insomnia

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heavy sigh, as Justine would say**.

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

Well, have a good day if you can.

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

**A character in The Accountant and its sequel.

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“You’d say I’m puttin’ you on, but it’s no joke…”

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, a more or less deliberate choice, as much as anything we do is truly deliberate.  I was already very tired when I left work yesterday, but now it’s even worse, because I got very little sleep last night, even for me.  I’m quite worn out in general.  By rights, I ought to stay at the house, but Wednesday is payroll day, and anyway, I’m more comfortable at the office than I am in my room.  Or, at least, being at work is as good as my days get.

I may or may not go to work tomorrow depending on how I’m feeling.  Even if I go to work, I may or may not write a blog post.  I honestly barely have the gumption to write what I’m writing now.

I haven’t written any of the “Earth” song lyrics for my weekly (or whatever) song yet*, but I have been thinking about them and what approach to take.  I considered doing something that references the idea from Ann Rice’s vampire stories of going into the Earth to rest or escape, but I did a quick Google search and there are already several songs with the title Into the Earth (though I have no idea what the songs are about) which I guess isn’t surprising.  They were very popular books, and the notion of a vampire going “into the Earth” is evocative.

So, I’ll take another approach, perhaps discussing coming up from the Earth or some such.  We’ll see.  I guess I don’t really have to take it too seriously.

Boy, am I tired.  I was already worn out and stressed and tense at the end of the workday yesterday (there were reasons, but I won’t go into them), and now I feel worse.  A person really ought to feel better after having spent the evening and night in their private place in the house, but it’s not so with me in this case.  Honestly, I considered sending for an Uber and just going into the office at about 1:30 in the morning or so, but I decided that would seem too weird; I think the boss gets notifications when the alarm is turned on and when it is turned off.

I’ve been thinking back to when I had my kidney stone‒it’s only been two months‒and about how I sometimes wish it had been some more deadly affliction, or perhaps even that when they did the CT scan they might have found some lesion somewhere in my abdomen or pelvis that indicated some untreatable illness‒cancer or something similar.  Then everything would be taken out of my hands.  I could just find some doctor from whom I could get palliative care when necessary and then wait for the end.  I mean, in a way, that’s what I’m doing anyway‒it’s what everyone is doing‒but it’s vague and indefinite right now.

I’m sorry to be so morbid.  I know most people don’t like to think about death and dying, let alone to “speak” about it.  Then again, the Tao te Ching counsels us to embrace death with our whole being.  It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean that we should worship or love death, à la “we love death more than you love life”.  Quite the contrary.  I read it as saying that you will only be able to enjoy life fully and wisely if you internalize and accept the fact that you are going to die someday.

Once again, we find that Tyler Durden captured at least some ancient wisdom in his “teachings”.

Anyway, my own fanciful yearning for a terminal diagnosis has nothing to do with a healthy and wise attitude toward my own mortality.  No, my yearning is born of simple mental exhaustion, of chronic pain for more than two decades, of chronic insomnia for even longer than that, and of depression/dysthymia with concurrent “anxiety” that is only superseded in length by my recently diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder, which is congenital.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence that any of these things is likely to go away‒especially the latter one‒and I’m just puttering around here in south Florida, accompanied by various arthropods and reptiles and fungi and humidity and rain and heat and one of the most idiotic state governments the nation has ever seen.  And I am just so very tired.

So, anyway, that’s that.  If I write a post tomorrow, it will be here, of course.  If I don’t, it won’t.  If that’s not clear to anyone, please let me know in the comments (I’m kidding, I know you all understand, though you should certainly feel free to leave comments).  If I make any progress on writing a song, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.

I hope you have a good day.

*Addendum:  Between rounds of editing this post, I came up with a possible first verse of a song.  I won’t share it right now, but it’s a start.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.