insomnia

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Please don’t take this post to heart; it’s not aimed at you.

Hello and good morning.  There’s no Shakespearean quote-based title today.  My apologies for that and for what follows.  I’m just having a rough time right now.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing this on the stupid mini lapcom again.  It’s “stupid” because I have to deal with changing the base font and type size every time I create a new post now, because Microsoft Word changed its defaults to the shitty little font Aptos Narrow, which sucks hugely, and they now want to start the font size automatically at 12, when for ages it’s been 11, which works just fine and is a prime number.

I swear, it’s almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple computer.  But I’d really rather not buy any more computers, nor any new smartphone, nor any more clothes or shoes or cups or silverware or shampoo or deodorant or any of it.  I hate having to get new things that have to do with the present bleeding into the future, when I don’t even want to be here in the present.

But, of course, one is not supposed to want not to keep living.  That’s taboo.  One tends to get shamed and cajoled about it if one even mentions it.  One is offered no help, of course.  It’s rather reminiscent of the “pro-life” movement, who want to make sure that babies are born if conceived (and many of them want to eliminate contraception) but have no intention to take responsibility for the lives they are forcing to continue.

Well, fuck them in the neck until they are “aborted” is how I feel about that, and when I’m feeling very uncharitable, I’m inclined that way about the other.  I mean, people don’t want you to die, but they don’t offer any actual help, and they don’t offer any serious reasons to stay alive.  At the very least, they don’t offer any convincing ones.

I’ve been dealing on and off with suicidal thoughts and hatred of myself starting when I was in my teens.  It has waxed and waned over my lifetime, and is resistant to the various and sundry treatments I have tried.  At least, they never have seemed to work for very long.

I have learned rather recently that this is common in people with ASD, particularly relatively “high functioning” ones, because of the exhaustion and ego-dystonic effects of constant masking, pretending to be human, pretending not to be seriously bothered by the things that bother us, trying to make our quirky habits of thought into jokes so people aren’t bothered too much by them.

It is at least good information to have, that one is autistic, but it points to no solution.  Indeed, data appears to suggest that ordinary treatments for depression that work reasonably well on NTs are often not useful in people with ASD.  But of course, it’s not as though one can cease to have ASD, any more than one can decide to be no longer right handed.

Anyway, the point toward which I was moving is one I’ve mentioned before:  I have been dealing with depression and self-hatred for more than three quarters of my life, and I am a bookish, rather studious sort of person who likes to try to understand things as much as he can.  I am also a trained medical doctor, who obviously has given special attention to such matters when he was/is studying, since it’s of real personal interest.

I’m not saying that no one out there could possibly find some answer or treatment that I haven’t encountered or tried or whatever; that would be astonishing hubris.  But if one is going to go for obvious or stereotypical things (or worse, to try to give religious reasons for one not to take one’s own life) it’s unlikely to be successful.  Indeed, the fact that it just reiterates things that have been tried and have failed already, makes everything all that much more depressing.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to demean or disparage or denigrate or dismiss (or any other d-word) people who want to help those who are in distress.  But it gets frustrating when, for instance, one logs onto Instagram or whatever and a pop-up message says “Someone out there thinks you need help” and it directs you either to—wait for it!—the suicide help line* or to suggestions for seeking therapy or suggestions for how to help oneself that include things like “talking to friends” or such like.

It’s almost as if it were taunting you.  It’s almost as if it were saying, “Aw, are you not doing too well?  Well, here, take a look at these various things that you have tried and found unsuccessful in the past.  Or you can talk to your family or friends, though you live alone and have no local friends**, and your nearest family members are more than a thousand miles away and have their own shit with which to deal.”

Sorry, everyone.  I’m angry and grumpy and gloomy and unpleasant today—more so than usual, I mean.  And yet, other people still come to me with their problems, and I do my best to help when I can, and I even expend my own resources to help.  But no one even asks me if I have any problems, and if I start to mention any, people just get awkward or make some joke or dismissive comment about it all.  If I had a drug problem, there would be available resources, but I don’t have one***, alas.

I get it.  Everyone has their own things happening.  That’s definitely true.  I don’t have any right to impose my troubles on anyone.  But if people aren’t going to do anything, then they should shut the fuck up.

Anyway, again, I’m sorry.  Really.  Forget about that crap from me, please.  I know that none of you out there are doing anything to try to cause me consternation.  I’m the one with the bad hardware and software.  You’re all just curious, literate people reading the blog of someone who occasionally has something mildly interesting to say and being as supportive as its practicable to be, often more so.  It’s my problem or set of problems, and it’s my fault (in the sense that “I am the faulty one” not in the sense of “I have done wrong”).

It doesn’t help that it’s near the solstice, so the daytime is getting shorter and shorter—I tend to be seasonally affected—and also that it’s the holiday time of year, and that the US is in a political state reminiscent of the single available port-o-john after a major rock festival.

