insomnia

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An inconsequential blog post

I don’t know if I’m going to write any fiction this morning.  I didn’t bring the laptop back to the house with me yesterday, and my insomnia is acting up, so I’m headed into the office very early and writing this on the way.  If I do write any fiction, I guess I’ll update this to let you know.

Of course, it’s nothing new that my insomnia is acting up.  Though I sometimes don’t talk about it‒since I’m sure it gets terribly dull for readers, though not as much as it is for me‒I have poor sleep every night.  I’ve been taking Benadryl nightly now for about a week, but its effects are limited, and of course, it has side effects.

Clearly, of course, humans are not adapted to the modern world, and I’m not adapted to it, either, though I don’t consider myself truly human.  So it should be no surprise that I am not optimally healthy in this world.  I’m also pretty nearly alone, with only long distance communication and “work friends” as well as a greater number of people at work who should feel lucky I haven’t mastered the “force choke” like Darth Vader.  I guess what they really should be glad of is that my frontal loves are well developed in that I have good impulse control and a strong sense of personal ethics.

I’m very tired and yet tense, which I’m sure you know is an exhausting combination.  It’s like being a rat in one of those old psych experiments that looked into learned helplessness.  I try to keep myself busy with writing stories and with music and with learning science and math and programming and other things, including philosophy and psychology‒I already know a lot of biology, of course‒and those things are distracting, and they can even be interesting.  But there’s no real point to any of it.  I can’t really talk to anyone about most of it, except info-dumping and watching even well-intentioned eyes glaze over.

I was thinking of trying to see if I can post this to Instagram in addition to Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter.  I have an Instagram account, of course.  I inherited it with my Facebook account, so to speak.  But I don’t know that I’ve ever posted anything on it.  Most of the video and picture sharing stuff isn’t really my cup of tea.  I’m certainly not something anyone really wants to look at, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m getting close to my destination.  Maybe I’ll pick this up later.  Unfortunately, so far there have been no fatal car accidents for me.  I guess that’s good.  I wouldn’t really want to take innocent people who are mostly trying to make a living with me just so I can die.  Better to do that sort of thing literally as well as figuratively alone.

‒

I’m at the office, where I’ve been for a couple of hours now.  I haven’t written any fiction.  I did try to look into Instagram, but as far as I can tell, you have to post videos and/or pictures there, and like I think I said, no one in their right mind wants to look at me.  I didn’t try too hard to figure it out, to be fair.  I’m not really all that concerned.  It doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, sorry for not writing fiction today or having anything positive to say.  Maybe I’ll be back in a better frame tomorrow.  Who knows?  Not me.

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Top o’ the workweek to ye.

It’s Monday, and I’m writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here from the house.  I did a bit of working up to the trek over the weekend, walking about four miles wearing my boots on Saturday (and getting a modest sunburn in the process), then a shorter distance yesterday, wearing lighter shoes, all to try to counteract some possible deconditioning.  It seems to have worked at least to some extent, because I was able to walk the whole way this morning without stopping to rest.

Of course, it’s possible, in principle, that my preparations over the weekend were of no help whatsoever.  It’s even possible (in principle) that I would have found it easier to walk this morning if I had not prepared at all.  However, given what I know about the nature of adaptive physiology in humans (and humanoid creatures like me), I give both of those possibilities fairly low credence.

I downloaded the MS Word app onto my smartphone over the weekend, hoping that thereby I will make it easier to work on my fiction even if I don’t bring my laptop computer with me.  The app is linked to my OneDrive account, as is the program on my computer, so I can use the phone to write and update not just Extra Body but also, if I so choose, Outlaw’s Mind or even The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I think no one is interested in having me work on either of those stories (possibly ever again), but please, correct me if I’m wrong.

I am considering changing my blogging pattern, especially if I can keep up my regimen of walking to (and also, at least part of the time, from) the train station.  I plan to cut back on the blogging to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and on the Saturdays on which I work, which will be every other Saturday.  That way, I’ll keep getting at least some new fiction writing done three days a week.  Thursday and Friday (also Wednesday, if I recall) of last week, I got no work done on my new short story once I’d written my extremely gloomy blog posts.

