health

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With purpose to be blogged in an opinion of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit

     Hello and good morning.

     Yes, I am continuing to indent the beginnings of my paragraphs, and it still is not a whim.  I’m not ready to reveal why I’m doing it; that’ll depend on how it works out for me.  But if any readers are interested enough to speculate, I will let you know if you get it right.  It’s not really important or consequential, but neither is anything else from a sufficiently broad perspective.

     I was awakened very early this morning, even for me (I’ve noticed that a lot of the time I do a quick gasp or exclamation when I wake up, as if startled that I still exist or that the world does), by a combination of needing to use the bathroom* and a particularly severe exacerbation of pain, which continues even now.  I have no idea what made this exacerbation happen.  Yesterday, my pain was just at its baseline level, and while that’s not pleasant, it was basically that to which I have become‒out of necessity‒accustomed over the course of more than twenty years.  With adequate, slightly higher than recommended, doses of combined OTC pain medications, I can keep it to the point where I’m reasonably functional.

     Then shit like this happens and I start hoping that they’ll stop the flow of illegal fentanyl by making OTC fentanyl legal.  I’m being unrealistic there, of course; I was on a prescription fentanyl patch for years, and though it did keep my pain suppressed enough for me to function, it never eliminated it, and it had various long-term side effects on hormones and on neuropsychological function, so I stopped it unilaterally.

     Anyway, that’s all boring ancient history.  The bottom line of the point I was making is that I am not likely to be as chipper today as I was yesterday.  Yesterday I even tried to make some intellectually stimulating use of social media by going back and starting to watch/rewatch the videos on Numberphile from the oldest one on.  I got to the second video before I saw that Veritaseum had released his own new video about “the biggest misconception in physics”, discussing Emmy Noether’s theorems on symmetries and conversation laws, showing how, and why, on cosmologic scales, there is no conservation of energy.

     It’s a fascinating video.  Veritaseum always does good work and explains things very well, and of course, the more airtime Emmy Noether gets, the better.  Part of the substance of her story is how she showed where Einstein and Hilbert were missing some things, and it’s not just anyone who could understand let alone correct the insights of those great minds.  Watch that video, if you have any interest in the subject.

     From there I jumped to a guest lecture he (Derek Muller, who created Veritaseum) was giving at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics about AI and education and prior predicted revolutions in education.  I haven’t quite finished this because work and other things interfered and intervened.

     I have to admit that sometimes I think about trying to set this blog up as a subscription-option-available site, or to open a Patreon associated with it, or to start a Substack or something, so that I could try to make a living learning and thinking and writing and discussing and educating about various things**.

     Some people have been able to do it.  I doubt anyone would even be willing to pay tuppence (figuratively speaking) for my stuff, though.

    Anyway, by watching educational videos I was trying to avoid getting caught up in interacting with Threads (and to a lesser extent other social media) because while I’ve certainly had enjoyable interactions there and have found useful services, like the place I got evaluated for ASD, I never really feel like I have or am interacting with friends there.  When I do feel like I’m getting some degree of connection, I suddenly become awkward and feel I’m overstepping or being cringeworthy or just being too weird, which I probably am.

     I should give up on ever having any new actual friends, let alone any kind of relationship or pseudo-family or any such thing.  I just don’t seem to have the knack, though that fact makes me almost unbearably sad.  And, of course, my pain is showing no sign of diminishing, at least none that I can detect.

     If any of you think it could be doable‒in a practical sense, not just in a “physically possible” sense‒for me to make money on my nonfiction writing (or even audio or video), since the fiction writing hasn’t worked out, let me know, please.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep writing this, like this, as this, until either I am able to get my pain under better control or I give up on that possibility.  Also in the meantime, my “social” interactions with almost everyone will continue to be a bit like being in orbit around Mars or Jupiter and trying to make friends back on Earth.  Actually, those interactions could happen with as little as 3 minutes lag time due to the finite speed of light, so maybe Saturn or even Neptune would be a better metaphor.

     TTFN

*This is not a BPH thing; it has been this way all my life.

**I could name it after my short story collection, Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, since it would probably be pretty eclectic.

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Please eschew sour grapes, or at least don’t chew them…they’re sour.

I don’t really remember what I wrote yesterday; I remember that I was angry, but it wasn’t really about anything solid or sharp, more just a general sense of frustration and despair.  I really felt and feel at a loss, with no sense of meaning or purpose or deep value.

I can’t claim to think that feeling is unreasonable; the world provides plenty of evidence for the pointlessness of all things.  I suspect that most people just try to avoid thinking about it.  They distract themselves with religions and other ideologies and with social interactions, whiling away their time until everything finally breaks down and they die.

Some surely die in a state of bewilderment and fear, never having accepted or even having truly contemplated their own mortality.  Some probably find comfort in the aforementioned religious ideas or just in community.  Having the love of family and friends, especially if such people are with them near the end, must help relieve at least some of the dread and pain as things wind down.