I’m overwhelmed and I’m very tired, and I don’t see any reason to expect things to tend to get any better than they are now.  Just as all political and regulatory and economic forces are in place to make the stock market tend to go up in the long run, despite many local ups and downs, my system seems set up to deteriorate over time.  I don’t just mean that in the sense involved in the second law of thermodynamics, though that obviously comes into play.  I mean that so many events of life seem prone to knock me downward, mentally, often in big steps, but my attempts to crawl back upward are plodding and scrabbling, like someone trying to reach the summit of a mountain of loose gravel.

Anyway, geez, sorry again.  I shouldn’t even post this, really, but I don’t have the energy to start over and write a different post, so I’ll stick with this, apologizing yet another time.  If I write a post tomorrow and/or Saturday, it/they will appear here.  If not, it/they won’t.

I hope you all are doing well.

TTFN

*With which I’ve had a particularly bad result in the past, and toward which I am therefore quite wary.

**This is only appropriate or at least predictable.  Believe me, no one wants to be around me much anymore.  I don’t even want to be around myself.

***I know, I know, that’s just what a person with a drug problem might say.  But while that may be true, nevertheless, among the number of people who would say that they don’t have a drug problem when asked, the vast majority really would be people who don’t have a drug problem, because most people don’t have a drug problem.  Bayes saves the day again.

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“As it is lasting, so be deep!”

Well, it’s Monday again.  It’s also the first day of Hanukkah, which technically started at sundown last night‒which means it started not only at different times for different time zones, but also in different latitudes, since in the winter the sun sets earlier farther north than closer to the equator*.  It also rises later.  This is all due to the curvature of the Earth.

Of course, in summertime, the sun sets later the farther north one goes (or south if one is in the southern hemisphere).  If you’ve ever been in northern Europe in the summertime, you’ll know what I mean.  It can feel very strange for it not to be dark out yet at nearly eleven at night (for instance) if one is from the US, where things aren’t quite so disparate.

Anyway, I’m not really celebrating Hanukkah this year, any more than I celebrated Thanksgiving or any more than I will celebrate Christmas or New Years or any other such holidays.  I have a little stylized menorah graphic that I used to put up on “the board”, with an increasing number of candles with the days and everything, but I don’t think I’m going to do that this year.  It’s actually more depressing to do little superficial things to mark a holiday when one has no one with whom to celebrate.

Speaking of all this, by the way, I’m very sorry if some people are put off when I talk about my depressed and stressed and self-destructive thoughts.  I know they bother some people, though that in itself is a bit curious.  After all, they’re not your depressive and anxious and self-destructive thoughts.  Or maybe they are in a sense.  I don’t know.

I do know, though, that it seems that my dark, morose, and pro-mortalist posts seem to garner higher readership than my ones where I discuss some kind of mathematical or scientific or philosophical or political point. They are certainly more popular than my fiction.

The number of people who reliably read this blog, or at least click on it daily, is greater than the number of people who have ever bought a single one of my books or even my short stories**.  I don’t know why more people click on or “like” the dark posts, but I don’t mind it.  At least I can feel that there are people who hear it, even if there may be little “listening” involved.

Of course I’m heading in to work today.  Things have been slow at the office, and some of the people who work there are going through various events‒some positive, some negative‒that mean that some of them are unable to work as regularly as usual or to work at all in the short term, and it makes things slower and a bit dreary.  Of course, unless I’m sick, I go to the office.  I have nothing better to do (nor, really, anything worse, since that might be tempting also).

I do keep being tempted to go back on antidepressants, but they never seem to quite work out as I would hope, in the sense of actually correcting my depression for any significant length of time.  I’ve tried at least one member of nearly every class of antidepressant, and more than one of some.  They just tend to make me more disconnected and dissociated, honestly.  Maybe ECT would help more, but that’s hard to get nowadays, and the potential memory issues associated are worrisome.

SSRIs do tend to help my anxiety/social discomfort somewhat, but they affect my judgment, with negative outcomes.  For instance, I did not see the fact that I could end up a guest of the Florida DOC for 3 years when I was only trying to help others who also had chronic pain, like I have.  And therapy has never given me many durable results‒this is, I’m led to understand, not uncommon in people with ASD‒though it was often nice to have someone with whom I could speak freely and who would at least give me sympathy.  Still, it was pricey.

I certainly don’t want to disrespect my various therapists‒I do very much respect them, and they did their best for me, I’ve no doubt about that‒but I might have done as well having weekly visits to a sex worker.  I don’t think I would have wanted to partake in their regular “services” though; I think the prospect of having sex with someone you don’t know, let alone to whom you have any deep attachment, is very strange and seems uncomfortable.