Much of this, like other plans, depends on me getting a minimally tolerable amount of sleep.  My sleep was still fragmented quite a lot this weekend, but I took two Benadryl tablets on Friday night and one and a half on Saturday night, so I slept relatively well, at least for me.  The Benadryl has unpleasant ill-effects on my ability to concentrate, so I took none last night.

Interestingly enough (to me, anyway) the time adjustment this weekend was somewhat useful.  When I started waking up on Sunday, quite early even after the Benadryl, I looked at the computer clock and thought that, well, at least I wasn’t waking up too early.  Of course then I looked at the microwave clock and realized that it was “spring forward”* time, and I was waking up really quite early for a Sunday, especially after 1.5 Benadryl.

Still, given the shifted time, that particular “early” isn’t quite as early relative to everyone else as it might have otherwise been.  I still started waking up well before my intended time to get up this morning, but not as much before it as it would have been before the “time change”.

I’m hoping that the walking and such will help me be prone to rest (or supine to rest depending on how I lie down, ha ha) a little better.  I think a lot of what prevents me from being able to do what I mean to do a lot of the time is my lack of sleep.  If I can manage to improve that, things may seem better.

I remember, when I was young and even more foolish than I am now, I used to wish I didn’t need to sleep, or at least not to sleep much, envying the people I’d heard of‒truthfully or not‒who didn’t need to sleep as much as others.  I didn’t quite recognize that I was already beginning to be that way, myself.  After a certain age, I was almost always the first person to get up in the morning at home, and even when my friends and I would stay up very late, I was almost always the first of us to awaken.

Sleep doesn’t actually feel enjoyable or even pleasant to me.  It’s not something to which I look forward; there’s no reward sensation associated with it, and if anything it is filled with stress and tension, partly my dread of how early I’ll awaken and how tired (but not sleepy) I’ll feel when I wake up.

I know there are people who really like and enjoy sleep.  I am not one of them.  I simply become tired, and that’s unpleasant, and so I go to bed and go to sleep, and eventually start to wake up, usually not feeling good, not feeling rested, but feeling perhaps a bit less tired than I had‒though not always.

The only time I ever enjoyed the prospect of going to sleep and felt good going to sleep was when I was on Paxil for depression.  Unfortunately, that came with a host of side effects that made it not a great answer for me and my depression.  But it was interesting to have the subjective experience of looking forward to sleep and really feeling good about the prospect.  Weird, isn’t it?

All right, that’s enough for now.  I’ll write another post tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have had a tolerable amount of rest and so won’t be too depressed.  Then, maybe, Wednesday I’ll just write fiction.  I guess we’ll see.

*It’s annoying that the new paradigm for “Daylight Savings Time” is set to have the jump back forward so early, because now the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” is technically inaccurate, because it’s not spring yet for more another week and a half.  If they’re going to squeeze the time change in so close together, why don’t they just get rid of it completely?  It doesn’t actually change time, after all.  Within any given inertial reference frame, time is conserved; gaining an hour now entails losing an hour later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The enemy of my Self is Myself

I mean to try to keep this post relatively short today, and only partly because I’m writing this on my smartphone and don’t want to make my thumbs feel worse.  It’s mainly that I just don’t have much to say or talk about, and certainly nothing uplifting.

I tried to do a few relatively upbeat posts‒for me, anyway‒on Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I don’t think they’re as popular as my depressed and nihilistic posts.  It’s rather ironic; one might imagine that upbeat posts would be the ones people would prefer to read, but I guess that may not be true.  I shouldn’t be surprised that it surprises me, probably; people often make very little sense to me.

Anyway, I’m just tired.  I left work slightly early yesterday with a bad headache and just feeling horribly stressed out and tense and angry.  I don’t know if it was that things were particularly frustrating at the office, or if it was the usual fact that I cannot escape from the person I loathe most in the world:  me.

I often say that I hate the world and I hate my life‒at least, it feels as though I often say it, because I say it in my head a lot.  Maybe I don’t say it aloud or in writing as often as it feels as though I say it.  I haven’t kept track, and I don’t mean to do so.  That would be truly boring.

But of course, the reason (one of them, anyway) I don’t just change my life‒or try to change the world‒is that I cannot escape the common denominator that is the single biggest contributor to the fact that I hate the world and hate my life:  I hate myself.