It must be at least some comfort if, when one is dying, one has loved ones nearby, helping to provide reassurance or at least just company.  If one has loved ones who willingly and lovingly attend to them while they are dying, or even just want to be there with them, one must at least be able to think that one has done something right in life.

Anyway, I’m on my way into the office, still rather sick but definitely improving.  I’m coughing, but not as badly, and the goo I’m bringing up is thinning out and looking less like some weird, opaque resin made from peas.  I’m still far from optimal, but then, I only started getting sick about six days ago.  If I’m substantially over it by, say, Friday, well that will have been a decently circumscribed illness, especially considering just how badly I’ve been feeling.

Somewhat ironically, my illness at least distracted me‒temporarily‒from the degree of my back, hip, ankle, and shoulder/arm pains, and those are becoming more prominent again as the illness recedes.  This leads me to wonder to what degree interferons or “tumor necrosis factors” and other aspects of the immune response can have beneficial effects on chronic pain, or if indeed they can do so at all.

It might be interesting to do a retrospective study involving, say, people who were treated with strong doses of interferon (with ribavirin) for Hepatitis C, or even for cancers such as melanomas, and who came out the other end healthy, then to try to learn whether any of them had chronic pain before starting treatment, and how the pain responded to the treatment.  We could compare them to age (and otherwise) matched cohorts who did not receive any such interferon treatments but who had similar amounts of chronic pain and see if their courses differed in a statistically significant way.

Of course, those high-dose interferon treatments for Hep C had their own serious complications and side-effects.  For instance, they could trigger serious depression even in people with no previously known disposition to have mood disorders.  These outcomes were generally worth the risk, if one could thereby eliminate chronic Hepatitis C, which is associated with significant morbidities and pathologies, not the least of which are potential liver cancer and sclerosis.

Still, if I could go through, say, a six week course of such treatment and thereby reduce (or eliminate) my chronic pain, I think it would probably be worth it.  I’m depressed and suicidal anyway.

Of course, we’re a long way from such a study outcome, even if we had unlimited funding and could start the study tomorrow.  Money can help make a lot of things easier to do, but as Kansas pointed out in Dust in the Wind, money has no effect on time*, and some things just take time.

I don’t expect to see such a study done, let alone to be able to benefit from the results, and honestly, I don’t have a high credence that it would show clinically useful effects.  After all, my own pain is not diminished now as I’m getting over my illness; it’s just changing back to baseline.  And, unfortunately, taking a vacation from one pain to another only to come back to the original one is probably not something anyone would really seek out***.

That’s enough for today.  I hope you all have a decent one‒do please try, at least.  Someone should, and it would be nice if most such people were reader-types who like blogs rather than wealthy assholes who don’t give much of a shit about anyone else, though those are the people who seem most likely to have happy days most often.

Not that wealth means someone is undeserving of happiness; that’s a non sequitur, really‒sour grapes projected onto the world by those who resent and envy the wealthy (sometimes with good reason, sometimes without).

Do your best.

*Okay, if you had enough money, all in one place**, you might form a massive enough object that it would measurably slow the local passage of time.  Heck, you could make a “money black hole” if you could get enough of it together and compress it enough, and at the event horizon, time would stop (to an outside observer, anyway).  Of course, according to GR, a black hole is a black hole is a black hole, with only mass, angular momentum, and charge differentiating one from another, so it wouldn’t matter if the black hole was made out of money.  Quantum mechanics demands otherwise, though, and thus we have the famous “black hole information paradox”, which isn’t really a paradox, anymore than is the “Fermi paradox” (When you come to an apparent paradox or contradiction, that’s just an alert, saying “something you’re doing here is incorrect or incomplete.”)

**Even if you’re just storing that money as information, with no bills or coins, there is still energy associated with the information, always.  So enough information about enough money could still have gravitational effects.

***Then again, there is the phenomenon of deliberate self-harm, and I can tell you from experience, it is sometimes a way of diverting oneself from a pre-existing, chronic pain to another pain, one deliberately and personally chosen.  Does that count as a pain vacation?

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“Don’t you know you’re gonna…”

It’s Friday morning, at last.  I don’t know whether or not I’ll be working tomorrow, but either way, I’m glad the main week is done.  I feel as though these five days have lasted for months.

My pain seems to be creeping back toward its baseline level, which still sucks, but it’s way better than it has been earlier this week.  I hope it doesn’t just bounce back up once I’ve become relieved (relatively).  That would really bite.

I’ve been trying to exercise carefully and consistently, and that’s at least been okay.  I’m also always trying to adjust my shoes and socks from day to day, just to see if they make any difference.  Sometimes they seem to do so.  Of course, I’m being quite unscientific about this, changing more than one variable at once (and of course it’s very hard to do blinded studies, let alone double-blinded ones, when one is working on oneself).  There is a fair amount of desperation involved in all of this, which is probably not too surprising when one is trying to relieve or at least diminish pain.