It might sound like it could be good, but I think it would be unworkable if I tried it.  I don’t even like being patted on the shoulder by people with whom I am not close, and sometimes, depending on my mood, even by people with whom I am close.  But still, one hears stories of men who go to sex workers largely to have someone with whom they can freely just talk.

That would probably cost more, though, and possibly lead to legal problems, not to mention the facts of exploitation and so on, in which I have no desire to participate.

I don’t know what I’m getting at.  But it doesn’t matter.  I’m just tired of all this.  I don’t want to do it anymore.  I just want to sleep.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day.  And Happy Hanukkah, if you celebrate it.

*The mirror image of all this occurs in the southern hemisphere.

**Though people who actually read my stories do seem to enjoy them.  I’m just really not good at promoting myself.  This is probably tied to my whole self-hatred, self-destructive attribute cluster.

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“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.

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Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday

Well, it’s Tuesday and I’m already exhausted after just one day of work for the week.  Mind you, it was a strange day at work, with people struck with family tragedies, people with personal catastrophes (such as a DUI), my coworker out sick, and all that sort of stuff.  The things that were/are not usual were manifold, and they are very unpleasant to me.

Also, I’ve had a dull, kind of pressure-like headache for the last perhaps 18 hours (with some lulls), and it feels almost like a “mini migraine”.  It certainly interferes with my mental acuity.  It may interfere with my writing; I can’t really tell.  If anyone notices anything regarding that, I would be grateful if you would let me know*.

I also feel a bit queasy, which goes along with the low-grade migraine notion.  I am going in to the office anyway, though.  First off, I don’t know if my coworker will still be out sick, and I don’t want to leave other people too much in the lurch.  In addition, if I get behind on things for one day, I’ll just have to catch up on things the next day, eliminating any potential benefit from resting for a day.

Also, let’s be real:  I don’t enjoy spending time at the house.  I need to rest there frequently‒longer than I actually do‒but it’s not pleasant for me.

Speaking of rest, I had a really bad sleep last night.  I mean, I didn’t sleep more than maybe half an hour before 3 this morning.  Then I dozed for a wee bit‒less than an hour.  But now I’m up, exhausted but not sleepy.

What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is the point?  Why do I bother going on?  Is it just fear of death that prevents me from dying?  Or is it also the fear of hurting people who matter to me?

But if they love me, why would they want me to suffer?  I understand that there is nothing they can do for me, of course.  But then they should accept things they cannot change, not wish for some other person to endure without reward or with no assistance.

Actually, all these things, these wishes from other people, are in my head.  Very few people have said they want me not to die.

I don’t think that’s because all the other people do want me to die.  Most people are probably pretty much indifferent.  Most people don’t worry about other people much because they’re too busy imagining that other people are “worrying about” them.

But they aren’t.  It’s just not workable.  People think about other people, of course, and especially about their family and friends.  But they cannot think about them much.  I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s hard enough trying to pay attention to oneself and one’s actions, to try to manage one’s days and nights, one’s work, one’s meals, one’s rest.

The percentage of time spent dwelling on other people instead of oneself cannot be very high in the double digits, if that.  This is not an indictment or a judgment.  I think it is literally just about all that people can do.

This is surely why narcissists are always so unhappy.  They can never get as much attention as they wish and imagine they deserve from other people.

We should all probably let go of our sense of entitlement.  The universe “promises” us all one thing and one thing only:  that everything, all this that exists around us, like ourselves, will end.  It may then begin again in some sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it ended.  Just because there’s another sausage after the link, doesn’t mean the preceding sausage isn’t nevertheless gone.

Wow, that’s a weird analogy or metaphor:  The universe as one sausage in an endless chain of sausage links.

I guess it makes as much sense as many such metaphors, and more sense than some.  I don’t really know what point I was trying to make, if there was one, but at least it ought to be somewhat memorable.  That’s worth something, right?

I’m too tired to contemplate any more at the moment.  I’m going to finish this off now and call it good enough.  I hope you all have a good day (or rather, that each of you has a good day).

But in closing, a thought just occurred to me.  Remember, mushrooms are not vegetables.  As fungi, they are more closely related to your fish and your chicken and your beef (and you) than they are to corn and carrots and peas and potatoes.

Okay, that’s enough.  Please have a good day.

*My gratitude is probably utterly worthless, of course, like my sorrow and regret and disappointment, not to mention my love and my joy and my dreams.

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Do you remember a Guy that’s been in such an early song?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day in the UK‒also known as Bonfire Night if I’m not mistaken.  “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot…” and all that.  The holiday isn’t celebrated in the US, which is not surprising, since it has to do with a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, before the future United States was seriously being colonized, let alone officially founded.