I wish it were otherwise.  It would be nice to love myself, I guess.  I wouldn’t have to be narcissistic or anything.  It doesn’t require a delusional or overinflated self-worth to love oneself, any more than it need be irrational or delusional to love one’s spouse or one’s children even when one can see and knows their imperfections.  No one is perfect, after all‒I’m not even sure what the term could mean when applied to a person.

One can love another person even when angry at that person.  One can punish one’s children when they misbehave, and one can choose not to indulge all their wishes precisely because one loves them and hopes to guide them toward being the best people they can be.

So love doesn’t have to be stupid or delusional.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean one can simply choose to love someone.  I’ve tried to train myself to love myself, with positive self-reinforcement, with cognitive therapy, with auto-suggestion, with written lists of my positive attributes, and even with self-hypnosis.  Obviously, I have not succeeded.

Even when I’m stressed out and irritated by everything that happens at the office‒by the noise, by the overbearing “music”, by the stupid little rituals, by the personality conflicts, by the frequent interruptions when I’m doing one task and people just come in without preamble and start asking me about something else entirely*, as if I were a machine just waiting for them to give me work‒even when all these things are happening, the thing that bothers me most is that I am with me.

That’s what I feel, and it’s what I’ve been fighting and it’s the fact in spite of which I’ve been trying to be positive, at least in my writing, but that’s not really working.

When I was writing fiction, that seemed to help at least a bit‒and sometimes a lot‒but there’s only so much fiction one can write that almost no one reads before one feels as delusional as if one believed one had magic powers.  But it is true that writing fiction is good therapy, as Stephen King has pointed out on more than one occasion, and if I could do it full time without other commitments, I might again find the energy to do it.  Unfortunately, if I want to stay alive‒which is a rather big “if” a lot of the time‒I have to work, like everyone else, and my mental energy is used up and more than used up.

Anyway, that’s that.  Yesterday I was very stressed out and had a headache and yelled openly at my closest friend in the office and came within a hair’s breadth of breaking my tablet and my back Stratocaster.  I banged my head on the wall a few times to release some of those destructive urges, and that didn’t help my headache.

Yet I didn’t sleep well at all last night, even for me, despite going back to the house somewhat early.  I don’t feel rested; I almost never feel rested.  The very air through which I move feels like viscous, heavy smoke, burning my eyes, poisoning me as I breathe, impeding me as I try to walk, pressing down on me as I try to stand up.  I need to stop.  I need to rest.  I need to sleep.

*This is a bit akin to people who will come up and start talking to one when one is reading, as if someone who is reading must be unoccupied and just waiting to be of service to other people.

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How many times must a man wake up before he can sleep through the night?

What a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sleep I had last night*.  I have said before, and I will repeat it in all honesty here:  my last good night’s sleep that I can recall happened in the mid-1990s.  So, I never seen to get a very good night’s sleep anymore, and this either contributes to or is a consequence of my dysthymia and apparent “neurodivergence”**.

Last night, however, was a bit of an outlier even for me.  For much of the night I would drop off to sleep and then awaken in stress, wondering what the time was and if I had overslept, only to discover that it was a mere five minutes since I had last looked at the clock.  I don’t know how often that happened, but we can work out the theoretical maximum just by taking the number of hours between when I first dropped off and when I finally gave up and got up, and multiplying that by the number of five-minute intervals (a rough but reasonably accurate average) per hour, which is twelve.

Given this, there was a theoretical maximum of between sixty and sixty-six awakenings during the night.  I’m sure I had quite a bit fewer than that, though.  for instance, I had a period of relatively long sleep during the early night, lasting about an hour to an hour and a half.  So, there were no more than 48 awakenings, and still probably significantly fewer than that.  Misery tends to amplify and magnify the subjective impression of these kinds of occurrences.  It’s probably a perverse version of the peak-end rule, described by Fredrickson and  Kahneman, which was used in colonoscopies before the general practice of doing conscious sedation, which ensures that people don’t tend to remember what happens during the actual test.

As one who has been present when colonoscopies were performed, I can tell you that patients are often semi-awake and even somewhat responsive to interactions during the test, but they do not remember it.  Such conscious sedation can give one the appearance of rest, but it doesn’t actually allow for effective sleep, though one may feel that one has slept during that time.  It’s also not the sort of thing to use outside of careful clinical monitoring, as the death of Michael Jackson demonstrated.

