exhaustion

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

Well, I did bring the mini lapcom with me when I left work yesterday.  Nevertheless, I am writing this blog post on my smartphone.  There are specific, calculated reasons for this, but I’m not going to bore you with them, because they are only relevant to me.  But please, do tell me if you notice that this change has affected the quality of my writing, for better or for worse.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.  Now, on to more interesting things.  It’s the first day of October, my favorite month, although the reasons it has always been my favorite month are almost all effaced here in south Florida, in the current state of my “life”.  Still, it is the month of Halloween, and of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and all of that, so it still holds its position as number one month, as well as being the eighth and the tenth.

A few years ago‒it feels longer‒I set myself the task of writing a “short” story to honor the month of October (though the story didn’t have to be set in the month of October).  That led to Hole for a Heart, which is not my darkest story*, but my sister says it’s my scariest story.  I’m sure that’s pretty subjective, but it warms my own heart-shaped hole at least a bit to have written a quite scary story.

I wish I had the gumption to write something new again for this month.  If I did, the lapcom would be better for writing fiction than the smartphone, though the latter might keep me from going too ham on the whole thing, i.e., writing too much.

But I have a sort of feeling of learned helplessness about writing fiction, as well as about music (writing it and even just playing it) and art and science and everything else I do.  I put a lot of energy into things with almost no return, certainly not one commensurate to the effort involved.  Eventually, I just feel like an exhausted rat lying in the bottom of his cage, knowing that no matter what choice he makes or action he takes, he will be randomly shocked and otherwise tormented.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about the pain or the other stuff, he just knows the pain will come no matter what, and that has taken almost all the possible joy from being creative.  This is especially so when the creativity goes almost entirely unnoticed, like a sculpture made on the ISS and then promptly launched from there into deep space without anyone having seen it but a handful of astronauts.

I don’t know what it might take to rekindle (no pun intended) my writing or other creative sparks.  Maybe if I just had less pain it would do.  Unfortunately, the pain seems just to add new flavors and textures to itself over time; it doesn’t diminish.

I guess maybe that could be considered creative in a sense.

It’s a curious sort of irony, but I know that writing fiction seemed to stave off my depression, at least a little.  One might think it would be exhausting, writing 1400 to 2000 words every workday (except when editing/rewriting, which was its own grind).  Maybe eventually it was, and that was what led me to stop finally, since there was no real reward to it after a while, since almost nobody buys the books and/or reads them.

I don’t regret having written my stories, of course, nor my songs, nor any drawings I’ve made, nor my blog(s).  But over time I’ve had rapidly diminishing relative returns on the fiction writing and on the music and such.  The returns on this blog, relative to the effort, are shrinking more slowly, and occasionally there seems even to be an uptick, but the overall trend of basically everything except my personal knowledge** is downward.

I don’t know when the y-axis overall will cross the origin‒for many particular things, I think it has long since done so‒but I suspect it’s a finite distance, and I’m not decelerating, so I will cross it eventually.

Sometimes‒indeed, pretty much every day and twice on Sundays, ha ha‒I think to myself the metaphorical equivalent of “Where is that fucking x-axis?  It’s time for this to be finished already.”  If I had a goal, or anything significant toward which to look forward, things would probably be different.  But I don’t, and they aren’t.  That’s logic for you.

Well, anyway, this evening begins Yom Kippur and my fast.  Whatever you all are doing, I hope you have a good day.  I expect that I will be writing to you again tomorrow.

*That would be Solitaire.  I’ve told the story of that tale’s origin here before, I think, so I won’t get into it now.  If I am misremembering, let me know, and I’ll try to tell you the curious but not very exciting tale of a very dark tale indeed.  Oh, and if you want to read either of those stories but don’t want to do the Kindle thing, they are both featured in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which is so far my only work you can get in Kindle, paperback, and even hardback!

**I do think that I am always learning new things and improving my understanding of things I knew from before, and I have a good memory, especially for things in which I’m interested.  That’s all well and good, and I’m glad of it, but knowledge in my head is only as good and as durable as my head is.  Eventually, as Roy Baty said, all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.

