despair

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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

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…or close the blog up with our English dead.

BrokenWall

 

Good morning, everyone.  It’s Thursday again, and time for another weekly blog post.

I wish that I had more that was new to share, or at least different from what I usually discuss.  I’m quite afraid that I’m going to bore those who read my blog every week.  Unfortunately, the process of writing—at least as it refers to long novels and/or to songs written and performed individually in snatches of very limited spare time—is a long one, and it doesn’t change noticeably from day to day or even from week to week.

Unanimity is proceeding well.  I’m nicely into the third editing run-through, but with much farther to go, and with much more trimming to do before I reach my goal.  Similarly, I’ve been working (intermittently) on the remix and re-recording of Breaking Me Down, very much a personal vanity project…which I suppose could also be said of any novel as well.  The music will surely be ready for release long before the book, but then again, it’s a seven-minute song compared to a seven hundred plus pages long novel, so it’s not too surprising that it should take less time, even considering the different levels of my expertise in the two fields.

On other matters, well…there’s not much to say that seems worth sharing, but I’ll share some of it anyway.  I continue to be unable to rouse myself to get involved in social media—or social anything, for that matter.  I really don’t have the capacity to socialize at all outside of work, and I do precious little of it during work.  You are, at this moment, experiencing the most social thing I do in any given week, at least for the last several months.*  How lucky for you!  Despite ongoing treatment for dysthymia/depression, I’m afraid that the reality of both traditional and newfangled media is just too depressing in and of itself for me to survive.

Of course, avoiding them doesn’t particularly seem to help my problem, either, and I can’t blame social and other media too much; the issue seems very much to be on my end of the keyboard and/or smartphone.  After all, I’ve lately been unable to enjoy even good music.  This morning I started listening to my most reliable Spotify playlist, comprised of my favorite songs by Radiohead, Pink Floyd and the Beatles, and I quickly got bored to the point of disgust and just shut it off.

The Beatles, for crying out loud!

And don’t even get me started on the fact that when I even contemplate reading any of the Harry Potter books, or even The Lord of the Rings, I’m filled with ennui bordering on physical revulsion.

There are well over two hundred books in my personal Kindle library, ranging from Physics, Philosophy, Biology, Neuroscience, Behavioral Psychology, and History to classic literature, science fiction and fantasy, all the way up to modern light novels.  It’s hardly an unweeded garden that grows to seed; it’s a stunningly beautiful garden by its very nature.  But right now, it doesn’t catch my interest any more than would a patch of garbage-strewn mud.  I find myself (somewhat ironically) resonating, as I often do, to a line from the Pink Floyd song, Nobody Home:  “I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.”

Only thirteen channels of shit?  If only he’d known how many channels of shit are available for us to swim in nowadays.  Don’t tear down that wall too quickly, Pink.  There are real walls being contemplated that are far more pathetic and disappointing than anything that goes on behind yours.

I just had an interesting and coincidental personal revelation:  I was considering using a particular line from early in “Hamlet” for the title to this week’s blog, but I suspected that I’d already used it for that purpose.  So, I checked and discovered that, not only had I indeed used it previously, but I had done so on August 23rd of 2018, one day shy of a year ago.  That’s weird.

I’m not aware of any particular reason why late August should trigger such specific associations for me.  It’s not as though I have “end-of-summer blues”.  I live in south Florida, for crying out loud; the end of summer is when the weather gets more pleasant.  And it’s been many years since I needed to feel despondent about an upcoming academic term.**

Now that I think about it, though, this isn’t the first time since last August that I’ve considered re-using that line in the title of a blog and had to go back to catch myself.  It’s one of the most well-known of Shakespearean quotes, trailing behind only that most famous soliloquy from “Hamlet”, a few from “Macbeth”, and perhaps some smatterings from “Romeo and Juliet”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and maybe “Richard III”.  Oh, well, I’ll just go (or will have gone, really), with a portion of a quote from “Henry V”, instead.

Ironically, and regrettably, I can find no interest in actually reading any of the aforementioned plays.

Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace this morning, it seems.

TTFN

*No, let’s be honest; it’s years, veering towards decades.

**And, in all honesty, I never once dreaded the coming of a school year, whether primary, secondary, university, or professional school.  It’s always been something to which I looked forward eagerly.