Anyway, I had a moment‒subjectively‒of relatively deep sleep quite early in the night followed by a very prolonged period of miserable and stress-filled, anxiety-ridden sleep throughout the remaining hours, until I gave up and got showered and dressed and ready and came to the train station quite early for the train.  That’s where I am now.

It’s not too cold here, but the wind is relatively strong, making it feel colder, and so I have my hood up.  I imagine I look a bit like a poor man’s Ringwraith from a distance, dressed all in back as I always am.  Or maybe I seem to be a would-be Sith Lord.  Neither is a pleasant state in which to be, of course, but at least they have powers.  My powers, if that’s the right word, are mainly just mental abilities, and unfortunately, my best ones are not really put to much use, other than in this blog.

I’m so tired all the time.  Nothing is very much fun anymore, as Pink Floyd sang in One of My Turns, from The Wall, disc one, side B, fourth song from the end.  Don’t Leave Me Now*** has already become an obsolete, already-too-late situation for me, which leaves only Another Brick in the Wall Part 3, and then Goodbye Cruel World to finish up the first half of that album.

I did get some new reading glasses yesterday, somewhat stronger than the previous ones, and I’m pleased to relate that they seem to allow me to read a normal, printed page (without adjustable type size) adequately.  I even read three or four pages of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible yesterday, and maybe that will be the beginning of something more.  Right now, I probably wouldn’t read it even if I had it in front of me.  But hopefully, with that one barrier reduced, the vector sum of that system in phase space will change, and I’ll do some more reading.

This leads me to wonder if it might be better if I overshot the vision target and got reading glasses that are stronger than the ones I have now.  Maybe I should try that experiment.  Thankfully, reading glasses are pretty cheap, so even if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be out too much money.

Perhaps I would even rekindle (no pun intended) my ability to read and enjoy print books of various kinds if I did that.  It’s probably a lot to ask or expect, let alone hope for, but it might be worth a try.  My life post-FSP is unrecognizable even to myself compared to the one before it.  I’ve said many times that I feel that I’m like a Nazgul, or some other mortal who keeps a “great ring”.  I have not died, but neither am I growing or obtaining new life; I’m merely continuing, until at least every breath is a weariness.  “…thin and stretched out, like butter scraped over too much bread,” indeed.

Anyway, that’s more than enough of that.  I mean the blog post, of course, but I also mean the other‒that drawn out, continued existence that has no true life to it.  I’m just weary, and I have no hope for anything good in my future.  I need to get to the end of that first disc.  I can see no real point in anything else; it’s all just trudging through an endless, primordial desert with no oases.

*Unfortunately, I don’t think that moving to Australia would make a difference, and they probably wouldn’t let me in the country, anyway.

**Most likely it’s a complex system that interacts with itself, with each aspect feeding back on the other, the sleep trouble exacerbating the depression and other issues, and those issues further worsening the sleep, until some relative dynamic equilibrium is reached.

***And I want to make it clear that I never did the abusive stuff mentioned by “Pink” in that song.  I am certainly an unpleasant person, but I never was one to put my spouse “through the shredder in front of my friends” let alone “to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night”.  If anything, being the recipient of such things would be more likely for me.  But even if she had been so inclined, my ex-wife was not capable of beating me to a pulp.  Not that she would have been so inclined, anyway.  Though I suspect that most people who spend very much time with me entertain that notion at least occasionally.  Goodness knows I do.

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.

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Methought I read a blog cry, “Sleep no more!”

insomnia

Hello and good day!  It’s Thursday again, as you no doubt know, and time for me to write another weekly blog entry.

I’ve had a rather intense exacerbation of my chronic insomnia over the last several days, so I’m worried that my writing might be incoherent and disjointed.  Of course, it’s possible that my writing is always that way, and I simply haven’t noticed.  How would I know for sure?  Still, I might be mistaken, but when I reread my writing, it doesn’t seem terribly incoherent to me.  Until and unless I receive specific feedback from others, there’s no way to fact-check the matter except through my general agreement with other readers about the quality of other writers.

Such are the vagaries of epistemology.

