?  Or is it a somewhat subtle way of encouraging someone just to get gone already, to leave the world to the vapid troglodytes?

I’m so tired.  I don’t have anything to which to look forward.  The only advantage of weekends, even, is that I don’t have to deal with the foolishness and the overhead noise in the office…but then I don’t really do anything on the weekends, either.  I can’t even seem to read, now.  My brain is frazzled and fried and other words beginning with “f”.

Hmm…let’s see…

Fudge’s face froze, feeling forsaken from fair freedom’s fiefdom, foundering forlornly, foully fettered, finding few facts, fearing fundamental farragoes, fleeting facets fabricated from Facebook**.

Oh, for fuck’s fake***!  I need to stop.  Is it any wonder I don’t have people with whom to hang out?  Is it any wonder that eventually even people who love me find it better to do so from a distance?  I, at least, don’t find it surprising.  I don’t even like my own company, honestly, and I’m often driven to punish myself in various ways when I get too wound up…that way, at least, I don’t go off on other people.

I don’t have any idea what I’m trying to accomplish here today, other than perhaps to convey the message, “Look, I wrote a blog post today, even though I didn’t write any fiction!”  Also, I suppose, to try to let people know that I’m slowly, and perhaps subtly, crashing.  It’s a bit (I imagine) like trying to stay above the surface of a vast body of a very viscous liquid that nevertheless has a specific gravity much lower than water.  One cannot float on it, anymore than one could float on the surface of gasoline, but the process of sinking is a slow one (because of the viscosity), so one can “swim” or “tread liquid” to stay on the surface, but it requires constant effort, and the stickiness makes it harder, and there’s no land in sight.

Oh, well.  Life doesn’t promise anyone a rose garden.  Even if one gets a rose garden, there are always thorns (or, technically, according to botanists, “prickles”, but “Every rose has its prickle” doesn’t work as well as a lyric).

A hemlock garden would be better.  If the umbels are tall and fair, one might even encounter Tinúviel dancing among them to a pipe unseen.  And I hear the plant can be used to make an interesting tea, though no man (or plucked chicken) tends to drink it more than once.

All right, all right, that’s enough nonsense.  Sorry.  Have a good day.

*I originally wrote that as “diphenhydrazine”, which is a peculiar typo to make–would that be rocket fuel with a benzyl ring attached at each end of every molecule?

**Sorry.  The ending of the previous comment made me want to see if I could write an entire long sentence in which every word begins with “f” and that nevertheless at least makes some form of sense, grammatically if in no other way.

***Use this last “f” as an archaically written “s”, such as one can sometimes see in old English documents, e.g., “feveral”.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”

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A monotone audio blog that may or may not be monotonous in other senses

Here is the audio recording I did this morning because I didn’t feel like typing anything.  As you will hear (if you listen) I am not really feeling very upbeat, even for me.  Sorry.  I don’t know if I have anything at all interesting to say.  If I do, well…enjoy, I guess.

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I’ll rack thee with old cramps, fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar that beasts shall tremble at thy blog.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing one of my old “Thursday-style” blog posts, or at least I’m trying to do that.  I’m not sure how well it’ll come out, since I’m feeling rather poorly right now, but that’s mainly pain-related.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a brief respite from pain, or at least a significant reduction in it.  It got to the point where my spirits rose, and I joked a bit with coworkers, that sort of thing.  Nothing major, of course, but in the morning I had been thoroughly anti-social, wanting to snap on everyone from my boss to the few particularly irritating people in the office.  One of these latter had the gall to pat me on the shoulder from behind—while I was working on something—and I snarled at him not to touch me.

Mind you, that’s not new; I feel very awkward about people touching me, especially when they’re being irritating yet are trying to display some kind of manufactured camaraderie, and I’m trying to work on something important at my desk.  Also, this person had arrived late, as he frequently does, yet suffered not so much as a rebuke, and even got paid his “spiff” which is supposed to be forfeited when someone is late with good excuse.