Of course, it’s still a good day for civil resistance (though perhaps without the explosives).  It might be a good day for some group to slip powerful laxatives into the food of many, if not all, of the members of the current administration and many of the members of Congress and the Senate and even the Supreme Court.  Our national government could certainly use a serious colon cleanse, metaphorically speaking; it might be amusing for that to become literal*.

I’m not actually endorsing that action or encouraging it, but it’s a rather entertaining thought.

I’m very tired today, even though we’re just coming into the middle of the week.  Of course, I’m almost always tired but very rarely sleepy, which is not a great combination.  I suppose someone who never gets a full night’s sleep does, in a certain sense, live more than someone who sleeps well.  If, say, a person can only sleep 4 hours a night instead of 8, then after 60 years, they will have been awake for the equivalent of another person’s 75 years, if my math is right, and ceteris paribus.

But all other things are very much not equal when one has chronic insomnia.  The early part of Fight Club gives some pretty good descriptions of how insomnia can feel.  I particularly like the line, “…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” which does give something of an idea of the feeling of never getting enough sleep.

So the tradeoff would seem to be, in a sense, living more but worse versus living less but better.  But that still doesn’t quite capture matters, because chronic insomnia also increases the occurrence of many chronic and even acute illnesses, thus likely shortening the insomniac’s life relative to good sleepers’ lives.  One’s immune system tends to suffer, for one thing, which not only affects one’s risk of infection but also of cancer.  In addition, one’s metabolism gets thrown askew, probably partly due to chronically elevated stress hormones.

Of course, some of these effects might actually be causes, mightn’t they be?  Chronically elevated stress hormones can, by more than one route, reduce one’s sleep quantity and quality, for instance.  That’s one of the tricky things about the biology of multicellular organisms.  Many questions become “chicken and egg” problems.

Though, the actual question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is one to which the answer is glaringly obvious.  Eggs have existed, in some form at least, since before backbones happened (paleontologists, please correct me if I’m wrong about that specific ordering).

Even if we focus only on hard-shelled eggs, like those of the proverbial chicken, these date back to the earliest fully land-based vertebrates, which if memory serves showed up at least a few hundred million years ago.  Chickens have only really been around, certainly in their modern form, since no farther back than the dawn of agriculture, say about 10,000 years ago.

These numbers are ballpark figures that I’m pulling out of my…memory.  If I’m off by a significant amount on any of them‒certainly by an order of magnitude or more‒please let me know.

Okay, well, I don’t know what else to write about this morning.  I mean, I could probably nevertheless keep writing indefinitely, pulling various weirdnesses out of my…store room.  But I won’t.

It might be fun to set that challenge for myself some day:  to see how long I can write at one sitting, with only bathroom breaks, and then just share the result on this blog without serious editing.  I think I would want to use the lapcom for such a task, or something similar with a real keyboard, rather than writing on my smartphone as I’ve been doing for most of my posts.

I wonder if there’s any Guinness World Records type entry on something like that.  Not that I’m into trying to make or break world records, but it’s amusing to contemplate.

Maybe someday I’ll do something like that, though I would need some manner of support to do it.  But it probably won’t happen very soon, if it happens.  It will probably have to wait until after I’ve caught the flying pig back from my skiing trip in Hell.

And I don’t know how to ski.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve passed 701 words, and like Major Tom after he passed 100,000 miles, I’m feeling very still.  I wish my spaceship knew which way to go.

But we can’t necessarily trust the good astronaut’s judgment on such matters, for as Bowie said later, in Ashes to Ashes, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.”

Hopefully, you all have a much better day than Major Tom.

*The Dulcolax™ treason and plot, you might say.

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It’s a prime day for a (slightly) shorter blog post

Morning has broken!

Does anyone out there know a good, reasonably priced morning repair service or person?  I really don’t have the money or time to go pick out and buy a new morning.

Ha ha.

Sorry.  I know that’s quite a stupid joke.  Still, it should give you some idea just how tired I am.

I should have been able to get a decent sleep last night, but I did not.  That shouldn’t be anything new to me, but some days the effects of the insomnia seem to pile up far more than on some other days.  And today is one of those “pile up” days, it seems.

Thus, I intend to make this a relatively short blog post today if I can.  To that end, I’m setting my “target” number of words to be 701 instead of the usual 800*.  701 has the added advantage of being a prime number, which always makes things at least a little bit better from my point of view.

It’s funny how, as numbers get bigger, there seem to be fewer primes (they fall off as something like the natural log of the number range at which you’re looking, if memory serves).  And yet, there are an infinite number of them‒the same “countable infinity” as the natural numbers, “aleph nought”:

Also, we have the twin primes conjecture‒which apparently most mathematicians think is correct‒that there are an infinite number of primes that are with 2 of each other.

It has apparently been proven that there are an infinite number of primes separated by no more than about 500 or some such (it’s probably a lower separation now, but I haven’t looked into it in a while).  That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but remember, we’re talking infinity here.  No matter how big the numbers get** you will never stop finding new sets of prime numbers that are no more than about 500 apart.

