health

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I’m back and (nominally) going forth

It’s Monday again‒the last Monday of September in 2025.  This day, in this month, in this year, will never come again.  Or, well, even if the universe is one big closed time-loop of some kind, it seems quite clear that the scale of it is so huge that it may as well be eternity before this time will come around again.

And then, of course, even if it does come around again, it’s not as though we would be aware of it.  I’ve brought up before the notion of it being like people in movie on a DVD or Blu-ray or what have you; at each moment, the characters are, from their viewpoint, facing an uncertain future with many possibilities, and yet we the viewers know that exactly the same things will happen to them, and they will do exactly the same things each time we watch the movie.

That’s all old hat, I guess (a weird expression, but somehow it works).  But it is interesting to consider occasionally, and then to think about where (if anywhere) quantum indeterminacy fits into such a picture, from the possible “many worlds” Everettian version of quantum mechanics to things like superdeterminism on the other end and so on.

Whatever.  Sorry, I sometimes get a little swept up in such matters, and it probably gets quite boring for my readers.

Anyway, I did not go to work on Friday, and that’s why I didn’t write a blog post.  My apologies.  I felt truly horrible at a sort of pan-corporeal level; it almost felt as if I were experiencing the effects of some kind of poison (though I do not actually suspect such a thing, it’s just a way to convey my experience).  I think something “global” and metabolic was going on, though I guess it might have been some viral syndrome or other.  I’m not feeling completely better, even today.

I also scratched my right eye in my sleep apparently, on Thursday night, and that didn’t help matters.  Thankfully, the conjunctivae heal very quickly, so that’s mostly better now.  It’s still a little irritated, and so it is irritating, but that should just be a matter of time.

As for anything else, well…I have nothing, really.  That applies in more than one sense, now that I think about it.  But in this case, I mean that I have nothing interesting in mind about which to write.  It doesn’t help that I’m doing this on my smartphone, which makes writing slower and also a bit painful.

I really should bring the mini lapcom back to the house with me.  It’s so much easier to write on it‒it really allows me to be in some ways more fluent and fluid even than when speaking (although if you get me started on a subject in which I’m interested, I can talk at a rate that will make most people wish for me to get severe laryngitis).

It’s tough, however, to talk with my six pm self to get him to want to bring the lapcom, when he’s globally fatigued at the end of the workday.  Likewise, he has a hard time making excuses to my morning self, who is still fatigued and who has sore thumb bases.

Nominally, of course, they are “the same” person‒and taking “the person” as the four-dimensional self-reinforcing and self-sustaining pattern that I am, like a complex braid in spacetime, one would say that they are indeed the same person, or at least that they are parts of the same person.  But as an experiential matter, they are subjectively quite different, instantiating different states of body and mind.

Oh, they are obviously far more alike than unalike‒the morning me is closer by far in overall state to the afternoon me than to any state of any other person, let alone any other animal or what have you.  But still, the Buddhist (and similar systems of thought) notion of the lack of any fixed “self” riding around inside the mind like a homunculus is clearly correct.

There is no “center” of consciousness in the brain except for the whole brain itself.  But even that does not exist in a vacuum*.  Its state is influenced by the states of the rest of the body, of the environment, of the information coming into the person’s mind via the senses, and so on.

It’s a fucking complicated system, okay?  It’s the most complicated thing‒at least on this scale‒of which we are aware.  By that, I mean human (and humanoid) minds and brains in general, not mine specifically.  I have a fairly high judgment of my own intelligence, but I’m not as egotistical as all that.

Maybe I should try to be.  Maybe I should cultivate a sense of self-importance and specialness (why is that not “specialty”?) that would keep me feeling nominally good about myself.  But people like that are so boring and annoying and even pitiful.  I don’t know if going that way would be more triumph or surrender.  It would probably be the latter.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*Unless it’s a Boltzmann Brain, which is pretty unlikely.  You can know you’re not a Boltzmann Brain if you continue to exist for more than a few seconds before disintegrating into the global entropy of a nearly empty universe.  Although, of course, your memories of having existed for more than a few seconds may simply be false memories, a real possibility in principle in any Boltzmann Brain.  But contemplating those possibilities reveals that they would make baseless any notion we have of consistent physical laws, including the laws that allow for Boltzmann Brains (if they do, which is questionable), so it gets pointless pretty quickly.

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“Don’t ask for favors. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t axe me why.”