I have had no ideas or inclination regarding any new stories, nor have I even touched a guitar.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time puttering through Threads and occasionally Instagram to distract myself (and sometimes BlueSky and the other one).  I’m following them at least partly out of novelty; they are websites I’ve never really used prior to recent weeks to months, so they haven’t gotten too boring yet.  Also, it was through Threads that I found the place that did my autism assessment, so that’s a real benefit.  But such short-format, chaotic sites discourage (albeit unintentionally) any depth and nuance of discussion.

Of course the Website Formerly Known As Twitter has always been a bit of a cesspool, precisely because it just encourages the equivalent of interaction via sound bite.  And since Musk®, by Elon™  has taken it over, both it and he have gotten worse.  I almost cannot believe that he indulges himself in such illogic and irrationality as he seems to do on the site, and that it has so leaked over into his real life.  Then again, even Ayn Rand, a fierce advocate of reason, fell victim to her own personality cult.

These are examples of the fact that it can be very difficult to maintain one’s clear-headedness without any input from others, and firm input at that.  This is why we have peer review in science (and various incentives to disprove each other in rigorous ways).

No great mind is ever error free, not even the greatest, whoever that might be.  It’s probably not possible for any finite mind to be error free*, and I’m not sure that even an infinite mind, if such an idea makes sense, could be error free.

Of course, none of it really matters in the long run, but in the short run there is much needless suffering in the world that could at least be mitigated if people would just calm down a bit and try to let reason govern them.  Alas, that’s an awful lot to ask of naked house apes.  They are saddled with all the evolutionary history that leads such jumped-up monkeys to hurl their feces at each other more often than to seek mutual understanding.

They also have a regrettable tendency to feel that they are right, that they just know something, and to be aggressively opposed to self-doubt.  That, I suspect, may be the attribute that will lead to the demise of the human race and possibly all other life on this planet.

I know the studies have been inconsistently replicated, but there are some experiments that indicate that people with depression evaluate themselves (and presumably the world) more realistically than those who are not prone to it.  Other people all tend to rate themselves above the median in most things**, whereas depressed people seem inclined to accuracy, not merely to downgrade themselves (at least when not actively depressed).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, self-confidence beyond a certain minimum requirement is inherently suspect.  I don’t trust people who trust themselves too much; they are much more likely to make errors and not to correct them, and then to compound and double down on such errors.  Current US politics is awash with this monkey-work, as is big business, and it can only be sustained for so long before the bubble must burst, and a bursting bubble is a violent event that can cause a great deal of harm.

This dysfunction of thought and communication is not isolated in the political right, though currently their pathologies are more immediately consequential and potentially disastrous.  But the left has its share of unthinking monkeys, too, and they often encourage and trigger the monkeys on the right.

As for me, I don’t consider myself a member of either camp.  I am orthogonal overall to the left-right axis of human politics.

And with that peculiar statement, I’ll bring this post, and hopefully this week, to a close.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a post.  Either way, please try to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Though errors are free in that you don’t have to pay for them in advance‒but they can cost you after the fact.

**It’s possible, in principle, for most people to be above average, when by average you refer to the arithmetic mean, but it is not possible‒by definition‒for the majority of people to be above the median.

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Why would mice and men plan things together? Small wonder such plans go awry.

It’s Friday, as you know if you’re reading this on the day it’s posted.  I’m writing this on my smartphone because I didn’t feel like bringing my laptop computer with me when I left the office yesterday, but I’m beginning to regret it slightly.  My thumbs have still not completely recovered from their inflammation.  Perhaps they will never fully recover.  Who knows?  But it’s certainly the case that writing on the computer is much easier and more “natural” for me.

I will be working tomorrow if the office is open, and if so I will probably write a blog post.  For the past two weekends the office has not been open, since we had so few people willing to come in.  But maybe this weekend will be different, though we still have a lot of people out of the office.

As for anything else, well…I haven’t backslid on what to eat so far, in that I am following a path that should be good or at least useful.  I must say, though, there were times yesterday‒there are such times many days‒when I thought that maybe what I ought to do is just lock myself in the house and eat ice cream and cookies in huge quantities until it kills me.

Unfortunately, it takes a very long time to kill oneself that way, I’ll wager.  The body has a very high capacity to store calories before it completely breaks down and falls apart.  Individual mileage will vary, of course, but the mileage is long.  Such a course might be enough to make me stop liking ice cream and/or cookies, but that’s not the specific goal.

Yesterday I was also contemplating, both to myself and with my coworker, what I might be like if I had not had my back injury a little over 20 years ago.  I think I said something like, “You should see what I would be like if I didn’t have chronic pain.  You have no idea.”

I don’t have specific ideas myself either, but I do know that I used to be someone who‒when not suffering from too much chronic depression and apparently autistic burnout‒could do just about anything to which I put my mind.  For instance, I decided to apply to medical school more or less as an afterthought, but I never doubted that I could get in or that I could become a doctor.