That’s not particularly useful to anyone but number theorists, I suppose, but it seems very interesting to me.

Incidentally, 701 is not part of a pair of twin primes, since 703 is not prime (it has four factors) and 699 is obviously divisible by 3.  And of course there is only one even prime (the number 2) because all other even numbers are divisible by 2.

Sorry, I know many people find these things boring, but I’m a fan of prime numbers.  In any case I’m trying not to be so negative in my blog posts, since I think it bothers a lot of people and may even be contagious at times.

It certainly doesn’t appear to do me any more good than does being a voice crying out in the wilderness, so to speak.  And despite the excellent biblical reference***, voices crying out in the wilderness usually are not heard or received by anyone or anything that can even understand them, let alone offer them any help.

I guess I can still talk about “imaginary” and complex numbers, because they just involve the square roots of negatives, but are not necessarily negative themselves****.  As long as I avoid multiplying them together, I should be able to steer relatively clear of negativity.

Ha ha, again.

I’m trying to try to avoid making other people miserable by expressing my own dark thoughts, so instead it seems I will make others miserable with my bad jokes.  You’re welcome.

Thinking about complex numbers makes me start feeling like I want to learn more about quaternions and spinors and so on, which seem truly fascinating, but about which I have only highly superficial knowledge.

It would be nice to learn more about them.  I probably will not, knowing me and my fatigued and distractible mind, but at least I can maybe be on the lookout for Numberphile videos about related subjects.  There’s at least one YouTube channel with a series on spinors.  Unfortunately, PBS Infinite Series stopped making new videos some time ago, but at least PBS Spacetime is still going strong, as are all of Brady Haran’s excellent channels.

And now, I’m over 701 (in the first draft), and so I’m done (for today at least).  I hope you all have a good day, and that your subsequent good days scale as the number of days, not as any logarithm thereof.

*I almost always go over my target, but at least it gives me a noteworthy place to decide it’s “time to wrap this up”.

**And there are described numbers so large that if you could memorize every digit of them, the information would be so concentrated as to turn your head into a black hole.

***It’s from the book of Isaiah.  John the Baptist supposedly quoted it and referred to himself as that voice, but then again, a lot of the writers of the “New Testament” shoehorned in references to supposed prophecy in the “Old Testament” to make the whole thing seem more sexy-cool (I guess).

****I just have to try to keep to the right upper quadrant of the complex plane.

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Decoherence–but nothing overtly quantum mechanical

You might be interested to know that I am not writing this blog post on my smartphone on the way to the office.  Neither am I writing it on the mini lapcom on the way to the office.  I am actually writing this while already at the office, because I did not go back to the house last night.

The trains were running late, and when they run late, they also run crowded, because of the pileup of people for what would have been later trains, at least until you get to the first on-time train after all the late ones.  That one tends to be nice and light.  But goodness knows when that train would have come, and it occurred to me that…well, no one was waiting for me at the house (no one ever is), and there was no point in getting there late only to have to get up and come in to the office today.

So, I walked back to the office and just stayed here.  I ordered a mildly “celebratory” dinner from Outback to mark the day.  It was okay‒not great, not bad.  It certainly beat, say, a bag of chips or something along those lines.  It almost certainly was not worth what it cost, but I could have ordered something from Morton’s, which has steaks starting at over $70.  And that was not the most expensive place available on Uber Eats for steak!!

Anyway, I watched some music videos and reaction videos and sat around and‒well, I won’t get into my thought processes and whatnot.  There are some things that are negative enough and worrisome enough for people that I don’t really want to share them.  I’m sure people who read this regularly probably would find that difficult to believe, but it’s true; I have thoughts that are dark enough or weird enough or negative enough that I don’t talk about them, here or pretty much anywhere else.

I feel very beat up* overall, as I’m sure is not a surprise.  That’s not because I slept on the floor; that actually tends to be beneficial for my back, at least a little**.  But I certainly didn’t sleep as much as I might have, especially considering the fact that I spared myself the time of my commute.  But my insomnia has never been particularly well-attuned to usefulness, though at times it has been useful.  It certainly was handy during residency, in its way.

It is quite unpleasant, though, even when it is useful.  I haven’t felt well-rested in a very, very, very long time.

As for anything else, well, I certainly didn’t write any fiction yesterday, to no one’s real surprise.  I did feel the urge to play my guitar and sing a bit very late at night, but I decided that would be a little weird‒even for me‒and just in case anyone was near enough to hear and be disturbed***, I decided not to do it.