I’m going to try to keep this brief today.  I had a particularly bad night’s sleep, even for me, and I am in a significant amount of pain even after taking what I have for it (without massively overdosing).  Thankfully‒so far‒my thumbs aren’t acting up too much as I write this.

It certainly does get old, this chronic pain bit.  I don’t know if anyone out there is considering trying it as a way of being, but I can tell you that, after more than twenty years, I’ve decided it’s not a good lifestyle choice.  So please, if you’re considering it, then reconsider.

I know, I know, no one‒as far as I’m aware‒chooses to have chronic pain, not as such, anyway.  I suppose one might say that anyone who becomes a professional football player (American football, I mean, though all competitive sports have at least some tendency in the same direction) is in a sense choosing a life of chronic pain.

But at least there are compensations, and one receives them more or less up front.  The bill, however, almost inevitably comes due for those who play any kind of serious competitive sports.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad they do what they do.  I enjoy watching football, and to a lesser degree several other sports.  But even golf (which I also enjoy watching the pros play) gives its practitioners accumulated damage.

Is there any sport that does not exact a toll on those who take part in it seriously?  I don’t know.  Maybe free solo rock climbing doesn’t tend to give people quite the same kind of chronic, post-high-impact injury problems, because high impacts in that sport tend to be fatal.  Other than those, though, it appears to be a practice associated with great care and deliberation.  There is little to no tackling involved (they don’t even use other kinds of tackle, thus the “free solo” part).

I don’t know why I’m going into such things.  I was just speaking tongue in cheek about the idea of people actually choosing to have chronic pain, which was an absurd notion.  Then I realized that, in a way, people often do choose things that will almost inescapably lead to chronic pain.  But, of course, they aren’t consciously choosing the pain, and many of them probably don’t seriously think it’s something that can happen to them, not when they’re young and feel unstoppable.

Then, by the time they’ve come to recognize their own susceptibility, their own mortality and morbidity, it’s too late.

I suspect that chronic pain was much less common for our ancestors, at least if you go back far enough.  This is not because they were hardier or healthier than we are necessarily, though they probably had less occasion to be indolent.  But we are exposed to injuries they might not have been‒even minor traffic accidents can cause damage that accumulates and persists‒and also, we survive many things that would simply have killed them, thanks to modern science and technology.

Just because we survive them doesn’t mean they are harmless, though.  As Billy Joel sang, “You are still the victim of the accidents you leave.”  That which does not kill you can still leave damage; it does not necessarily make you stronger, any more than syphilis made Nietzsche healthier.

On that cheery note, I think I will wrap up this week and put it in the fridge for leftovers, where it will eventually go bad and will have to be thrown out anyway.  I know, that particular metaphor doesn’t really make sense.  I didn’t have anything in mind when I wrote it, I was just following the automatic thought that was initiated by the words “wrap up”.  If any of you have a good potential meaning for the metaphor that I just frivolously threw out there, please, feel free to share it with us.

Also, please have a good day and a good weekend if you can.

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I’m back, despite my back holding me back

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go in to the office, because the pain I was having on Monday just continued and worsened, and by yesterday morning I was just exhausted.  I’m frankly not feeling a whole lot better today, to be honest (and to be redundant, since I already said “frankly” which means essentially the same thing as “to be honest”).

In case any of you don’t already know, I have a thing called “failed back surgery syndrome”, which seems a bit unfair to the surgeon, who was a colleague of mine.  He did as good a job as science and technology allowed.  I just had a fairly bad lower back injury:  specifically, a ruptured L5-S1 intervertebral disk.

That’s not a bulging disk, that’s a rupture‒it was torn all the way down into the nucleus pulposus of the disk, which is the delicious jelly center from which the bouncability arises.  I had all sorts of investigations after the pain began, because it didn’t first present as back pain but with pain in my legs.  And then once the disk issue was confirmed, I tried a lot of less invasive interventions to treat my pain, none of which did anything much.

Even after the surgery, I tried and was on various medications, of various classes‒including opioids‒which helped some but which caused their own issues over time.  But the pain has never gone away since its onset, over twenty years ago, and which has contributed greatly to things like the failure of my marriage and the ruination of my career.  Still, the surgery did reduce the pain at least to some degree.

But of course, these last several days have been worse than usual, probably partly because I was exercising (low impact) to try to improve my condition and help my pain.  Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, can’t it?