It’s not that I was cocky.  Self-confidence of that sort has been something I occasionally pretended to have, but it’s not my natural state.  I just considered medical school an eminently soluble problem and proceeded to solve it.

Medical school does not involve a mentally super-challenging curriculum.  There’s a lot of information to internalize, of course, but none of it involves dealing with any counterintuitive notions.  There are rarely any complex numbers or linear algebra or calculus or differential geometry involved in medicine!  Quantum mechanics essentially never comes into play, except perhaps in describing vaguely how MRIs and PET scans work.

Anyway, things being so stochastic, it’s very difficult to imagine what I or my life would be like if I had never developed my chronic pain and back problem.  I might still be working in Winter Park as a doctor; I might still be married; and I would be much more likely to be with my kids, or at least to be able to see and interact with them.  I would also probably be much less grumpy than I am.  I don’t know how my autism itself would change its presentation.  Maybe I never would have sought out or even considered the diagnosis.

I guess it’s pointless to contemplate these things.  We cannot change the past.  Still, one of the big strengths of the human brain (or a pseudo-human brain) is the ability to contemplate counterfactuals as simulations so one can make decisions based on assessment of potential outcomes, colored by past experience and knowledge, rather than having to do everything trial-and-error, with death weeding out the worst local failures.

Still, all I can see stretching before me if I cannot reduce my pain and try to get better sleep at the least is loneliness (which is what I deserve, I guess) and pain and never-ending fatigue, with intermittent forced distraction.  That’s not worth the risk, especially since, in that scenario, an accidental or medical death would be one of the better outcomes.

Anyway, my resolve hasn’t changed since I discussed it earlier this week.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.  If I work tomorrow, I will probably write another post.  If not, I won’t.

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I have a plan, though I have no dream

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day.  This means that today at the office will be relatively stressful, especially since the largest of the relevant weekly reports didn’t arrive until just before closing time yesterday, so I didn’t get the chance to start to work through it.  Still, that’s okay.  It’s been a weirdly slow week at the office, all things considered (even on Monday, when I wasn’t there), so it won’t be as bad as it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve come to a tentative‒well, not all that tentative, really, but like all rational conclusions it is in principle provisional‒plan or goal set or determination or whatever the most appropriate term might be.

Here it is:

Within a fairly short period of time (I don’t have a specific amount laid aside, but it will certainly be well before my next birthday*) one of three things will have happened.

1)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will help reduce my chronic pain.

2)  I will have lost a significant amount of weight and it will not help reduce my chronic pain.

3)  I will fail to lose a significant amount of weight.

It’s not that I’m horribly overweight, but I am nearly the heaviest I have ever been, and that’s not cool, so to speak.  It certainly isn’t likely to be helping my chronic pain.

Anyway, the upshot of the plan is, if the first thing happens, I will then try to reassess my depression and anxiety and my lifestyle and my ASD and see where to go from there.

If one of the latter two outcomes occurs, I will kill myself.

I’m not sure by what means I will do so, and whether I will make it public or not, or if I will try to make it some kind of statement; I just don’t know.  I try not to box myself in with too many specifics about things I’m going to do, because to do so would limit me; the best means and methods might reveal themselves only in the future.

I think this plan makes good sense.  At the very least, I would like to try to reduce my chronic pain, and though I doubt that all of it would go away with a significant reduction in weight, I expect at least some of it will improve.  Whatever else is the case, if I lose a significant amount of weight and it doesn’t help my pain, well, at least I will have lost weight and will not die as quite the disgusting creature that I currently am.

I intend at least tacitly to inform some of the people at the office of this plan‒at least the people who are smart enough to take it seriously.  That way I can hopefully avoid anyone unwittingly sabotaging my goals by offering me food of various kinds that will get in the way of weight loss; it can be very difficult to resist temptation in any given moment.  And, of course, people who know my intention and who for whatever reason are willing to sabotage it, will be thereby revealed to be my enemies.

Now, enemies are not as troubling a thing for someone who is depressed and suicidal (Oh, what are you going to do to me, keep me alive?) but I do not promise that, if I fail and have just to kill myself, that I will not take the opportunity to take vengeance on those who deserve it.

Of course, I also do not promise that I will take vengeance upon anyone at all.  For the most part, in my life, the opinions, nature, state of being, and other aspects of people I don’t like (or who don’t like me) are not very important.  I suppose that’s one positive aspect of autism spectrum disorder:  no one really lives in my head rent-free, as the saying goes.

People who are literally in my presence impinge upon my consciousness, but I don’t actually ever really even imagine what other people are thinking or doing when I’m not with them**.  As long as they just leave me alone and don’t bother me, I generally don’t tend to hold grudges.  Just because I consider someone my enemy, doesn’t mean I consider myself their enemy.

That may be a subtle distinction, but it’s significant.  If someone is my enemy, it’s something I may need to take into account in my dealings, depending on the situation, but then, so is infectious disease and shower mildew.  It’s not personally significant to me.