I worried most of yesterday about some trouble that I suddenly started having with my right shoulder, which is usually not a source of difficulty for me.  My right forearm and elbow have been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and maybe that’s working its way up the arm, who knows?  But I don’t mean to imply literally that I think it’s some form of creeping arm malaise that’s working its way up.  Rather, something that affects distal joints can create atypical tensions that hurt the body more proximally; think of how, when your ankle is acting up, it can affect your knee and hip and even back, triggering them also to have exacerbations.

Maybe that doesn’t happen to you.  But I assure you, it happens to me, and I think something like it has probably caused this new irritation and feeling of decreased mobility and new soreness and weakness (from tenderness, not actual loss of strength) in my right shoulder.

That’s about it, really.  There’s nothing else going on, not in my “life” anyway.  This is as good as it gets, and I doubt it will get this good again.  I’m very tired.  I wish I were sick with something more acute, something that would kill me or at least knock me out of commission for a while.  Unfortunately, one of the detrifits of being so socially uncomfortable is that I don’t get exposed to as many communicable pathogens as I otherwise might.

Oh, well, you know what they say:  If you want something done right…

Enough.  It’s been a blog post.  I hope you’ve found at least a moment’s interest in reading it, if you’ve read it.  I know people like to rubber-neck at roadside traffic accidents, so maybe my absurdity and distaste can at least engender some prurient interest.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.

*It’s slightly amusing that “beat up” has such a different meaning from “upbeat”.

**In any case, I always sleep on the floor, though at the house I have a modest futon.

***Or any other relatively high-end heavy metal band.

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“And by a sleep to say we end the heartache…”

I am really groggy this morning.  I feel as if I slept very poorly, or at least not nearly enough.  Of course, both of those things tend to be true pretty much every night on which I don’t literally sedate myself.  But somehow I’m really feeling it today.

Usually, I’m so tense overall that even though I sleep poorly, I’m still alert bordering on hyperalert.  Maybe now I’ve had such poor sleep for so long that it’s finally catching up with me and wearing me down.  Or perhaps one might say it is Breaking Me Down.  [That was a shameless plug.  BTW, my songs are also available on Spotify and iTunes, and you can choose them as background music for Instagram and (so I’m told) even TikTok.]

Of course, it may be that I actually slept better than usual last night, but it was simply not enough of such better sleep, so I’m feeling very mentally tired because I started to get some rest, but have by no means made up for my deficit.  Does that make sense?

I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  I guess if I somehow develop better sleep and begin to be better rested, it will gradually produce some effects.  I don’t know what such effects might be.  Perhaps such sleep would improve my creativity, my energy, my optimism, what have you.

Maybe I would start writing fiction again.  Maybe I would start writing music again.  Maybe I would start drawing and painting again.  Maybe I would find the energy really to study the physics and mathematics I want to study, and even to master more of the science of biological and machine intelligence.

And maybe I would catch the flying pig to go take a skiing trip in Hell.  Unfortunately, I do not know how to ski (except in principle).  Also, snowboarding looks like it would be more fun.  In any case, I think such activities would be very hard on my joints and back.  But who knows?  Maybe if I were able to get enough sleep for long enough, even my chronic pain would improve.

We know how crucial sleep must be, because every single creature with a nervous system seems to do it, even though it puts us all into a vulnerable state at least part of every day.  If there were a way around it, you’d think that some creature would have developed that capacity, but the closest we have is things like dolphins and other marine and aquatic creatures that sleep with half their brains at a time.

That’s pretty remarkable and cool, when you think about it.  I know that not just marine mammals and some reptiles do this, but also some birds do it.

I also had Mark Reed do something akin to this in Mark Red.  As he developed into what he was becoming (a demi-vampire) he stopped needing to sleep at all, and Morgan (a full vampire) speculated that maybe during the day his vampire half slept, while at night his human half slept.

Of course, he was a supernatural being, so parallels with even the most esoteric of real creatures are at best quite a stretch.  It’s all pretty much a stretch for me, as well, though I am certainly not a supernatural being.  I’m quite weird, but that’s not the same.

Mind you, as I’ve said before, in reality there can be no such thing as the supernatural (at least as I would straightforwardly define the term) because anything that actually exists‒no matter how bizarre or inexplicable‒is part of nature, and so is natural.  If ghosts exist*, then ghosts are natural.  If vampires exist** then vampires are natural.  If Cthulhu and Azathoth and Nyarlathotep exist***, then they are natural as well.

Nature is big.  It’s not just the biosphere of Earth.  It’s the whole capital-U Universe, by which I mean everything, even if there is a multiverse or many different levels of multiverses.  It’s what I might call the Omniverse, as I did in The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I had planned on referring to it as the metaverse, starting from well over 20 years ago, but then Fuckerberg stole the term and applied it to his lame-ass would-be virtual reality thing.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  I suppose he has his uses.  I don’t know whether his existence is a net positive or a net negative, and such measures are always dependent upon what criteria one uses to judge things, anyway.  And as long as one is fairly rigorous and consistent and careful in applying one’s criteria, I would say that all such evaluations are reasonably valid within their own bailiwicks.  My own frustration, though perhaps likewise valid by those measures, is a bit petty and somewhat pathetic, even from my own point of view.