Anyway, I have to go to work today because it’s payroll day.  That was the same reason I kind of pushed to be let out of the hospital early with my recent kidney stone:  I had to do the payroll the next day.  That was unpleasant, I can tell you.

Such is my life now, it seems:  Chronic pain with varying intensity, insomnia, tension/anxiety and depression‒both at least partly (probably) related to ASD‒and work, then going back to the house to lie down to try to recover for the next day.  The only real bright spots are seeing my youngest child now and then (this was started by the kidney stone, curiously enough, so that at least paid for itself) and talking to my sister on the phone once every week or so.

In case anyone wonders why I have suicidal ideation, well, all the above should explain at least some of it.  Of course, I’ve had such thoughts since I was a teenager, long before my chronic pain developed, but I did have chronic depression (AKA dysthymia) starting at that time.  Looking back, this was probably at least partly because of my long-undiagnosed ASD (level 2).

I also had the other kind of ASD‒an atrial septal defect‒until I was 18 and had heart surgery for it.  Interestingly enough, there is a higher incidence of the heart-based ASD in people with the other kind of ASD, according to some studies I have read.  There’s also some increased prevalence of spina bifida occulta, which often has its effects very low down the spine.  I sometimes wonder if I might have had a very slight version of this that made me prone to have the back injury I had, but I may be going through “second year medical student syndrome” again with respect to that possibility.

Okay, well, sorry about annoying you with my medical history and medical/psychiatric complaints.  For the most part, it’s all I have to talk about anymore.  I don’t do anything interesting; I don’t do anything much at all other than work and trying to rest and distract myself.  It’s really quite pathetic and pointless.

I keep hoping that all the aspirin I take (among the other strictly OTC meds I now use) will lead me to have some form of hemorrhage and take this all away from me, but I have had no luck so far.  I guess it’s true what they say, that if you want something done “right” you need to do it yourself.

I don’t know if that’s always true, though.  I think what really happens is that people want to do something in a particular way for personal, often aesthetic, reasons, and want to be able to have some control over something, so they do it themselves.  Then, no matter how badly they fuck it up or how much better someone else might have done the job, they convince themselves that what they did was best, since confirmation bias is one of the easiest fallacies of reasoning into which people can fall.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you feel better than I do, since that would at least be some comfort for me.  I’ll probably be back to write a post tomorrow, Batman knows why.  But he’s not telling.

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Is this my eigenstate? If so, I fear it makes me LESS coherent.

It’s Monday, and I really am going to try to keep this short.  The only reason I’m writing this post at all is because I don’t want anyone to worry about me in any unnecessary way.  I suppose it’s okay for people to worry about me in general‒I think I would, if I were someone else and if I cared what happens to me.  I’m certainly not in good shape, just as a general matter, and I don’t seem to be getting better at all, so who knows what to say?

But today, I am not taking off work or anything.  I am however in a significant amount of pain, above my usual baseline, and I have been so since last week.  It’s quite frustrating, and it takes the wind out of my sails for getting anything done but the bare minimum.  Certainly I have done no walking or biking.

I did have a lovely day on Saturday, because I got to spend time with my youngest.  That was, of course, quite wonderful.  So you will hear (or read) no complaints from me about that.  It was officially one of the two best days I have had since 2012, at least.

I wish that could make my chronic pain go away, but alas, it does not.  It does take the edge off my depression for a while‒certainly while spending time together‒and that’s obviously good.  If only there were something that could be done in addition to that.

Unfortunately, I’m currently in the state* that I tend to refer to as feeling as if I have already been embalmed despite the fact that I am nominally still alive.  This is meant to convey how stiff and constricted I feel, and how every motion is difficult and painful.  I at least did my dips this morning, despite feeling wiped out already upon awakening.  Yay, me, right?  Huzzah.

It probably comes as no surprise that I continue to have insomnia, and the pain exacerbation doesn’t help that.  Well, in a certain sense one could say it helps the insomnia.  It impairs the somnia, if you will.

I’m writing this on my smartphone, by the way.  I have the mini lapcom with me, but it’s too much trouble to use right now.  So I am using the smartphone.  Using it is, however, also somewhat painful for the bases of my thumbs, but almost nothing I do does not hurt, so there’s little hope of avoiding pain entirely no matter what I’m doing.