But if I declare myself someone else’s enemy, then I will do my best to merit the title “The Enemy” like Sauron and Morgoth, like Doom and Lord Foul (and worse than Voldemort).

Well, I would be worse than the wizard formerly known as Tom Riddle in general, but like him, and less like the others, I would not tend to want to torment my enemies.  There would be no clever deathtraps and torture chambers (physical or psychological) from which one’s targets can potentially escape.  I prefer the style of the Terminator or The Accountant; just wipe the subject from existence as completely and efficiently as possible.

Anyway, that’s a digression.  I wouldn’t do to others what I’m not willing to do to myself, and the only person I’m at all likely to kill is me, which seems fair.  So, that’s the plan:  Try to do something that has at least some chance of reducing my chronic pain, and if I fail, die in short order.

I’m not completely sure which outcome I prefer.

*I’m thinking of setting it at no later than what would have been my next wedding anniversary if I were still married.

**This is probably related to deficits in the so-called theory of mind that are a frequent part of ASD.

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Well, here we go again

It’s Monday morning, again, and I’m starting another week writing a blog post in the morning instead of doing something productive or creative or whatever.  Or, I suppose one could also say I am doing this instead of sleeping, though it’s not as though I really had a choice about that.

Oh, and the reason I didn’t post on Saturday was because the office didn’t open on Saturday, since everyone kind of needed a break.  It wasn’t because I died sometime after my Friday morning post, unfortunately.

Anyone who thinks that dying would be the unfortunate thing clearly hasn’t wrestled with and internalized the fact that everyone is going to die anyway, and that chronic pain makes the process of being alive a form of slow torture.  And as some famous person from the time of the inquisition said, if anyone has not confessed themselves a witch or a heretic, it is merely because they have not been subject to torture.

He was commenting on the fact that, unless there is truly some greater purpose motivating someone, torture works on essentially everyone, eventually.  Now, I don’t know if it’s melodramatic of me or if I exaggerate in calling 20+ years of chronic pain (while still trying to live a gainfully employed, productive life) a form of torture.  Maybe I’m just a wimp.  I do know that I do not have that greater purpose, that goal on which to keep my gaze fixed.

I used to have something or some things like that.  One of the thoughts that helped me get through prison was that I could look forward to seeing my kids again when I got out.  The whole point of accepting a plea bargain, even though I consider myself innocent, was that I didn’t want to take the chance of being in prison any longer than I had to, because I wanted to see my children again as soon as I could.

Of course, that turned out not to happen, because they didn’t actually want to see me.  It turned out that their lives were at least simpler when I wasn’t around, just like their mother’s was, just like pretty much everyone else’s life is simpler when I’m not around.

That was about 10 years ago, and I still haven’t seen either of them since.  I ask you, what’s the point of enduring anything in that situation?

I have a lot of endurance, I think‒mentally, anyway.  I can put up with a surprising amount of stuff just out of general pig-headedness.  But after a while it all gets annoying.

And lest anyone be under the mistaken impression that I am someone who has not sought help or not allowed people to help me when they tried:  I have gone through years of therapy at various times and of various kinds, I have taken various types and brands of antidepressants and related medications, I have called the suicide crisis line more than once and have very briefly been hospitalized because of it.  I have taken various kinds of medications and have tried numerous interventions including surgery to address my chronic pain.  I don’t easily let problems go.  I don’t tend to give up easily, at least not at things that matter to me.

But I am tired and I am in pain and I am alone.  Also, it turns out I am autistic.  That would, of course, be nothing new, just newly discovered, but it does make it very hard to make new friends or new connections with people, especially now that I am no longer in an environment where there are people around who are interested in at least some of the things in which I am truly interested or who have shared backgrounds.

I would like to do good in and for the world in some fashion.  I would at least like to bring original creations into the world that make some people happy, at least for a little while.

I know we’re all just animals, muddling our way from the womb to the tomb, acting in ways shaped by natural selection’s effects on our ancestors.  There need be no deeper point to life than that to keep everything rolling.  But it’s not very interesting after a while.

I don’t know.  Everything is getting boring.  It’s hard to bother keeping oneself alive when everything is either dull or irritating or painful.  There is such a thing as learned helplessness, even for the very stubborn.  All creatures have their limits.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say or do here.  I don’t know what the point is.  Probably there is no point.  I know that I am pointless, at the very least.  So I’ll draw this to a close again, and start yet another pointless, unpleasant, idiotic day.  I’m stupid that way.  But maybe I’ll get smarter someday.

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Are you entitled to a headline?

It’s Wednesday, and I’m writing this post using my laptop computer, and here we all are again, though we are not on the Mississippi.