What else is new?

Not very much, I’m afraid.  Details change from moment to moment, though even that depends to some degree upon one’s perspective.  Certainly no human, nor indeed any manner of finite mind, has ever had or can ever have all the answers.  The best we can do is to try always to increase our knowledge, to improve our understanding.  It may take forever to learn every possible thing there is to know, but what better way could there be to spend eternity?

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, even though you can only learn and improve a finite amount in that time.  It’s good enough.

*They almost certainly do not.

**They also almost certainly do not, unless you count the bats and other blood-eating parasites like mosquitoes and fleas and the Masai people.

***Alas, even these beings almost certainly do not really exist.

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“And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone…”

It’s Friday, and I feel as though I’ve recently run an ultra-marathon‒except that, if I were in the habit of running ultra-marathons, I think I would be more physically fit.  I like running, actually; I used to get that famous “runner’s high” endorphin rush, and it made me feel that if I just pushed a little bit extra with my next step, I could take off and fly.

Alas, my chronic pain has made it very difficult to do regular jogging and/or running.  I still like to walk, but I have to be careful.  In any case, pain saps my energy even for walking, and for many other seemingly minor things.

I’ve had a lot of pain this week, in my usual places as well as in my more newly encroached-upon regions, like my right hand/wrist/forearm/elbow.  I wish I could sleep better, just to escape from it, but my sleep has also been even worse than usual this week.

I’m stressed by the laundry machine thing as well, of course.  I’ve had to wear old backup clothes and buy quite a few new pieces of clothing, chewing up some of my savings, such as they are, and that’s so frustrating.

I hate my life, but I’m stuck in a sort of slight local bump in the middle of a huge surrounding value-sink, a kind of one-person Nash equilibrium.  There is almost nothing in my life (my daily life, anyway) that is much good, but to change my life would nevertheless at least temporarily make everything worse, and there is no way of knowing if it would ever get better.

So, I do nothing but what you “see”, waiting here for the branch* to break, which I’m sure it will do before very long at all.  It could be today; I would not be surprised.  I barely had the energy to go back to the house after work last night, and I can barely get going to go to work this morning (though I am doing it).

I don’t know why I do it.  It’s probably more out of habit and training than anything else.  Not only do I find no lasting happiness or fulfilment, I have no even momentary peace of mind.  I just occasionally get so exhausted that I am able to become unconscious, but that lasts a very short time before I sort of start awake, as if I’ve heard enemy troops going through the jungle nearby.

I’ve never fought any wars in any jungles, of course.  But I just don’t ever feel safe**.  And I certainly have no squad, no fellowship, nor even any partner with whom to share the watch or whatever.

Lone tigers can do well, I guess, since that is their nature.  But wolves and humans and humanoids (like me) are not really at our best when alone.  That was why in the ancestral environment, ostracism was such a serious punishment.  A human alone on the Serengeti thirty thousand years ago was a human who was unlikely to survive for long, let alone to leave any offspring.

It’s appropriate for something like I am, I suppose.  If I were worth being around, there would probably be people around me.  But whatever compensations I was able to generate in the past to make my weirdness worth tolerating, I don’t have the energy or the will‒or the skill, to be thorough‒to bring those things to bear.  I’m not even sure what they are anymore.

Oh, well.  It’s not like there’s any reason to suspect that anyone else knows what they’re doing or has many true, deep insights.  There are a few people here and there in history who figure out useful things, but everyone is merely flesh and blood.  Their minds and wills and insights are markedly finite.  One can learn what one can from them, but one can expect no deep, final answers.

There may be no such deep, final answers.  The universe shows no evidence of having been built for us, after all.  We are just epiphenomena.  Don’t let anyone try to fool you with any ridiculous “fine-tuning” argument(s).  The universe is not fine-tuned for us.  There is almost nowhere in the universe where we can survive.  I made a video that more or less talked about this, if I recall correctly.  Even the Earth is largely hostile to us, and it’s by far the most livable place in the known universe.

The fine-tuning claims remind me a bit of people who say that natural immunity is adequate (or even best) and that we don’t need vaccines.  People can imagine this to be true only because they are the recipients of the world their ancestors created: a world where there are few deadly diseases that wipe people out in childhood the way they used to, because of measures like vaccines.

Or‒to think of other people who speak and act out of ignorance of what it has taken to make the world in which they find themselves‒we have those who decry capitalism as fundamentally evil all while writing on their laptops and tablets and smartphones and driving their electric cars to get overpriced coffee-like dessert beverages from international coffee chains.