It looks like Chrome and Google Docs and everything have updated themselves again, and now it’s causing trouble with the way the computer starts and the way I write this on my smartphone as well.  It’s terribly annoying; they change things that don’t need changing and that seem to work fine, apparently for cosmetic reasons, because they think they need to…I don’t know, keep up with the other software giants?  Anyway, it’s terribly annoying.

Are they really continuously releasing a product that has so many deficiencies that they need to keep updating every other week (or so it seems)?  Perhaps they’re hiding nefarious changes behind these seemingly pointless ones.  How would we know if they were?  How can we know this isn’t the work of some AI that got out of the box, for that matter?

Though, honestly, I think such an AI would do a better job of not requiring so many pointless-seeming updates.  But maybe that would be the perfect camouflage:  artificial intelligence masquerading as human stupidity.

Heavy sigh, as Justine would say**.

Anyway, that’s gonna be enough for me today.  It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m already exhausted.  I am not, however, sleepy.  Talk about a system that needs an update!

Well, have a good day if you can.

*Not to be confused with the state of Florida, though the two states have things in common.

**A character in The Accountant and its sequel.

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

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m sitting at the train station as I begin to write this, having walked the five miles here from the house.

I’d intended either to walk or ride the bike today, having taken a rest break yesterday, but riding the new bike was just a little too intimidating.  I think I’ll need to get a bit of practice in over the weekend—a longish ride or two each on Saturday and Sunday—in order to get really used to it, so I don’t feel daunted when I arise in the morning.

I don’t have anything against walking, of course.  It’s actually rather enjoyable.  But it does take quite a bit longer than biking does, and it’s much more likely to cause me blisters, as well as irritation in my right ankle and left knee (though I have a spandex brace on for the latter issue, and it helps).

How’s that for a boring beginning?  Still, at least it’s a form of “good” news, in the sense that I have accomplished something useful already today.  That’s one reason it’s nice to get your exercise in before work—or whatever constitutes the morning for you—because then you begin the rest of your day with an accomplishment already under your belt, so to speak.  And, of course, over time you’ll be able tighten that belt, or so it is to be hoped, if you keep up the good habits.

In any case, I’m starting this post off much more positively than I did yesterday’s post, though that’s admittedly a very low bar to clear.  Hopefully there will be no minor catastrophes today involving the train as there were on Tuesday after I walked.  The announcement proclaims the train is on its way in ten minutes, which will make it right on time, so that’s a hopeful fact.

It’s not as though I don’t have plenty of time before work officially starts; I can’t seem to sleep past about three in the morning, and I wake up more than once before then, no matter when I go to sleep.  I might as well use that time to get some things done, and exercise can be one of those things.

Okay, well—what should I talk about now?  I don’t know.  I never plan these things out, as you know, and though sometimes I think I write better when I feel angry in general, I don’t feel especially so at the moment.  I keep trying to give myself positive “self-talk” as they call it, but it’s difficult for me to do, because I find that I don’t believe it.  I want to be able to say to myself that “I love my life and I love myself” but I really don’t.  Maybe if I said something like, “I deserve to love myself” or similar I might find that easier to stomach.

I doubt it, though.  Perhaps if I’m able to get into better condition, as I am trying to do, I’ll feel better about feeling better about myself.

***

Well, I’m on the train now, and we appear to be moving on time and on schedule and other redundant expressions meaning that things are going according to plan.  It’s quite chilly on the train, after the tropical mugginess of the very early south Florida morning.  Fortunately, I brought an extra tee-shirt to put on over my fancy one, the latter of which is supposed to allow perspiration to evaporate quickly.  I’m not sure that it really does that, but it at least doesn’t tend to sag as it sticks to your skin with your sweat.

Well, it doesn’t actually do anything to your skin or in response to your sweat.  As far as I know, no one else but I has worn any of my shirts.  That’s good.  I don’t really want anyone else to be in my shirts, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend to anyone that they try being in my shoes.

Ha.

Ha.

So, now, what to do otherwise for today?  Of course, I will go to the office, and I will work, which makes good sense, since that is the point of getting up and leaving in the morning.  It all does get quite drab and repetitive, though, and it is certainly pointless from any objective point of view.  Unfortunately, it’s also pretty pointless from my subjective point of view, and over time that view has become more and more definitively that my days are without a point.