Actually, for all I know, some of you reading actually are on that river.  But I am not, and I don’t think I ever have been “on” it, though I think I have crossed over it at least once, on a bridge somewhere.  I’ve also had at least one dream that I can vaguely remember from long ago about driving in a car up a road that ran alongside some imaginary Mississippi (I think I was on the west side of it) but whatever it was in my dream was almost certainly not much like the real thing.  Similarly, the landscape around was also not at all like what I’m sure the real landscape along the Mississippi really is.  It was almost…compressed, and also simplified, in a way rather reminiscent of the Territories in the Stephen King/Peter Straub book The Talisman.

That was a weird digression, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s not really a big deal, though.  I have no particular agenda for today’s post, so it’s really going to be just a stream-of-my-consciousness thing.  Hopefully that won’t be too unpleasant for you.  If it is, I suppose you can console yourself with the fact that you only have to endure it for the few minutes it takes to read the post—indeed, you don’t actually have to read the whole thing, though if you’re reading these words, you’ve probably already read a substantial amount of it.

Still, least you’re not stuck inside this consciousness like I am, every waking hour.  And I have more waking hours than most people do because of my insomnia.

I had a particularly bad pain day yesterday.  I actually needed to use my bamboo walking staff to get up from my seat.  Well, I didn’t truly need to use it, I guess; I was able to do it without.  But it hurt quite a lot more to stand up without it than with it.

I’m not certain what caused this rather severe exacerbation.  Sometimes I try to do slightly different exercises or stretching or to wear different shoes and whatnot to see if they are better, and sometimes it just turns out they are worse.  On the other hand, sometimes the pain seems just to be random, or at least it’s worsened by some event or series of events that are not clear, and over which I have no apparent control.  It’s frustrating.  I keep trying, believe me; I’m still alive, after all*.  But Batman knows it’s hard to know why I try, because I see few if any potential short-term or long-term rewards.

Of course, I’m also no further along in deciding what, if anything, to do about my autism diagnosis.  Maybe I won’t do anything.  Maybe it’s enough just to know.  Supposedly there are supports and communities and so on for people with autism, but I am not good at seeking out communities at the best of times.

At least some people use this sort of situation as inspiration to make “content”, either on Instagram or on YouTube or similar.  I did do my old YouTube video “Asperger’s…or not?”  I guess I could do another one, a sort of sequel to that one, now that I have my formal diagnosis.  Unfortunately, I’m even more hideous to look at now than I was back then, so the prospect of making a video is of mixed potential at best.

In any case, I have been having a lot of trouble, largely because of the pain and my depression.  I’ve been taking the Saint John’s Wort for several weeks now, and I’m far from sure that it’s having any beneficial effects on my mood.  It all makes me want to ask “What is Saint John’s worth?”

Yes, that’s the sort of joke I think of whenever I write those words.  It’s not something I seem able to resist.  I have more of an excuse now, I suppose, but I doubt that makes it any better or more tolerable.

I don’t know what to write.  I don’t know what to do about my pain or my depression.  I don’t know what to do in general.  I’m getting lots of strong urges to hurt myself—partly just for distraction, partly to express my frustration, which I cannot seem to do in other ways, and largely because I just hate myself—and I have succumbed to them more than once recently.  That’s not a good trend.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I’ve already said more than I had to say, so the signal to noise ratio of this post is small.  But what part is the signal and what part is the noise?  I’ll give you a hint:  anything that seems whimsical and humorous and upbeat is almost certainly noise.  It’s my habitual cloak, since I know that people in general don’t want to deal with someone who is in distress.  They want to be able to convince themselves that there is nothing that needs to be done, or that there is simply nothing anyone can do.  It’s nice to be able to give those people an out.

As for the prospect of finding some out for myself, one way or another, well, I guess you can only wait and see, while I try to see if I can find any answers, whether trivial or significant.  And if nothing else changes, tomorrow I will write another blog post.

Please, please, try to have a better day than I have.

*Whether or not that’s a good thing is a question on which I am far from clear.

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“…my mind is on the blink.”

It’s Monday.  I almost don’t know what more needs to be said.

I’m probably going to make this relatively short, because I’m having quite a bit of pain in the bases of my thumbs as I write this on my smartphone.  I took three aspirin* already this morning, but it certainly hasn’t kicked in.  If it’s not going to help my pain, I wish at least the anti-platelet action would make me have a massive GI bleed or something.  I know, it’s kind of gross, but it’s one of those things where no one can claim you’re malingering or lazy or whatever.  If you’re vomiting blood, only a fool could say, “It’s all in your head.”

Speaking of it being all in your head, though, it’s of course a worry that aspirin could cause a hemorrhagic stroke instead of a GI bleed.  Obviously, since my brain is my greatest strength, I would prefer not to have that happen.

On the other hand, it’s not as though my brain is my friend or anything.  It’s where my greatest difficulties lie, as well as my strengths, and those difficulties dominate most of my days and‒to say the least‒my nights.  I’m depressed and “anxious” and angry and pessimistic, and I cannot sleep properly, and I am in constant pain, and I also have all these attributes that led me to have my assessment done last Friday to try to determine if I have the second kind of ASD or not.  So I can’t exactly feel too worried about my brain.  I don’t even wear a helmet when I ride my bicycle.  If I get brain damaged, it seems like the least my brain deserves.