Insomnia has been a longstanding problem for me, certainly ever since I’ve been an “adult.”  One part of that problem is that, unlike what seems to be the case for most people, sleep is not in an especially pleasant experience for me.  If anything, it’s rather dysphoric.  I don’t tend to remember any dreams—which is disappointing, given legends of such writers as Coleridge, who are reputed to have been led to some of their greatest works by slumberous visions.

For me, sleep is at best a bland phenomenon; I have trouble getting to sleep and I have trouble staying asleep.  I don’t resist sleep knowingly, and I certainly don’t fear it in the sense that inspired the apocryphal Edgar Allen Poe quip, “Sleep, those little slices of death, how I loathe them!”  Though Poe never wrote those words, as far as I know, he does seem to have been afraid of and resistant to sleep as a harbinger or precursor of death; he clearly feared premature burial (that dread features prominently in more than one of his stories).

This is not the nature of my problem.  I have no intellectual fear of death at all, though it’s hard to eliminate the purely biological drive to keep living.  I simply find sleep, if not actively unpleasant, somewhere between uninteresting and dreary.  The only time I’ve ever experienced real pleasure both at anticipating sleep and at experiencing it was when I was taking Paxil to treat depression.  That was certainly remarkable, but the medicine had more than enough detriment to counter that one benefit*, and it never did a very good job on my depression.

There’s little doubt that my chronic insomnia and my dysthymia/depression are related, and that the tendency for sleep to be thoroughly anhedonic to me is part and parcel of my dysthymia, though it long predates the latter problem.  I don’t remember any time in my life when sleep held real allure for me.  This tendency has been useful in many situations; I’ve never had trouble being an early riser, and when on call—either in hospital during residency, or from home later on in my practice—I never had much trouble quickly coming awake and being able to focus on whatever problem might need my attention.  And, of course, indifference to sleep was a very useful trait when my children were babies, allowing my then-wife to rest through the night far more often than many new mothers can.

Feeding and rocking my infant children in the silence of the night, now…that was a truly hedonic experience par excellence.

Nevertheless, like every organism with a nervous system, I do require sleep, though the nature of that need is far from fully understood by science.  When I go without enough of it, for long enough, it wears me out, and I know that it affects my cognitive functions, as well as my moods (though there’s a real chicken and egg problem involved in this latter issue).  So, I try—sometimes only halfheartedly, I’ll admit—to avoid succumbing to my insomnia.  But it can be hard just to lay in bed doing nothing and waiting to see if sleep arrives…or if it returns, as the case may be, when I awaken far too early in the morning.  I don’t tend to feel anxious or particularly stressed at such times, because again, I don’t particularly enjoy sleep, but I sometimes get angry at myself, knowing that I’m going to regret my sleeplessness later.

Oh well.  Whataya gonna do?

I’ll tell you what I’m going to do:  keep chugging along, I suppose.  The editing of Unanimity continues to go well, despite a few computer issues; I’m still enjoying the story and the characters.  And, of course, my footnote reminded me that I have a substantially begun novella waiting in the wings, which I may even complete someday.  And, however much I tend to begin my blog posts with no clear idea where I’m going in any given week, it’s still a rewarding process.  If nothing else, I amuse myself, and that’s got to be worth something.

Hopefully, at least occasionally, some of you enjoy it, too.

TTFN

*When coming off it, I did have two experiences of sleep paralysis, which I’ve not experienced before or since, but which were astoundingly vivid and thoroughly terrifying.  The first centered on the comparatively benign illusion of a lion resting on my body and holding me in place, and the second—far worse—involved an indescribable, extradimensional monstrosity pinning me to my bed.  I’m somewhat proud to say that, on that second occasion, rather than try to scream or anything of the sort, I was able with great effort to force my head into motion—or to imagine that I did—and I bit the effing thing.  This woke me up fully at last.  I immediately recognized the well-described phenomenon for what it was, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling truly frightened for several long minutes afterward.  A version of that second experience has appeared in a current work in progress, the novella tentatively titled Safety Valve.  So, I guess I have used “dream” experiences to inspire my writing upon occasion.