Do most people have a subjective sense that their daily lives have some meaning?  I suppose if they live with a spouse and/or children and/or have a group of friends with whom they spend their time, they might not even have to acknowledge any subjective sense of meaning; they will simply instantiate it.  That’s probably nice.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and the train is also going, and there seem to be no untoward complications.  It’s still dark, but dawn is in the east, gradually drowning out the lovely morning spectacle of Jupiter floating a degree or so above Venus in the eastern sky.  Venus, of course, is far brighter than Jupiter, belying the actual relative sizes of the planets, since it is much farther away and light intensity falls off as the square of the distance, due to the geometry of space.

It’s interesting how many names Venus has, and how contradictory they are.  In middle-earth, of course, it is Eärendil, and we call it Venus, but it was also the original Lucifer, the morning star—and it’s also the evening star, depending on where in its orbit it is relative to the Earth.  And it is, of course, the most transitory of planets.

With that really stupid and bad astronomy joke I’ll end for the day, and none too soon.  I hope you all are feeling well and are accomplishing your own little or not-so-little successes.  Sometimes just living to the next day can feel like a heroic accomplishment.  And sometimes it can feel like a terrible mistake.

TTFN

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True hope is swift, and blogs with swallow’s wings: kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and against popular demand (or at least orthogonal to it) I am writing another blog post.  I don’t know how you feel about that, but you’re reading it, so I guess you can’t complain too much.

I had a rough day again yesterday, pain-wise.  I basically took everything that was safe to take, and then a bit more, but it did not do a great job of getting the pain under control.  However, I did take delivery of my latest attempt at lifestyle change:  a new, folding bicycle, which is quite a lot smaller (and has a smaller wheel base) than my other one.  It’s also lighter, and so it is easier to transport, and starting this afternoon, I mean to ride it from and to the train in the morning and evening‒or, well, in the evening and morning, to keep the order consistent.

I tried it for a little ride-around in the afternoon, and while the smaller wheels make it feel slightly less stable (thanks to a smaller moment of inertia, proportional to the mass times the square of the radius of rotation, if memory serves), it’s still comfortable, and it is also easier to get on for me, since I can step through it rather than having to raise my stupid, stiff old legs and hip.

Hopefully, it will help me get around faster and get stronger/healthier again.  Even my little test ride yesterday seemed to loosen my back up a bit, which was a bonus.  I think the lower-impact movement of a bicycle is much easier on my joints* than, say, running, which I’ve otherwise always really liked.  It’s also just faster to get around on a bike than by walking, but you don’t completely lose out on the experience of being in the midst of the places through which you are traveling.

So, yeah, that’s my reason for guarded optimism today.  I have a hard time being optimistic even at the best of times, though.  It feels like I’m setting myself up to fall into a trap.

That reminds me, I rather like something I heard David Frum say recently.  I can’t reproduce his exact words at the moment, but he basically said he tries to follow the guideline:  think like a pessimist but act like an optimist.  Or,  as Mel Brooks put it in the theme song** for his early movie The Twelve Chairs, “Hope for the best, expect the worst”.

In some ways, I feel that’s almost become my default setting, because when I’m at my current clearest state of headedness, I am definitely depressive and gloomy and neither expect nor feel that I deserve anything good.  But I still keep moving forward (well, if you’re moving at all, then “forward” can be defined as just going in the direction in which you are, in fact, going) and trying new things.

With respect to everything else, well, because my pain flare has been so distracting this week, I haven’t done any music of any kind (even listening, really) nor have I written any fiction.  I also haven’t worked on any lyrics for a song taking off from the word “humility”.  Hopefully, if I can feel better from riding the new bike, it will help me have more energy to do things.  Of course, it will be physically taxing at first, at least a little bit, but that’s okay.

As for anything else, well, I still occasionally toy with the notion of adding a Patreon account or something to this blog, just to see if it does anything at all.  But one is expected to give perks to one’s patrons, and I’m not sure what I have to offer.  Of course, I could write special posts that are only available to patrons, but I don’t know how exciting that would be.

Maybe I could ask patrons to suggest topics or subjects for blog posts, or do some manner of “ask me anything” posts, open to patrons only.  I don’t really know what on Earth people on Patreon could possibly want to learn from or about me, but maybe there would be interest.  I don’t know what else might entice someone.  If any of you out there have any ideas, I would love to hear them.

See what I mean by “think like a pessimist, act like an optimist”?  It’s hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to pay to read my writing, since I barely want to read my own stuff for free***.  And yet, I would consider trying to start making money from even my non-fiction writing, because what have I got to lose by trying that, other than an expenditure of time and energy?