I’m tired.  I’m so tired.

I know there are people out there who are able to try to put the best possible spin on events, and who can honestly say that they love themselves, and that’s great.  I envy and admire that.  And I have tried very hard to develop those habits, through self-hypnosis and autosuggestion and meditation and even pharmacology, but I have not been able to alter my programming so far.  Maybe I need a factory reset or something.

Anyway, I’m supposed to receive my report about my autism assessment within a week, so I should have it by this Friday at the latest.  I can’t say I’m not nervous about it.

Well, I can say it, I guess.  “I’m not nervous about it.”  See?  But saying it doesn’t make it so, no matter how loudly you say it, or how often you repeat it, or what oaths you proclaim, or what authority you cite.  It doesn’t even matter if you really believe it, even if you believe it so fervently that you’re willing to die for the belief.

If that were any measure of truth, then suicide bombers would be more likely to be right than Nobel Prize winning scientists, and such people are not more likely to be right.  They are almost certainly wrong about everything important that led them to blow themselves up.  In fact, certainty of anything beyond literal mathematical and deductive, logical conclusions is the hallmark of a mind less likely to be right than would be a mind that is full of doubt and willing to criticize itself.

So, I am nervous, but there’s nothing I can do for now but wait.  In the meantime, I really should start writing on my laptop computer again.  This phone writing is losing what charm it had, since it’s making my thumbs hurt worse over time.

With that said, I’m going to end the first draft of this now.  I don’t have more to say that I’m sure I haven’t said elsewhere, before, probably eight-thousand times.  I tend to repeat myself a lot.

I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Sometimes I feel that the plural of aspirin should be “aspirins”, but I think it’s generally just “aspirin”, like “deer” and “fish”** being both singular and plural.

**Sometimes one sees the word “fishes”, but that is generally used, I believe, when one is discussing more than one kind of fish.

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I could a blog unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course‒Valentine’s Eve, if you will.  I don’t mean to imply that every Thursday is Valentine’s Eve (which would imply that every Friday is Valentine’s Day).  No, no.  For the sake of any future archaeologists who might be trying to piece together tattered bits of our civilization, among which is this blog post*, I’ll point out that Valentine’s Day falls on February 14th (every year, without even any breaks!), and today is February 13th.  I’ll also point out that I am probably the only one who would think of it as Valentine’s Eve.

As you may be able to tell, I have nothing about which to write, today.  Don’t worry (as if you would), that won’t stop me from writing.  But I am distracted by mental exhaustion and rather severe pain that’s been bothering me and exacerbating my depression all week.  I know that my depression is not dependant on or caused by my chronic pain‒I know this because it predates it by a good twenty years‒but Batman knows it doesn’t help.

I mean, think about it:  you have dysthymia (aka chronic depression, with dips into full-on major depression), probable undiagnosed ASD with all its associated difficulties, you had a congenital heart defect (also called an ASD!) requiring open-heart surgery at 18, and now you have chronic back pain from a disk rupture/tear and “failed back surgery syndrome” for about 20 years (so every day for 20 years has been dominated by pain), and your career is wrecked, you’ve been to prison, you have no social life, no friends (outside of work), no romantic attachments for more than a dozen years (after having been divorced after your marriage of 15 years and then having only one, short and ultimately rather catastrophic, relationship after that) and you strive for self-improvement‒which you stubbornly keep trying to do, because you’re stupid that way‒but each time run into the barriers and obstacles and quicksand of your mood disorder, chronic pain, and probable “neurodivergence”, sending you what feels like three steps backward for every one you took forward.  Why would you not want to give up?

What, other than foolhardy stubbornness (and literally mindless biological forces), could drive someone to keep going and keep trying when there is no point, no goal, no reward, no aspirations, and no significant amount of even transient joy (though there is some)?

Whatever it is, it’s associated with such a high degree of tension that I cannot even sleep at night without waking frequently and early as if I were a soldier in the jungles of wartime Vietnam or something.  It’s really stupid.  I’m very irritated by and with myself.

But I have not yet been able to find effective solutions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t any‒the potential solution space might just be very large, and the subspace of workable solutions much smaller‒but it also doesn’t give any reason to be convinced that there are effective solutions.  There may be no answers, there may be no “right” way to go.

Oh, well.  What was I writing about…or, rather, what was it about which I was writing?  I don’t know.  Valentine’s Day, future archeologists (perhaps virtual beings?) trying to find clues to the attributes of our civilization, the pointlessness of continuing to live without connection or companionship or activities, no full escape from pain (ever), no good nights’ sleeps, all these weird things were matters about which I wrote above.