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They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time blogs many parts

Well, you wouldn’t think it would catch me by surprise—it’s something that happens every month, after all, in an entirely predictable fashion—but I didn’t realize until this morning that today was the second Thursday of October and is thus the “official” day for me to write an episode of “My heroes have always been villains.”  Obviously, since I wasn’t thinking about it, I haven’t given a second’s thought to what villain I should discuss today.  Rather than pick a random baddie from my memory’s hat and produce an off-the-cuff essay on him or her, I’ll push that project back until next week or next month.  I apologize if anyone out there was looking forward to a new episode today.  Then again, if there are such people, I haven’t heard from them; I’d be quite gratified if you’d make yourself or yourselves known.  I can exculpate myself a bit for my oversight by admitting that I’ve been rather worn down, tired, and slightly ill, this week (see my IoZ entry here for a brief discussion of the nature and effects of my troubles with insomnia), so I’m behind my mental curve.

Even as I wrote that last sentence, I realized that I’ve often made comment in these, my public venues, about being under the weather.  Now, I don’t think that I’m too whiny and hypochondriacal, as a general rule, but I certainly don’t seem to operate at my physical optimum much of the time.  It’s a problem that I need to keep in mind, going forward.

I will say this, in tangential reference to the above issue:  I’m glad that I decided to put my audio productions on indefinite hiatus.  It’s a melancholy gladness, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, because I really do like those audio productions, and if you’re interested you’re welcome to partake of the ones I’ve made, either here, or on my YouTube channel.  But making them requires a lot of mental energy and physical time.  Since putting the audios on pause, I’ve gotten more writing done on Unanimity, and I’ve worked steadily on my two other short stories during the the hours I would have spent recording and editing the audio, leading to an increased total output of about five pages a day versus only three on average (or roughly 2500 words versus 1500) before.  This is a serious improvement.

It would be nice to be able to do all this full-time, instead of in the interstices between actions of daily necessity required to put food on the table, so to speak.  Then I could write just as much and still make my audio files, which would be a lot of fun.  I hope someday to reach that state, but I obviously haven’t done it yet.

Unanimity goes well, though, and is honestly approaching its climax and resolution (I swear!  No, really!).  I still expect—if I work on it as steadily as I ought—its first draft to be finished before the end of the year, and probably well before that long novel is ready to be published, I’ll release one or both of the short stories I’m working on, Penal Colony and In the Shade.

It’s amazing how something can take so many hours, so much effort, and yet yield a product that can be consumed within the course of, say, a few days for a novel, or at most an hour or two for a short story.  It would be nice if I could give the readers of my work as much lasting entertainment as I get durable engagement from producing them, but I guess that’s the nature of all creative arts.  Even a small, independent film is created through untold hours of effort by astonishing numbers of people, to be then enjoyed within the space of two hours.  A great painting or sculpture can take perhaps less total work, but is then enjoyed in mere tiny, minutes-long chunks by even the most passionate enthusiasts of the arts.

I wonder how many people would have to read my books to make the “man-hours” of reading surpass the man-hours of production; it’s a hurdle I’d love to cross with all my stories.  I don’t know if anyone’s done the math on such a question—I assume that the numbers would be different for different people and different works—but if they have, I’d love to know about it.  I’m sure that Stephen King, for instance, passed that milestone decades ago.  He probably passed it with Carrie, and I doubt that he’s ever caught up in the time since, despite the staggering pace at which he writes.  To match such an outcome is a high bar for anyone to set, but as I’ve long said, only those who attempt the impossible can achieve the unbelievable.

And now, I think that will just about do it for today.  I’ll say, tentatively at least, that I’m going to put off the next episode of “My heroes have always been villains” until November, unless I receive any complaints or protests from those who don’t want to wait.

I’ll close with an exhortation—probably preaching to the converted, but there it is—that you all be cautious of falling prey too much, too often, to the easy distractions of videos and memes and other short-attention forms of entertainment.  Keep reading.  Read “real” books, read e-books (they’re just two forms of the same thing), read fiction and nonfiction, read articles and blogs, read poems, read plays, but do keep reading.  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization, and stories are the default mode of human thought (or so it seems).  To read, and to write, are affirmations of and contributions to the health and longevity of the human project and are well worth anyone’s time.

So I am convinced.  I may, perhaps, be biased.

TTFN

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Methought I read a blog cry, “Sleep no more!”

It’s Thursday again, and we’re in the middle of the first week of Autumn (in the Northern hemisphere).  For the next six months, the nights will be longer than the days.  As someone who tends to write about the darker side of possibility, I don’t think that’s so terrible…or it’s terrible in all the best ways.