As he walked away, I grumbled, “I’ll cut your fucking hand off.”  At the time, I meant it, but I’m not sure he heard.  Apparently, I don’t have a good sense of how to speak up so that people can hear me, even though I feel like I’m speaking just fine.

Anyway, in the afternoon I had less pain than usual, for unclear reasons, and that was good.  As I walked to the train station after work, it was cloudy and a bit drizzly and windy, but far from being displeased, I felt almost as if someone somewhere had decided to give me weather that felt at least a bit autumnal—which it did—as if in response to my blog post yesterday.  It was quite nice.  And I started thinking about getting back into long walking, and maybe some hiking and whatnot.  I was absurdly optimistic for a brief time.

I even brought my little laptop with me when I left the office.  That’s what I’m using to write this.

Overnight, however, my pain has resurged with a vengeance.  First my low back and down my left hip and knee and calf and thigh and foot and ankle flared up, waking me in the night, and I applied my little massage gun as best I could—after taking some analgesics, of course.  I soothed it enough to go back to sleep, but shortly thereafter woke up with my right side doing the same thing.  Now they’re both acting up, and it’s hard to stand up from a seated position because both of my hips hurt a lot when I do.  I’ve tried all along to exercise and stretch and adjust, and to do all the other interventions I can bring to mind, all the time, over and over, but it’s difficult to tell what, if anything, makes a difference.

I don’t know what led to my brief lull of pain yesterday afternoon.  I don’t know what made it act up again last night and through to now.  I don’t know if weather changes affect it, I don’t know if that’s just a bias or a random, illusory correlation.  I try very hard to be objective, but I can’t figure out what to do.

Of course, my hands—especially my thumbs—and my shoulders and my neck are also sore and stiff, but compared to the chronic pain in the entire lower half of my body, they’re almost pleasant by comparison.

I’m sorry to keep boring you all with this.  I would love to discuss something interesting and likely to incite wonder or at least curiosity.  But evolution has shaped pain to be difficult to ignore, unfortunately.  If you find it tedious and irritating, just imagine how it is for me.  You already have preemptive revenge upon me, for I have to live with it, and can’t even walk away to get a break, at least not in any predictable fashion.  Right now, on both sides, my entire body from about umbilicus level or so on down is one contiguous, 7 out of 10 ache, and my hands and my shoulders are stiff and sore.  And I can’t take anything else in the way of meds at the moment without it being frankly toxic, and also probably making me want to throw up again.

I have had various epidurals and other more invasive interventions in the past—including surgery, as you may recall—and yet here I am.  I have no desire to be put on prescription pain medicine again.  I’ve been through that, and I think the way it affected my thought processes didn’t help with the whole crash and burn through which my career and my life have gone.

The weather is so hot that it’s hard to deal with going for walks because I get so sweaty, but maybe what I really should do is just do what I’ve so often thought of doing:  go out and start walking, and keep walking (with rests as necessary) until it kills me or until I feel better—or both, I suppose, that’s not out of the realm of possibility.  I really don’t know what to do.  But, of course, I’m still doing this blog post, so I haven’t headed off into the sunrise yet, and right now, the process of even walking to the bus stop is daunting.

I may order a Lyft to get to the train station, or an Uber, whichever is cheaper.  I hate to waste the money, but I haven’t the energy to do other things.  By now, I could have bought an electric-assist bike or one of those electric scooters, and it probably wouldn’t have been much more expensive than car services.

I honestly and strongly hope that every last one of the people reading this feels much better than I do right now.  That would at least be some consolation for me, and not a small consolation at that.  I want you to have good lives and be happy, and to have friends and family around you, and to live among people who make at least a modicum of sense to you.  I hope you don’t feel like aliens in your own environments.

It doesn’t feel like too much to ask.  Maybe it is.  Anyway, I’m done with the blog post today, but there will very likely be one tomorrow.  Why would I stop rolling this boulder, after all?

TTFN

skelington