Enough.  I’m annoyed by myself; I can’t even imagine how annoyed you readers must be.  Really, I can’t.  My apologies.  I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish.  Nothing, really, and possibly nothingness***.  But I have nothing else to write right now.  I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*This, of course, raises the question of how future archaeologists would even be able to see my blog without having already understood much of our civilization.  After all, unlike paper artifacts such as books and magazines, every written thing on the internet and web requires functioning computer systems, including processors, storage, internet protocols, languages from html to Java, C+, Python, Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, I don’t know what, as well as all the necessary hardware.  This is something people who say stupid things like “online is forever” don’t seem to grasp:  if we lose electrical power or some other process interferes with electronics, all the data on the internet is useless.  Hard copy books can decay of course, but that is much slower; they are much more self-contained stores of information, much less contingent.  That’s something about which to think, as the world approaches the brink**.

**Yes, I did that on purpose.

***That was a deliberate sentence fragment, used to convey a sense of drama and intensity.  I don’t know if it worked.

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Raveling down the knitted sleeve of care

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m heading to the office‒way too early, because I still can’t get a good night’s sleep,  Even with recent interventions to try to help my pain and insomnia, it seems the sleep honeymoon phase might already be over.

I felt very much like the lone soldier in the jungle again last night, unable truly to rest and relax, primed at some pervasive level to jump up and react in case some threat developed.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a true external threat.  It might be some break in my routine, sleeping past my alarm*, realizing I had forgotten to set my alarm**, or there might be an intruder, some deliberate, secret assailant, come to attack me in my sleep***, or just a new flare-up of chronic pain developing.

It’s not a great way to start a day or to continue a life.  As I said, I had some temporary improvement not in the quantity of my sleep but in the quality thereof‒I wasn’t sleeping more, but I felt as though I was sleeping better‒for the past week plus a day or so.  This is probably why I’ve had the energy to write some blog posts this week.  But last night felt just like one of my typical, paranoid, restless, angry “sleeps” from before.  I have not stopped my new intervention, but apparently it’s no longer addressing whatever the roots of my sleep issues are.

I suppose I shouldn’t draw too sweeping a conclusion so readily.  One night is not a pattern.  But it’s such a familiar experience, and after such a short semi-respite, that it’s almost worse than never having a respite at all.

For at least 15 years (at least), I’ve spent most of my days and nights alone in the wasteland‒not literally, of course, don’t be stupid.  I just mean that I’ve had the sense of being by myself‒even when in crowded places, such as malls or prison‒and with no real recourse to anyone to help me defend against potential enemies, physical or social or “spiritual”, real or even imagined, external and internal.

To be clear, I don’t feel that the world around me is generally hostile.  In some ways, that would be easier, although considerably less stable.  If I were literally being attacked, I could literally take arms against that sea of troubles and let slip the dogs of war, imitate the action of the tiger, throw my warlike shield before my body and lay on*, fighting against assailants until they were all beaten or until I was dead‒and damned be him that first cried, “Hold, enough!”

Almost certainly, the outcome would be my destruction, but we all have that coming, anyway.  Dying in battle against actual attackers isn’t the worst death I can imagine, if I’m honest (it’s not the best one, either, don’t mistake me…I am not a Klingon or a Sontaran, and I do not embrace the philosophies).

Alas, I will probably be taken down in the end just by the progressive deterioration of my body.  It would be nice to die in a way that is heroic or at least useful, but that’s unlikely to happen.

I’m frustrated and angry about many things this morning, and I’m sick of feeling this way so much of the time.  What is the point of this?  Unlike Camus, I don’t imagine Sisyphus is happy.

It would be one thing if he had people whose company he enjoyed with whom to spend his time while he kept pushing his boulder.  Or, if he really were achieving some result, something beneficial, something that improved the world beyond himself.  But just to keep grinding away at his absurd and pointless task, with no benefit, with no entertainment, with no inherent joy in the process…why bother with that?

At the very least, he could try to plot his escape and enact vengeance against those who sentenced him to this fate!  It might take a long time, but it’s not as though he has anything else to do.  Even though he was made to roll his rock as a punishment, any eternal punishment would always be immoral when brought in response to any finite deed in a finite lifetime.

Of course, no one has put me in my current state.  Well, okay, the government of Florida and of Palm Beach County certainly did their parts in carrying out significant injustice in my case, and those involved are probably worthy of retribution, but it’s all really just so haphazard and so much a part of an unplanned, inefficient, and fundamentally unjust system that it’s not even easy to know where to begin.  Probably, we just need another really big asteroid, or a nearby gamma ray burst, just to wipe the slate entirely clean.

I guess we’ll all see what happens.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good weekend, whether you want to do so or not.  So there.

*Ha ha, I don’t recall whether that has ever happened to me.

 **This has happened, but almost always in the middle of the night, when I awaken, realize with a feeling of severe tension that I forgot to set my alarm, quickly make sure to set it…and then just stay awake until it goes off or until just before it goes off.

***I keep various weapons next to me, within arm’s reach, when I sleep.

****Macduff