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

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

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

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

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

What a tragedy.  Ha ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“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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I want this all to end

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer (the little one, not the regular sized one).  The laptop is slightly more awkward for typing on when there are bumps and shakes in a vehicle, but the vastly greater speed with which I’m able to type on it more than makes up for that—though it does not assuage the frustration.

I’m already exhausted (mentally) after only one day of work.  I don’t think it’s the work per se that’s so exhausting, it’s the environment, the people, the noise, the frustrations, the fact that other people arrive late or not at all, so many little frustrations.  There’s so little predictability in their behavior, and what there is is so often illogical.

I have, in general, identified more with Melkor than with Sauron in Tolkien’s universe—largely because he’s the Big Boss—but sometimes I can understand Sauron’s desire for order, and for forcing other creatures to be more orderly.  Of course, the way he goes about that is pretty stupid, but whataya gonna do?  As Gandalf said, he is a “wise fool” (a great expression).

Anyway, I like Lord Foul better than either of those two, and I like Doctor Doom most of all.  Doctor Doom is the sort of character about whom Christopher Nolan could make a movie trilogy, presenting him in a more down-to-earth fashion in a nearly realistic story, as he did with Batman, because Doom is not the product of radioactive spider bites, nor is he the last survivor of a star faring people with powers because of his alien nature, nor is he otherwise enhanced.  He is a human, but with a brilliant, inventive intellect and an obsessive drive.

Why am I writing about this stuff right now?  I have now idea.  This is all stream of consciousness, and that stream flows faster when I’m typing.  I’ve written all this so far in less than ten minutes (first draft), and I’m already almost halfway to my target word count.  I have to set a target, not so that I don’t go below it, but so that I don’t go too far over it.  I could probably gabble on here interminably.

But I want it to end.  I’m so very, very tired, and I have very little joy in my life.  I mean, I’m pleased that The Chasm and the Collision is still an enjoyable read even now.  But of course, I’m probably one of two people in the world who has actually read it.  My mother died just days after it was published—I tried to read some of it to her in her hospice bed, from her own miniature Kindle, but it was clear she wasn’t even following.  That’s too bad.  I think she really would have liked it.  I think she had been looking forward to reading it.

It’s such a me fact that my most wholesome, family-friendly story involves a threat of destruction to two universes and a villain who is unknowingly in the thrall of a much greater, larger scale “villain” or destructive force that threatens all universes, potentially.  That’s my meta-level villain; its influence is felt in many of my other stories, though I don’t always make that explicit.  I have so many ideas for my large-scale omniverse (formerly thought of as a “metaverse” before Schmuckerberg stole my term), so much backstory and intersections and connections and so on, but none of that is ever going to happen or be revealed or anything.  It’s sad, but, as a character in my darkest ever story says, “Life’s like that, I suppose.”

I wish I could sleep for a really long time, just to rest and recreate myself, but that’s not an available option.  I don’t simply long for “suspended animation” because that’s just like pausing a game; you wake up in the same state you were in when you laid down.  The only point to that would be living to see a future you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.  It’s not any kind of a cocoon, a chrysalis, an Adam Warlock kind of thing, where you change and grow and heal.

I don’t know why I’m writing about comic books and other wildly fictional characters.  Perhaps it’s because the real world is not only so stressful but is also so stupid.  This emergent system that is the whole human race interacting with itself is just an astonishing example of idiocy on performance enhancers.  I really am sick of them.

If I were Doom, I would decide to commit myself to saving them, correcting them, trying to make the world as good as I know it could be.  But of course, that leads Doom to be thought of as a villain (he has other psychopathology that contributes to that, of course).

Okay, well, I’m approaching my target, and obviously I have nothing to say, but that doesn’t stop me.  I’m really tired and depressed and discouraged.  I cannot go on like this for long.  Right now, I’m trying to hold on until at least next Friday, when I’m finally getting an autism assessment, but I don’t even know if that’s enough to cling to even for so short a time.

We shall see.