My writing has been steady but rather slow this week, mainly because I’m struggling badly with insomnia.  I’m not referring here to the Stephen King book by that name (though coincidentally I’m in the middle of rereading it at this very time), but to the chronic, and occasionally incapacitating, sleep disorder.  Over the previous two nights (before last night) I slept for a rough total of three hours; this is, obviously, not adequate, and it has a noticeable impact on my ability to concentrate and to think clearly.

Nevertheless, the writing continues.  Hopefully, when I go back to rewrite and edit, I won’t be dismayed by how horrible my work product from these past few days is; I don’t honestly expect it to stand out as either better or worse than average.  As I’ve said previously, the way I feel when writing something is poorly correlated with how good the writing turns out to be.  Sometimes when I feel lofty and inspired and superhumanly gifted, I produce nothing but great, steaming piles of oozy excrement.  The converse is also occasionally true.  It’s unpredictable.  Thus, we will always need to edit and rewrite.

Today, for the first time in quite a while, I’m riding the train in to work, due to certain vehicles being in the shop and matters of that sort.  It’s nothing to worry about, just routine maintenance, despite an event I obliquely mention below.

It’s curiously nostalgic to be taking the train, and not entirely unpleasant, though it’s far less efficient—time-wise, anyway—than driving.   I’ve been inspired to write at least one story (Prometheus and Chiron) while waiting for a train, and I see many interesting people when using mass transit.  Little of note happens on the Interstate, especially when one rides a vehicle that is fundamentally solo.  One can have occasional exciting, even life-threatening moments on the road, such as one I had three days ago, but they don’t make very good stories.  Not to me, anyway.  I suppose I could throw some details of such an occurrence into the midst of an action scene to add to the realism, drawing from my personal experience of feeling my right leg squeezed against the passenger door of some idiot’s car, which is changing lanes without the driver looking, but it happens quickly and—thanks to the fact that I don’t tend to rattle easily—is rapidly over, with no harm done.

I’m having a peculiarly good time working on three stories at once, as I mentioned in my previous post.  Of course, my primary work right now is still Unanimity, which is grudgingly proceeding toward its conclusion, but I’m enjoying both the writing of my new short story and the rewriting of the older, uncompleted story, In the Shade.  I remember when I wrote it originally, and more or less why I stopped—I just lost steam, I wasn’t inspired by what was happening, and I had other projects awaiting my attention, to which I turned (with good results, I think).  But rewriting it now, I have to say that I’m pleased with what I made then.  I think it could turn out to be quite good, even if it is just a gonzo horror story.  We shall see.

Skipping to a non-sequitur:  I must say, I’ve so far been consistently disappointed by the lack of response and feedback to the “My heroes have always been villains” episodes.  From my point of view—admittedly biased—I would think people would find such posts particularly interesting.  I wonder if my title for the series throws people off, making them wonder just what kind of horrible person I am, but it’s honestly just an ironic play on the title of an old Willie Nelson song, “My heroes have always been cowboys.”  I don’t actually idolize villains, in the sense of wanting to be like them, though they tend to have character traits that, in the right place, in the right amount, would be quite admirable.  That’s just the nature of the tragic character with the tragic flaw:  Much of what makes a villain a villain would, in proper measure and in the proper circumstances, make them admirable and even heroic.

Likewise, many attributes we admire in our heroes, real and imaginary, can be terrible drawbacks in the wrong circumstances or in different proportions.  Harry Potter, for instance, is one of the most admirable, inspiring, and pure-hearted heroes in modern literature.  Nevertheless, Professor Snape does occasionally have a point when he decries Harry’s reckless disregard for rules and his difficulty controlling his emotions (though I think he’s completely wrong when he calls Harry arrogant).

Oh, well.  I’ll continue to write those episodes roughly once a month, even if they find no readers other than myself, at least until I work my way through most of my most prominently beloved malefactors.  Hopefully there’s someone else out there who enjoys them, but since I think a writer must write primarily for him or herself, and only secondarily for the outer audience, it will only be a moderately devastating heartbreak if there isn’t.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ll continue to write my weekly postings in both of my blogs, and more importantly, I’ll keep writing my fiction.

TTFN