Don’t even get me started on flat-earthers.  The frikking ancient Greeks and Egyptians and Phoenicians and all those ancient civilizations knew the Earth was round.  Eratosthenes even figured out how big it was, to within a few percent of our modern measurements, about 2200 years ago.

No intelligent people who paid attention and thought things through (or cared) ever really thought the Earth was flat.  If the Earth were flat, on a clear day you could climb to the top of a high building and essentially see to the edge in all directions.  With a good enough telescope and no interfering mountains, you could peep through someone’s Tokyo window from Chicago.  The Earth is not flat.

I, however, am a flat person‒not in the sense of being roughly planar, but rather in the sense that all my fizz is gone; my pep and vigor are asymptotically approaching zero.

At least it’s Friday.  Maybe next week will be better.

I doubt it, though.

*Or the camel’s back, if you prefer.

**I’m actually not safe, of course.  No one ever is.  But there are gradations of safety, and probability rules ordinary reality.  When risk is low enough, one should ideally feel quite different, much more even-keeled, than when risk is high.  Unfortunately, that’s often not how things are.

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Poor venomous blog, be angry and dispatch.

Hello and good morning.

I think it’s Thursday, so I used my traditional Thursday opening here, but honestly, I had such a bad night’s sleep that I don’t feel confident in my reckoning of days.  I’ve been awake since shortly after midnight, and it’s not as though I fell asleep early.  Also, the internet was down locally for most of the night‒I figured that out pretty quickly once I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep‒so it’s not as though the internet was what kept me awake.

It’s the 4th of September, with only a few weeks until the autumnal equinox.  It’s interesting‒at least to me, though probably not to anyone else‒that though the seasons are opposite in the northern versus the southern hemisphere*, and the solstices are opposites, the equinoxes are all always the same for everybody.

After my blog post about songs and music yesterday, I did play a little guitar and sang.  I didn’t work on any new songs or any of my own old songs, but at least I did a little practicing.

Oh, I also recently watched someone reacting to the Pulse concert version of Wish You Were Here (the song, not the album) and I noted that David Gilmour played a nice, compact acoustic guitar with a somewhat narrow neck that looked like it would be good for me, since I find bigger acoustics too bulky (partly because I myself am too bulky, but that’s a separate issue).

I looked online to try to find which make and model guitar he was using, and I found at least some credible answers, though many of them discussed the 12-string he used on the album, which was definitely not what he used in the concert**.  After I determined the most likely correct candidate, I decided to look up that guitar online to see how much they cost.

The average price was about 5 grand, and many cost more.  So, yeah, I’m not going to be buying one of those any time soon, unless I win the lottery (which is even more unlikely for me than for many other people, since I don’t play it).  It would be wonderful, but if I were going to spend that much money on something, I would rather buy one of those big, CW “cleaning” laser systems, because…well, of course I would.  Talk about fun!

I definitely have even more destruction in my nature than creation.  I sometimes refer to myself with the reverse of Nebula’s kind words to Drax in the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie:  I wasn’t born to be a dad; I was born to be a destroyer***.

Not that I think it makes any real sense to say that anyone was “born to be” anything.  As far as we can tell, the concept of telos doesn’t actually apply to anything outside the human mind (or humanoid minds, as in my case).

Maybe I should really get back into a regular, daily practice of meditation.  I’ve done it before, sometimes for a long time, but though it does calm my tension somewhat and helps decrease my distraction, I’ve noticed that it tends to make me quite a bit more depressed, as though depression and anxiety are my yin and yang‒or my quantum mechanical position and momentum if you will‒and as one shrinks, the other must grow.

Perhaps I should just muscle on through and see if I can come out the other side in some sense.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that the other side is the sooey side (ha ha), but that’s not such a bad thing.  Still, worsening depression along the way is really horrible.  At least I don’t have anyone else around me to make miserable as a side-effect, unless you count coworkers.

I don’t know.  I’m just writing, sampling what comes out of my mind, which I guess means you lot are sampling what comes out of my mind, as well.  Admit it:  this is one sample that does not make you want to buy the product!  Am I right?

I strongly suspect that I am.  Certainly I’ve seen no evidence of interested shoppers.  Those who have actually “bought the product” have all ended up returning it eventually.  Who can blame them?

Okay, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a very good day.

TTFN

*I don’t know what tortured sophistry so-called flat-Earthers use to try to explain such facts, and honestly, I don’t really want to know.  If I had infinite time and patience, it might be worth exploring their notions, if only for the sake of better understanding human psychopathology, but unless and until I become an immortal being with unlimited bandwidth, I won’t waste my limited resources of time and mind.

**Because he plainly was using a 6-string.

***To be clear, Nebula said, “You weren’t born to be a destroyer.  You were born to be a dad.”  It was a beautiful moment.