Well, we’ll see what happens.  I would greatly welcome your input on such things, O Reader of My Blog.  In the meantime, please have a good day.

TTFN

*As long as I can avoid repeating any of my two prior major bike accidents, which each did harm to one of my shoulder joints‒first the left then the right, first a connective tissue injury, then a fracture.

**Which, yes, he wrote himself, both the song and the movie.

***Okay, that’s a lie.  I tend to enjoy rereading my own fiction quite a bit.  Is that narcissistic?  If it is, I’m a very peculiar kind of self-hating narcissist:  I think I’m the most annoying, disgusting being this side of a palmetto bug, and yet I think my stories (and my songs) are pretty good, and I enjoy them even if no one else does.

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I have no title today (other than “doctor”)

I don’t think I’ll probably write very much today‒though I’ve been wrong about that many times before, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see.  I feel particularly tired already this morning, but that didn’t let me sleep uninterrupted for more than a few hours.  So far today I’m not in as much pain as I was the previous two days, but then again, on neither of those two days was my pain as prominent in the morning as it became during the day, so I cannot be too optimistic.

I am, of course, trying all my various adjustments and interventions and so on to try to improve things, and they have limited and temporary success in general.  But I will keep trying, until the day that I finally give up and/or die.  I suppose, of course, that I might even get better.  It’s physically possible.  But I’m not going to hold my breath, because I’ve tried many, many things to improve my pain, and they have not had much success.

With that in mind, unless you have something truly esoteric that you think I, a physician with a broadly curious mind and with chronic pain, will not have encountered or considered, I don’t encourage recommending or suggesting pain treatments to me.  You can of course, and I truly appreciate the sentiments involved in such offers, but they are often frustrating.  Also, when people recommend things that I know are just woo, it’s additionally frustrating to have to remind myself not to respond impolitely.  Good intentions aren’t enough to make good things actually happen, but they are worth taking into consideration and appreciating.  You shouldn’t be rude to people who are trying to help, even if they aren’t succeeding.

Anyway, my new thing that I mentioned yesterday did not arrive; it’s supposed to arrive today, now, having been delayed.  I won’t get into it yet, but I maintain my stupid pseudo-optimism, which I cannot explain nor justify, except to say that I’m stubborn.  But I have my limits.

It’s been a string of rather frustrating days, lately, and though none of the frustrations are catastrophic, in some ways that makes them more pernicious.  With major setbacks, one is allowed and expected to need a real recovery process, a bit of time, a bit of rest, or maybe just some sympathy.  One gets a break.  With more minor setbacks, one gets no respite, but they can nonetheless pile up, especially if one has chronic issues already.  But one will gain little ease from others with respect to them.

For instance, when I mentioned to a coworker that I was having a lot of frustrating things happen over the past several days, I got a reply that everyone was having a rough time‒based on what data, I don’t know.  His rough times apparently have to do with taking his daughter to the doctor for a thankfully not too severe issue and his wife being sick and so on.  I would give almost anything possible to have such “problems” again, or just to be able to be with my children in a significant way again.

Anyway, I was not terribly pleased, and in response to his statement about the claimed recent local preponderance of irritations, I said, “Well, that makes everything all right, then, doesn’t it?”

It wasn’t the cleverest of replies, but at least I was channeling the Toymaker a bit.

Anyway, I’m sure few or none of you readers are particularly sympathetic, either.  Why would you be?  I’m no one and nothing, just a weird little “voice” on the internet/web.  I’m a wisp of marsh gas, a flicker of movement in the corner of your vision, an occasionally annoying afterthought, like the water that gets on your shirt at the waist from doing the dishes, but that you don’t notice until you’re done.  I’m a tiny little grain of rock that gets on the bottom of your foot inside your shoe; it’s not quite bad enough to force you to stop, take off your shoe, and clear it out, but it’s there all the while, and you end up with a blister and other aches at the end of the day, from changing the way you walk.

So, yeah, that’s me.  That’s how I feel today.  I know, it doesn’t matter to anyone, but there it is.  Maybe today will be better than yesterday.

I wish I could say it couldn’t be worse, but that’s never true.  Reality has no lowest level.  Things can always deteriorate.

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Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).

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Lost then found thoughts about lost connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(I do like to quote things, don’t I?)

I hope you have a good day.

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

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

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

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

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

Hello and good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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

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

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

*****Or is it?